Sirazhutdin Ramazanov, a leader of the Dagestani Wahhabis and the prime minister of the short-lived rebellious Islamic Republic of Dagestan and Chechnya, turned himself in to Russian authorities on Tuesday after five years of hiding out abroad. Immediately after his arrival from the Azeri capital of Baku to the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala, the 47-year-old Ramazanov showed up at the Dagestani Chief Prosecutor’s Office, where he told prosecutors in a statement televised across Russia that foreign intelligence services have been instigating and fueling the conflict in Dagestan. Then, despite being charged with participation in an armed rebellion – a charge that carries a 12-20-year prison sentence, Ramazanov walked away a free man, having given a written promise not the leave town.
The way of the mutineer
Ramazanov is the third Dagestani Wahhabi leader to end up in the hands of Russian authorities in the past four months. The first, an ideologue of a Russian-free Muslim state in the Caucasus, Magomed Tagaev was arrested (or, according to other reports in Russian press, turned himself in) at the Dagestani border with Azerbaijan in April. He was sentenced by a Dagestani court to 10 years in prison last month for attacking police officers and stealing their weapons in 1999. An aging children’s poet, Adallo Aliev, who had rallied for the reunion of Chechnya and Dagestan into an Islamic republic in late 1990’s and was hiding in Azerbaijan, turned himself in a month ago in exchange for a guarantee that he would not be kept in custody during the investigation into his alleged rebel activities. The Ramazanov case seems to somewhat reflect the Aliev case. A descendant of the Avar village of Kudali - one of the few hotbeds of religious extremism in Dagestan in the past decade - Ramazanov, once an top executive at a large municipal transportation enterprise, had turned to radical Islamist in the early 1990’s and called for the creation of an Islamic state in Dagestan. In 1998, after Dagestani mufti Akhmed-Khadzi Abubakarov was killed in a clash between the traditional clergy, which he led, and the rising Wahhabis, the Dagestani authorities cracked down on the latter, forcing many of them to seek refuge in then de-facto independent Chechnya. There, Ramazanov and other Dagestani religious radicals joined forces with extremist Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev, who was increasingly abandoning Chechnya’s secular president Aslan Maskhadov and turning to the Arab jihadi fighters filtering into to the region. In August 1999, Basaev’s brigade of Islamist fighters carried out a raid into Dagestan, capturing several mountainous districts and announcing the creation of the Islamic State of Dagestan and Chechnya. The council of the Dagestani and Chechen Wahhabi activists brought by Basaev into the captured territory elected Ramazanov as the republic’s prime minister. Ramazanov claimed at the prosecutor’s office that he never took arms against the Russians, but Dagestani investigators told reporters that they had discovered a videotape in which Ramazanov is calling on rebels to take up arms against the Russians. The Islamic Republic lasted only several weeks, having been swiftly crushed by the Russian military. Ramazanov then returned to Chechnya, and when the Russian troops moved into the rebellious republic, he fled to Saudi Arabia. Having an international search warrant on top of his head, the Wahhabi leader moved on to Turkey, where he attempted to open a school for the children of the Chechen “shahids”, but failed to raise enough funding for the initiative, Gazeta newspaper reported on Tuesday. As many Dagestani Wahhabi exiles, Ramazanov has been living in Baku for the past three years.
The so-called foreign connection
“Foreign intelligence services have not abandoned their attempts to unleash a fratricidal war on the Dagestani territory, regularly send out agents, finance extremist movements, use their members to the escalate situation [in Dagestan],” Ramazanov told RIA Novosti after publicly admitting to having himself been “a puppet in aliens’ hands”. He did not specify which countries stood behind numerous terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage in the republic. Curiously, Ramazanov’s statement came on the heels of a recent public address by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which he stressed counteracting foreign intelligence services as the Russian Federal Security Service’s (FSB) highest priority. Before Ramazanov’s statement to Dagestani prosecutors, there had been no allegations of foreign intelligence involvement in fueling extremism in Dagestan. Instead, the blame had traditionally been directed at Islamic charities and public organizations. Several of such organizations - including the International Islamic Relief Organization and Benevolence International - established a presence in Dagestan in the mid-1990’s but were forced to close by Dagestani authorities after the outbreak of the second conflict in Chechnya in 1999. It is unclear whether Ramazanov was revealing genuine insider information, or acting on the order of Dagestani security officials, as the surprisingly lax treatment of the charges against him seems to suggest.
