Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 30 – Only 1100 of
the 560,000 inmates of Russia’s prison camps are serving time for Islamist
extremism, but increasingly this small group along with Islamists who have been
convicted of crimes is spreading its radical message to many confined for other
crimes, a phenomenon Russian commentators are calling “prison Islamization.”
Lastwek, Valery Trofimov, head of
the Russian penitentiary system, said that while radicals of all kinds, including Russian
nationalists, are using the prisons as “universities,” the Islamists “represent
a threat not only because they are able to effectively spread their ideology to
other Muslim convicts but also draw into their ranks prisoners of other faiths”
(interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=53512).
At present, he said, penal officials
are engaged in prophylactic work with 426 prisoners, a 40 percent increase from
a year earlier and a trend reflecting the general increase in the number of
inmates convicted of crimes arising from “political, ideological, racial,
national or religious hatred.” Their numbers have roughly doubled since 2009.
Within the Russian corrective labor
camp system, Trofimov said, there are now 279 Islamic communities which unite
soe 10,600 Muslims. There are 51 mosques in operation, and three more are being
built. There are 228 Muslim prayer room, and there are more than 85 Muslim
courses in which “more than 7800” inmates are enrolled.
Trofimov added that he and his Russian
colleagues are currently studying the work of officials in Saudi Arabia, Yemen,
Egypt and Iran concerning the “rehabilitation” of Islamic fundamentalists,
including the plans of these countries to set up “centers for the
rehabilitation of radicals.”
The FSIN director’s report was
delivered to an All-Russian Conference on Countering the Dissemination of
Radicalism in Places of Detention, a meeting that its organizers put together
because of three fears: the spread of radicalism among prisoners, the combination
of religious fanaticism and ordinary crime, and high rates of recidism among
prisoners (wordyou.ru/v-rossii/tyurmy-v-rossii-ee-gordost-eeki-islamisty-ee-pozor.html).
At
the meeting, Mikhail Fedotov,
head of the Presidential Council on Human Rights, laid particular stress on
what he said was “the serious threat” that radicalism and ordinary criminality
are “fusing” in ways that make countering both more difficult and require the
joint efforts of state structures and civil society (kavpolit.com/tyurma-dlya-ekstrimistov/).
Roman Silantyev, a specialist on
Islam at the Moscow State Linguistics University, said that what is especially
troubling is that there is now no good way to identify Islamist radicals who
have been convicted of other crimes. He suggested that prosecutors or judges be
required to note any radical ties of those they convict (radiovesti.ru/article/show/article_id/114827).
Maksim Shevchenko, director of the
Center for Strategic Research on Religion and Politics, argued that the best
way to deal with extremists under detention is to “recognize them as political
prisoners and keep them not in separate cells but in special institutions here
the authorities could work” with them (radiovesti.ru/article/show/article_id/114781).
And Anatoly Rudy, Trofimov’s deputy,
said that the prison system has already adopted three strategies in dealing
with the problem of the spread of radicalism in general and Islamism in
particular. First, it has turned to representatives of traditional Islam to
serve as instructrs. Second, it has
redoubled efforts to confiscate and destroy radical literature. And third, it
has isolated “the most active” radicals.
But other commentators, including
Dzhannat Sergey Markus, a Muslim broadcaster, suggested that there is very
little the authorities can really hope to achieve: the nature of imprisonment
itself makes a turning to Islam even in its most radical forms an attractive
option for those incarcerated, as international experience shows (islamnews.ru/news-141897.html).
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