BY_ ANNA NEMTSOVA
FROM_ FOREIGN POLICY
JUN 11 2012
The bloody Islamic insurgency
in Russia's backyard.
MAKHACHKALA,
Russia – The officers nervously cocked their rifles as the crowd began to
swell. The Kirovsky police station in the capital city of Russia's Dagestan
region was now under siege. But the angry cohort outside the station walls on
May 27 wasn't composed of the bearded, gun-toting militants one might expect in
this insurgency-racked region, but a crowd of enraged women in hijabs and
ankle-length dresses. It wasn't the first angry mob the officers had faced
down, but a crowd of only women was unprecedented. Their dry faces wrinkled by
sleepless nights, the women stormed the courtyard looking for their husbands
and sons, locked in the basement cells, where they were thought to be beaten
or, worse, tortured with electricity.
Yelling at
the top of their lungs, the women, mostly Salafi Muslims, demanded that police
let in their lawyers. Desperate to make sure that one of the women's sons, a
19-year-old named Abdurakhman Magomedov, detained a few hours earlier, was not
hidden in a trunk of a police car, the women blocked the driveway. They yelled
that they would blow themselves up if the authorities didn't answer their
demands. After a few phone calls and text messages went out, hundreds of the
women's infuriated male relatives and friends drove up to the police
checkpoint. With iPads and cell phones held aloft, they began taking photos of
the men in uniform.
The Dagestan
insurgency began with the spillover of militant activity following Russia's
harsh crackdown on neighboring Chechnya in the late 1990s. Although the region
is traditionally Sufi, militant Salafi imams have been making inroads in the
North Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In recent years, the
region has been the scene of a vicious cycle of violence and repression: police
and special forces have arrested thousands of young Salafists throughout the
North Caucasus republics, which in turn has driven more young men -- and increasingly
women -- to various jihadi groups that aim to establish an Islamic state
encompassing the entire North Caucasus. With thousands of active fighters, the
insurgency in Dagestan is now reportedly the largest in the Caucasus.
In
Makhachkala, frustration and rage have been growing over the 17 people
abducted, presumably by authorities, since the beginning of this year.
Dagestan, always one spark away from fire, is heating up -- a bad sign in this
region, where 254 Russian police officers died in insurgency-related incidents
last year, far more than the number of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan.
"Women
should be sitting at home cooking soup for men, under sharia law," the
police officers sarcastically shouted at the angry crowd. The comment was the
last straw for Zhanna Ismailova. Two of her five sons had been abducted from
their workplaces that month, she said. Men in black uniforms, who introduced
themselves as members of the Federal Security Service (FSB) took them in on
suspicion of militant activity. One of her sons, Arslan, 34, had been released
after two days and has gone into hiding. Taking out her cell phone, Ismailova
showed me pictures of her son's wounds, including pictures of his feet, burned
by what she said were electric shocks. The FSB men questioned Arslan about twin
suicide attacks on May 3 that killed 13 and injured more than 100 people in
Makhachkala. Ismailova's youngest son, Rashid, is still missing. "This
brutality and Moscow's idiotic politics is the reason for the war,"
Ismailova said.
At one
point, she slipped past guards and ran into the building, yelling: "Show
me immediately the cells where you beat our children!" Outside, hundreds
of her supporters, now face to face with a unit of special-forces troops in
black balaclavas, were raising their hands in the air and chanting: "God
is Great! God is Great!"
To most
Russians, the scene would probably look more like Syria or Libya than their own
country. State television rarely broadcasts images or even official comments
about the increasing human rights abuses by the FSB or police in Dagestan. It's
a part of Russia that newly returned President Vladimir Putin does not want to
talk about now. Meanwhile, Dagestan is quietly turning from police action to
the kind of shooting war against Islamic insurgents that Putin waged with
brutal efficiency in Chechnya at the beginning of his first presidential term.
"Instead
of reforming the court system, so independent courts could prosecute those who
abduct and execute people in this part of Russia, Moscow assigns thugs, men
known for their criminal background, to leading positions at security agencies,
who pay million-dollar kickbacks to the insurgency in order to save their
lives," said Gagzhimurad Omarov, a former member of parliament from Dagestan
who stepped down last fall and has now joined the opposition. It's a paradox
that Moscow refuses to address. At the same time Putin has declared a
zero-tolerance policy for militant activity in Dagestan, the officials he has
appointed are paying protection money to the insurgency, which has often
targeted Russian officials.
"Silence
and secrecy is Putin's style. We never heard any proper commentary clarifying
why he canceled the trip to G-8 summit. It does not surprise us that we hear
nothing of his strategy to put an end to violence in Dagestan," senior
human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina said.
Gannushkina
has been focusing on the North Caucuses for years, calling and Skyping
associates in the region day and night. A member of ex-President Dmitry
Medvedev's human rights council, she reported to the Kremlin for the past three
years about conditions in the Caucuses. She got little reaction to her
increasingly dire warnings while Medvedev was in charge, but with Putin back in
his presidential seat, Gannushkina quit the council along with other highly
respected human rights defenders.
The night
before the angry gathering outside the Kirovsky police station, Gannushkina,
members of the human rights NGO Memorial, and a parliamentary committee on
constitutional law and civil society stayed up all night in Moscow, trying to
save the lives of two young men, three women, and two babies in a house in
Makhachkala surrounded by federal forces. The inhabitants of the house were
suspected of participating in the Islamist underground. Gannushkina and her
team tried for hours to convince the commander of the operation to let the
women and children out and allow the men to surrender. But in the end, federal
forces raided the house, killing one of the men, who was indeed armed; keeping
the three women in custody for a day; and arresting and beating the other man
at Kirovsky station. It was this arrest that precipitated the demonstration at
the station the next day.
The
situation at the station quickly spiraled out of control. Soon enough, blood
was on the pavement. Several Salafi men grabbed this reporter's notebook and
camera, but returned them. A reporter for a web news portal went down in a
scrum of fists, was pulled out and rescued by police, and later flew to Moscow
to receive treatment for shock and bruises. The police started making arrests.
The crowd threw chunks of pavement, hitting one policeman in the forehead,
leaving a bloody gash. Before the crowd dispersed, 11 more people were in cells
in Kirovsky station.
It was just
another day in the violent conflict that most Russians aren't even aware is
taking place within their own country.