Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 7 – Under the
impact of Moscow media, Russians have become accustomed to thinking that
anti-Russian militants in the North Caucasus are bearded men who fight in the
forests. But recent events in Daghestan suggest, Vladislav Maltsev says, that
in that republic, they are now an urban street movement capable of fighting
local siloviki.
Maltsev who tracks religious affairs
for “Nezavisimaya gazeta” says that this trend has gone so far that it is
entirely appropriate to speak about “an unnoticed Islamic revolution” in
Daghestan and even about the emergence of “a second Syria” within the borders
of the Russian Federation (ng.ru/columnist/2014-11-06/2_dagestan.html).
On October 31, Daghestani police
detained several people who had just come out of a Salafi mosque in
Makhachkala. But instead of intimidating the others in attendance, this
official action led the remaining parishioners to come out and surround the
police cars. The police responded by shooting in the air, but even that did not
cause the Muslims to back down.
Instead, this resistance prompted
the authorities to send more senior officers to the site and to begin
negotiations with those who were challenging the actions of the police, Maltsev
points out.
“Something similar already took
place on September 26 at the Historical Mosque in Moscow,” he notes, and that
action sparked enormous discussion on Muslim social network sites. But
the Moscow events were “only a pale copy” of those in Daghestan where the
people acted more as the Muslim Brotherhood did earlier in Egypt.
The October 31 clash was
not unique. Three weeks earlier, Daghestani police seized Nadir Abu Halid, one
of the most popular Salafi leaders in Makhachkala. His followers met and
decided to liberate him by surrounding the police station where he was being
held and demanding that he be set free.
Efforts to disperse the crowd were unsuccessful, and so
the authorities sent in even more senior officials to begin negotiations,
Maltsev says. At the same time, the police mobilized as Daghestani Muslims
posted on their websites that “God is Great, soon a second Syria will begin in
Daghestan.”
It
should be remembered, the Moscow journalist continues, that “the civil war in
Syria which has not ended yet began in March 2011 with disorders in Dera where
protesters whose base was the El Omar mosque took by storm police stations. The
key role in these disorders … was played by Salafi Muslims and members of the
Muslim Brotherhood.”
In the wake
of the Makhachkala standoff, Maltsev says, Ali Charinsky, a Muslim activist who
served as a spokesman for the Islamic community of Moscow at the time of the September
events there, declared that “the solution of all the problems of the Muslims of
Russia is social-political activity,” a statement that the journalist says is a
call for them to go into the streets.
Daghestan is far and
away the most Islamic republic in the North Caucasus: it has more mosques per
capita than anywhere else and has been sending a vastly disproportionate number
of its believers on the haj to Mecca in recent years. Moreover, Islam now plays
as it did in early times the key unifying force in what is the most
multi-national republic in Russia.
But
in the past, most of the resistance to Russian control there had been centered
in its inaccessible mountainous rural regions. Now, that resistance is moving
into the major cities, calling into question Moscow’s ability to maintain
control over a key region on the Caspian littoral which sits astride key
north-south transportation networks.
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