Paul Goble
Staunton, June 24 -- At least since the beginning of the Soviet
period, Moscow’s security services have sought to penetrate, divide and
disorder ethnic organizations by covert means, an approach that has given the
Russian government deniability because these actions typically are exposed only
by inference from what is taking place or by opponents or defectors.
But now the Russian government has
become so openly contemptuous of the West and how it will react to such subversive
policies that it has accepted a public bid from the International Circassian
Association, a pro-Moscow group, to engage in such actions against other
Circassian groups in the North Caucasus and elsewhere.
Saying that it
will engage in Internet activities to oppose “ethno-centric ideology” by groups
promoting nationalist views in the western and central North Caucasus, the
International Circassian Association says that it will thereby promote “the
strengthening and preservation of tolerant relations among the peoples of
Russia” there.
Among the step the group intends to
take are monitoring of Internet sites, analysis of nationalist declarations, “the
preparation of materials” to oppose these declarations, “the placement” of
positive materials online, and “the development of methods” to fight nationalist groups via the
Internet.
To that end, the ICA says it will
involve media specialists, scholars, and “owners and creations of regional
electronic mass media.” When the project is completed, the ICA says it will
provide a final report to increase the effectiveness of “information-propagandistic
activity” more generally.
“Translated
into normal language,” Andzor Kabard, an independent Circassian analyst says,
what the ICA is doing is seeking “state financing for a project to neutralize
the Circassian political factor on the territory of historical Circassia” via
the Internet and other means and thus reduce the influence of Circassian groups
opposed to Moscow (aheku.net/news/ahtung/5855).
Indeed, what it shows, he suggests,
is that the ICA has shown itself to be nothing more than “a subdivision of
Russian forces engaged in information operations. At a practical level,” this application “represents
the completion of the mutation of a onetime serious structure” into a Moscow “troll”
working against those it claims to represent.
With Russian government support and the
increasing popularity in Moscow of using trolls against its opponents, Kabard
says, “the ICA will be preserved and in demand in its new form for some time.”
But it will last “only as a political instrument used by Russia for the transmission
of its influence in the Circassian work and in governments connected with it.”
As a representative of the
Circassian community, he continues, the ICA “no longer exists.”
In addition to the blatant nature of
what Moscow is doing in this case, two things about this are disturbing. On the one hand, at least since the time of
the Trust in the 1920s, Moscow has always planned to use the exposure of its
penetration of such organizations as part of its strategy to weaken its
opponents.
Consequently, in this case, as when
the Trust was exposed as a Chekist project in 1927, the ICA is weakened or even
destroyed, an outcome Moscow may have intended all along.
And on the other, last week, Moscow
news outlets reported that the Russian Interior Ministry is developing a
strategy to “combat extremism” on the Internet, an indication that what the
Russian security services are doing in the case of the Circassians may be
extended to other groups as well (nazaccent.ru/content/12087-mvd-budet-borotsya-s-ekstremizmom-v.html and kommersant.ru/doc/2494603).
UPDATE FOR JUNE 26. The group did not get the grant it sought (nazaccent.ru/content/12182-mezhdunarodnoj-cherkesskoj-associacii-ne-dali-grant.html).
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