The engines of insurgency
Naming external forces as the engines behind the insurgency is a consistent tactic used by officials in Dagestan (and in Ingushetia), allowing them to escape accusations from their poor and downtrodden public that political mismanagement has contributed to extremism, and to shift the blame from law enforcement officials for their failure to squash the insurgency. That policy also mirrors the Kremlin’s rhetoric that the insurgency in the North Caucasus is part of the global Islamist terrorist campaign - rhetoric that helped to muffle Western criticism over the Russian military’s widespread abuse of Chechen civilians. However, not a single piece of solid evidence has surfaced to support the theory that foreign intelligence has been fueling the insurgency, and such has been admitted in the course of numerous court processes involving Dagestani religious extremists and terrorists over the past several years.
The art of surrender
One probable explanation for the recent epidemic of Dagestani Wahhabi surrenders is the ongoing transformation of the Chechen rebel cause into a leaner militant entity that no longer has any use for those political activists who are unwilling to actually take up arms against Russians in the Caucasus. Those Dagestani extremists who have surrendered in recent months were not fighters, but charismatic political activists. The insurgency no longer needs them. It needs operatives in Dagestan. But at the same time, the violent rebel operations - such as the attacks on Dagestani officials and policemen and the bombing of strategic installations in the republic - generate little political appeal among the general public, in contrast to rebel operations in neighboring Chechnya. The Dagestanis ultimately sided with Moscow in its crackdown on Chechen separatists in the second military campaign from 1999, and for the rebels, the presence of their operatives in Dagestan is necessary not in terms of bringing about political change, but only in terms of asserting themselves as an entity that extends beyond the Chechen borders. This absence of a broad political constituency rallying about the local rebels in Dagestan was likely the main reason that Dagestani civilians have so often become victims of large-scale rebel attacks. One would recall the bombing of an apartment building in Buinaksk in September 1999, and the blast at the Victory Day parade in Kaspiisk in May 2001, which claimed some 100 civilian lives.
The metamorphosis
The latest surge in rebel activity in Chechnya may also be attributed to the increasing radicalization of the insurgency. The political leader of the Chechen rebels, separatist president Aslan Maskhadov, who has consistently condemned terrorism and excessive use of force by the rebels, told Reuters last month that he considers Russian civilians and Russian cities legitimate targets for massive rebels attacks. In later statements carried by the rebel websites Kavkazcenter.com and Chechenpress.com, he vowed to move the war onto Russian territory and admitted that he had authorized the rebels’ raid on Ingushetia in June. About 60 Ingush policemen and 40 civilians were killed in that raid. Moving closer to Basaev, who actually led the raid, Maskhadov has thus effectively undermined the political image of the Chechen insurgency. The Dagestani Wahhabi ideologues were once part of that image and had been called upon to symbolize the will of the Dagestani people to the republic of Moscow’s rule. But by refusing to take part in the armed struggle, they had left themselves no other choice but to eventually start knocking humbly on Russia’s door. As the rebel cause metamorphoses, and the lines between separatist president Maskhadov and extremist warlord Basaev becoming increasingly blurred, it seems there is no longer any room for those unwilling to actively take a side.
Nabi Abdullaev is a Dagestani journalist and researcher working with The Moscow Times daily. He holds a degree in public administration from Harvard University, where he studied terrorism and international security. Presently, he is a researcher at the Washington-based Transnational Crime and Corruption Center.
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