Chechnya is small (1.267 million people), significantly Muslim, region in the North Caucuses in the southwestern part of Europe, and despite several recent civil wars, insurrection and rebellion, it is currently under Russian control. Ethnic Russians make up less than a quarter of the population; the region is otherwise overwhelmingly Chechen. Tensions between “mother Russia” and indigenous and mostly Muslim Chechens has never been good, and with a substantial rise in Muslims generally throughout the new Russia, tolerance from the ruling majority Russians for Muslims is fairly low, despite strong Russian ties to countries like Iran. One particular moment in recent Russian history illustrates this unparalleled level of hatred.
In 2002, a horrific attack by Chechen Islamists in a Moscow theater left 170 people dead, but mostly from the over-kill efforts of the Russian authorities to subdue the terrorists with little regard for the hostages in the theater, as Wikipedia explains: “The Moscow theatre hostage crisis, also known as the 2002 Nord-Ost siege, was the seizure of a crowded Moscow theatre on 23 October 2002 by some 40 to 50 armed Chechens who claimed allegiance to the Islamist militant separatist movement in Chechnya. They took 850 hostages and demanded the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya and an end to the Second Chechen War. The siege was officially led by Movsar Barayev. After a two-and-a-half day siege, Russian Spetsnaz forces pumped an unknown chemical agent (thought to be fentanyl, or 3-methylfentanyl), into the building's ventilation system and raided it.
“Officially, 39 of the attackers were killed by Russian forces, along with at least 129 and possibly many more of the hostages (including nine foreigners). All but a few of the hostages who died during the siege were killed by the toxic substance pumped into the theatre to subdue the militants. The use of the gas was ‘widely condemned as heavy handed.’ Physicians in Moscow ‘condemned the secrecy surrounding the identity of the gas’ that prevented them from saving more lives.”
A Moscow subway bombing this year only served to stir up the boiling kettle further: “The 2010 Moscow Metro bombings were suicide bombings carried out by two women during the morning rush hour of March 29, 2010, at two stations of the Moscow Metro (Lubyanka and Park Kultury), with roughly 40 minutes interval between. At least 40 people were killed, and over 100 injured…. Russian officials called the incident ‘the deadliest and most sophisticated terrorist attack in the Russian capital in six years’… At the time of the attacks, an estimated 500,000 people were commuting through Moscow's metro system… Initial investigation indicated that the bombings were perpetrated by the Islamist Chechen separatists of the Caucasus Emirate.” Wikipedia.
How about this in the very, very recent past: “Heavily armed gunmen burst into the Parliament building of Chechnya, in southern Russia, on [the] morning [of October 20th], killing at least three people and wounding more than a dozen before the assailants were killed by police officers or by their own explosives, officials said… Investigators said that three gunmen drove through the front gates of the Parliament complex, in a busy section of downtown Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. Without uttering a word they killed two police officers standing guard at the entrance… One militant then blew himself up, killing a staff member… The force of the blast blew out windows and wounded several others… No one immediately took responsibility for the attack, though it bore all the hallmarks of similar violence carried out by the region’s Islamist insurgents. An embattled, though still potent, force, the insurgency arose from the remains of a fierce separatist movement that kept Russian forces at bay during nearly a decade of intermittent war in Chechnya that began in the mid-1990s.” New York Times (October 20th).
So it can be no surprise that not unlike New York City, where many believe passionately that 9/11/2001 was a Muslim attack on America and not, as the government maintains, the act of a small and isolated group if terrorists, many Moscow residents feel equally that mosques in their capital city are unwelcome… almost anywhere, a view that is much more extreme than that taken by US counterparts. In a city with an official population of 10.5 million (14 million if the immediately surrounding areas are taken into consideration), estimates of Muslim Muscovites range between 500,000 to 2,000,000. But there are almost no mosques to be found as the October 2nd Washington Post explains: “There are only six mosques, but with one at the Iranian Embassy and two in one place, for Shia and Sunni, maybe there are only four…. On this volatile issue in Russia today, every point of view arrives in the company of the opposite. If someone believes more mosques are needed to prevent the swelling numbers of Central Asia immigrants from going astray, someone else believes their construction will nurture terrorism.” One of the newer Moscow mosques is pictured above.
9/11/2010 was a day of protest, but this time in Moscow, where thousands lined up to protest the building a new mosque, far from the city center in an industrial section, littered with factories and anonymous high-rise apartment buildings. City officials had made it a practice to make building a new mosque, anywhere within Moscow, a bureaucratic nightmare. And the signs of the large Muslim population openly celebrating a religious holiday drove many local residents to this counter-protest: “Two days before the demonstration, Moscow Muslims set off for the Central Mosque, built in 1904, to observe the end of Ramadan. There were many hundreds - perhaps many thousands - and they made an astonishing sight, throngs as far as the eye could see stretching along Schepkina Street near the 1980 Olympic Hall, prostrate on the broad pavement in prayer, street car tracks covered with rugs, or st rips of old wallpaper for those without… Moscow looked like an Islamic city, and the photos were all over the Internet. The anti-mosque demonstrators carried printouts with the words ‘Do we need this?’” The Post.
All over the world, this “clash of civilizations” appears to be the biggest conflict of the 21st century, which, along with profound environmental issues and a reshuffling of the economic power elite, will define our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren to come. To miss this unifying theme that embraces conflict all over the earth is to ignore the biggest story in recent history.
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