Long Shadows

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The New York Sun

Some 24 hours after the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya hosted a conference in Washington on the Beslan massacre of September 2004, armed militants in the North Caucasian city of Nalchik launched a mini-insurgency. Targeting symbols of Russian power such as police stations and government buildings, the militants later engaged in street fighting with Russian forces. The whole bloody episode left close to 150 people dead in the streets. Like Beslan, the events in Nalchik are shrouded in mystery, raising more questions than answers. The dangers of unchecked violence, however, should be clear to all.


Although the Chechen Islamist, Shamil Basayev, claimed responsibility for directing the attacks, it is likely that the attacks were both conceptualized and implemented by Islamists within the borders of the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. Due to the refusal of Moscow to release the bodies of those killed by the security forces, we may never know exactly who the attackers were and whether or not they had links with Mr. Basayev. Whatever the connection, there is now a committed, organized movement of Islamic militants, not all of Chechen origin, in the North Caucasus, willing to both fight and die for the restoration of the Imamate, an Islamic state that existed in the region in the mid-19th century.


The North Caucasus, inhabited by myriad ethnic and religious groups, has long been a borderland between civilizations and has long resisted encroachment. Little understood by the outside world, the predominantly Sunni Muslims of the North Caucasus, sandwiched between an expansionist Russia and a declining Ottoman Empire, maintained their distinct cultures and languages for centuries. In the 19th century, Tsarist Russia and the indigenous Caucasians clashed in a series of savage battles and confrontations that left St. Petersburg in control of this hitherto fiercely independent region and many of the region’s inhabitants, Abkhazians, Circassians, and Ubykhs, were exiled to the Ottoman Empire.


Although Russia, over the course of decades, was able to conquer this mountainous region, many Caucasians resisted and staged a series of violent uprisings against what they perceived to be infidel rule. The forces violently resisting Russian rule in Chechnya and Daghestan united under Imam Shamil, a Naqshbandi Sufi and the so-called “Lion of Daghestan.” He ruled by sharia and fought the Tsarist forces until his surrender in 1859. A romantic figure who led an Islamic state or Imamate – not to be confused with the Shi’a theological understanding of that term – Shamil captured the imagination of Victorian England. He has become a Chechen symbol of defiance to Russian power and was immortalized in Tolstoy’s novella, Hadji Murad.


Some 140 years later, Shamil Basayev (who was named after the 19th century imam) and his Wahabbi collaborators have exploited the Chechen cause to launch an Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus that has not only targeted Russian power but also those Muslims opposed to strict Islamic law and to the reestablishment of an Islamic state in the rugged mountains of the Caucasus.


Much as in the 19th century, when ethnic, political, and religious differences amongst the highlanders prevented them from establishing a cohesive front against Moscow, such cleavages persist today as many Adighas and Circassians, inhabitants of Republic of Adygeia and the aforementioned Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, are deeply wary of the fact that Islamism has overtaken Chechen nationalism. Nevertheless, there are disturbing indications that, even in these Russified republics without a history of extremism, there are young men who are adopting a radical interpretation of Islam that endorses the restoration of the 19th-century Imamate.


One may naturally dispute Moscow’s handling of the North Caucasus since the fall of the Soviet Union, particularly its tactics in Chechnya, without blinding oneself to the real dangers that may emerge should more impressionable boys and men throughout the North Caucasus disregard their own tolerant Islamic traditions for a harsh, uncompromising Arabian Islam that views not only Christians and Jews, but also Shi’a and Sufis, as infidels. Despite the fact that there is indeed a strong romantic element in the history of the 19th-century Caucasian wars against Tsarism, those concerned about human rights and liberty must realize that, while the creation of an Islamic state in the North Caucasus in the 1840s may have indeed been a bulwark against Russian imperialism, such a political entity today would likely be no better than the Taliban in its treatment of women and non-Muslims.


Last month’s uprising in Nalchik, while very likely carried out by frustrated and under-employed locals with mixed motivations, should be seen within the context of the greater strategic aims of those Islamists who would like to recreate an Islamic state in Russia’s southern frontier, a goal that the silent majority of the region would likely reject outright. The inhabitants of the North Caucasus are once again caught between two worlds – Russia with its virtues and vices, and Islam with all its contradictions. It would be a tragic irony of history should the peoples of the North Caucasus have to suffer once again, this time at the hands of those Islamists who want to force the region’s inhabitants to divorce themselves from Russian power and to embrace a future based entirely on sharia. A synthesis of the best of both worlds, as history has shown, is not altogether impossible. Should the Caucasus further deteriorate due to both mismanagement and radicalism, the peoples of this troubled region may experience further episodes like Beslan and Nalchik.



Mr. Lewis is a policy analyst based in Washington, D.C., and can be reached at suomi1974@yahoo.com.


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