[wvns] Caucasian Muslims Face Russian Police
The Kremlin intensifies reprisals against
Muslims in the North Caucasus
By Andrei Smirnov
5 October 2007
The Jamestown Foundation
http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2007/10/05/8940.shtml
Repression against practicing Muslims has significantly intensified in
the North Caucasus this year. Disappearances or kidnappings of devout
young Muslims have become more frequent in such Caucasian regions as
Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria. During an official
conference in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, on June 6, the
director of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) Nikolai Patrushev,
expressed concern that radical Islam in the North Caucasus is pushing
away more traditional forms of Islam. In his talk at the conference,
Patrushev also pointed to the fact that a growing number of Caucasian
Muslims are receiving religious education abroad. "During the last ten
years, thousands of young men have gotten training in religious
institutes abroad," Patrushev said. "Some of these students have
become active agitators of ideas that are alien to Russian traditional
religious values" (Interfax, June 6).
Patrushev's speech was a signal to security officials in the North
Caucasus to intensify their activities in searching and detaining
devout practicing Muslims in the Caucasus. Imams of regional mosques
play a key role in this activity. They provide the police and the FSB
with the names of those who visit a mosque too often or whose way of
praying differs from the others. There is a difference in praying
between Sufi Muslims (Sufism is the dominant school of Islam in some
regions of the North Caucasus; the Russian authorities regard Sufism
as a less dangerous branch of Islam than the other branches,
especially Wahhabism or Islamic fundamentalism) and others. The noon
prayer of a Sufi in the Caucasus lasts a little bit longer than the
prayer of an ordinary Muslim. If a man regularly finishes his noon
prayer a little bit earlier and then leaves the mosque, this could
mean that he is not a Sufi, but an adherent of another branch of
Islam, including Salafism or Wahhabism. It should be noted that the
majority of the Muslims in the world do not have prayers that are as
long as those of the Sufis of the North Caucasus, so if a man leaves
the mosque earlier than the others do, this is not necessarily proof
that he is an adherent of Salafism or Wahhabism.
All of the imams of the mosques in such Sufi dominated Caucasian
regions as Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya have special instructions
from the police and the FSB to report on all those who leave the
mosque before the end of the noon prayer. Arresting or kidnapping a
man who is on an imam's blacklist is a common thing in the Caucasus.
At the end of the last year, a young man who had had arguments with an
imam of a local mosque in Makhachkala over how to pray was detained by
the police and found dead the day after his arrest. According to Lev
Ponomarev, head of the For Human Rights movement, 18 men were
kidnapped in Dagestan during April and May this year, all of them
devout practicing young Muslims.
A Muslim who simply goes to mosque too often can also be regarded as a
suspicious person. During the last two years, the police carried out
several raids on mosques in Makhachkala in the early morning, during
morning prayer. Security officials believe that only a true Muslim can
attend a mosque so early, and they regard all true Muslims as
potential rebels.
The hunt for practicing Muslims is currently under way in Ingushetia.
As the Ingushetiya.ru website reported, during a recent meeting of
police officers, Musa Medov, the republic's interior minister,
declared that the lists of the names of those who leave mosques at
noon earlier than others had been coordinated with the Spiritual
Directorate of Muslims of Ingushetia (the official Muslim
organization). Medov added that persons on the lists were Wahhabis and
should be eliminated.
The Galaev brothers from the Ingush village of Sagopshi are the first
victims of this new campaign in Ingushetia to eliminate those who pray
"in a wrong way." On September 27, Said Galaev and Ruslan Galaev were
killed by a squad of special forces who had raided their house. The
policemen said that the brothers tried to resist and shoot at them,
but Bamatgiri Mankiev, head of the Human Rights Commission of the
Ingush parliament, told the newspaper Kommersant that the Russian
policemen shot them while they were still in bed. Mankiev insists that
the only thing the Galaevs were guilty of was being on the blacklist
(Kommersant, September 28).
Sometimes the hunt for the "wrong Muslims" becomes so absurd that
young men who simply have a healthy lifestyle also become victims. As
the Chechen journalist Ruslan Sultanbekov told Jamestown, his friend
in Chechnya had been arrested and called a Wahhabi simply because he
did not smoke or drink alcohol.
In the western part of the North Caucasus - Kabardino-Balkaria,
Karachaevo-Cherkessia, and Adygeya - where there are practically no
Sufis and Islam does not have such deep roots as in the East, Muslims
who do nothing more than pray in public and go to the mosque can be
added to the blacklist. After a period of relative calm that lasted
for about one year, repression against practicing Muslims has again
intensified in the western part of the North Caucasus. According to
the "For Human Rights" movement, this past summer, the anti-organized
crime unit of the police in Karachaevo-Cherkessia detained dozens of
practicing Muslims. Human rights activists say that all of the
criminal cases that were initiated against the detained Muslims were
fabricated with only one aim: to send as many local Muslims as
possible to prison for a long time and thus secure the region before
the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014 (Karachaevo-Cherkessia is
adjacent to Sochi).
As for Kabardino-Balkaria, the reprisals in the region are even worse,
because practicing Muslims are not only arrested, but are often
kidnapped and disappear without a trace. On September 26, Daymokh
website reported the disappearance in Kabardino-Balkaria of two young
businessmen known in the republic as devout Muslims.
The aim of such reprisals is clear: in detaining practicing Muslims,
the security officials are trying to neutralize potential rebels and
sympathizers of the insurgency. It is likely, however, that even the
FSB leadership is not absolutely certain that these reprisals will
work. The lack of other effective methods is forcing the FSB to resort
to the dubious practice of targeting young Muslims.
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