>By the way, this is the reason the Kremlin has been so in favor of the US
>actions. There are radical Islamic movements who want to establish
>theocracies in most of the Central Asian countries, and are fond of blowing
>stuff up. And of course there is the Chechnya situation. The Kremlin has
>been telling the US for years that the No. 1 threat is Islamist terrorism.
How true is this? Is it a case of Russia framing any political opposition as "Islamic terrorism," or is it really a bunch of armed religious lunatics?
Doug ---------- Well, it's both. There really are armed religious fanatics feeding off the despair of large sections of the population in Uzbekistan etc. They do blow stuff up. And there are other groups in those countries (largely Islamic, but not necessarily fanatic) that are suppressed by the government and labelled as "terrorist" even though they're really not. And, as I've said repeatedly, there really is a very scary Islamic jihad in Chechnya operating alongside mainstream Chechen society, though not everybody fighting against the Russians in Chechnya is a jihadist.
In the case of the Central Asian countries, it is the countries in question that do it, not Russia, which is following the line laid out in Islamabad etc. because it wants those governments to stay in power to insure stability. People in Russia are real scared of instability spreading into Russia proper, which is one reason why Moscow gave Tatarstan half a billion bucks last year to keep separatism down. (Tatarstan is the third most prosperous region in the Russian Federation largely because of this, after Moscow and St. Pete. It is also the birthplace of Russia's No. 1 female rock singer, Zemfira, who I am going to see on the 19th. Go, Zemfira, go! Bring glory to Tatarstan!)
Chris Doss The Russia Journal