Day of Victory and Terror By Robert Bruce Ware
Published on May 05, 2005
On May 9th Russians will celebrate the 60th anniversary of their victory over Nazi Germany with the help of dignitaries, including President Bush. But in the North Caucasus over the last five years the date has come to stand for something else.
On 9 May 2000 a bomb-sniffing dog located a powerful bomb near the ceremonial rostrum upon which most of Dagestan's officials were due to take their places a few hours later. The rostrum was in the main square of Makhachkala, the capital of Russia's southernmost republic, wedged between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea. Had the bomb exploded, it would have eliminated most of Dagestan's leadership, killed dozens, and injured hundreds more.
On 9 May 2002 people were not so lucky in Kaspisk, a quiet town just south of Makhachkala along the Caspian shore. That morning, at a Victory Day parade, an explosion killed 42 people, nearly half of them children, and injured more than 150 others. Local police blamed a gang of Islamist extremists, led by a Dagestani man in his early forties, named Rappani Khallilov. Over the following years they made a series of credible arrests and convictions in the case.
On April 14, 2004, Chechen militant leader, Shamil Basayev, announced that he was shaking up the organization of militant fighters in order to remove the "stooges of (Aslan) Maskhadov", the former Chechen president, who was killed in March 2005. Basayev appointed Khallilov, as "commander of the Dagestan front" and a young Ingush militant named Magomed Yevloyev as "commander of the Ingush front". On May 9, 2004 a powerful explosion killed Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov and injured members of his entourage as they attended a Victory Day celebration. Shamil Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov claimed responsibility.
Basayev and Maskhadov also claimed responsibility for a series of attacks that occurred in Ingushetia on the night of 21-22 June 2004. The raids, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 100 police and civilians, were led by Basayev, Khallilov, and Yevloyev. These terrorist attacks had no military targets, but as with the Victory Day attacks they invoked military symbolism. On the 21 June 1941, Germany invaded Russia.
Clearly there is meaning behind the dates of these terrorist attacks. May 9th is not only a day of celebration and unity among all of the Russian peoples who joined in the monumental effort to achieve that Victory, it is also a reminder of the prowess of the Russian military, which rallied on the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941 to counterattack the Germans and then push them back to Berlin.
Basayev and Khallilov relish their humiliation of the Russian military in Chechnya in 1996, and they are mocking the Russian military in the timing of their attacks. Ultimately they are targeting sentiments of Russian unity and patriotism among the people of the North Caucasus, and if those are the affinities that they wish to squelch, then there is no better day to attack them than the 9th of May.
Still it would be a mistake to assume that there will be an attack on 9 May 2005. This is not because it is an odd-numbered year, nor because a terrorist attack in front of so many foreign dignitaries would invite international condemnation, nor because Basayev has been relatively quiet since he was condemned for the Beslan atrocity. In fact, the militants generally take breaks during winter months. Before his recent death, Maskhadov announced a ceasefire that extended from 27 January, the day that he was elected president of Chechnya in 1997, to February 23, the day that the Chechens were brutally rounded up and deported in 1944.
The real reason that there might not be a major terrorist attack in the near future is that the militants have been doing well without one. Khallilov's gang has claimed responsibility for the murder of scores of police and government officials in Dagestan over the past two years. This has resulted in harsher police tactics that are now alienating segments of the population. These tactics are now being copied by Islamists throughout the North Caucasus. Growing police brutality in Dagestan also mirrors recent tactics of Ingushetia's President Murat Zyazikov, who was installed by the Kremlin in 2002. Hence, it appears that the militants have adapted to their own declining numbers, to diminishing public support, and to the gathering strength of the loyalist administration in Grozny, with a strategy that invites repression as part of a long-range militant recruitment effort.
If so, then not only is this strategy working, but the militant campaign may have scored its greatest victory with President Putin's announcement of an electoral overhaul last September, in the aftermath of Beslan. The Kremlin appointment of more local leaders, like Zyazikov, is likely to decrease local accountability of government officials, and thereby increase corruption, which in turn will feed alienation and extremism. This is not the kind of coherent strategy that won the Second World War.
Robert Bruce Ware, associate professor at South Illinois University, North Caucasus expert.
http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.html?cat=3&type=3&art=1636
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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