Putin Shifted Resources from Fighting Terrorism to Fighting the Opposition, Pelevina Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, January 9 – While Kremlin loyalists are lecturing Paris about failing to struggle together with Russia against the common threat of terrorism, a Russian rights activist is calling attention to the sad reality that eight years ago, Moscow shifted many of the resources it had been using against terrorism to the fight instead against the Russian opposition.

 

            In 2007, Natalya Pelevina says in a comment on Kasparov.ru, the Putin regime decided that “terrorism had been defeated” in Russia, reduced the size of a key agency involved in that struggle, and shifted part of these resources to the task of combatting the country’s political opposition (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=54AF82FB96DA0).

 

            At that time, she says, the Interior Ministry’s Department T, which had been set up after the Beslan attack when the FSB decided to shift “responsibility” for combatting terrorism to that ministry, was disbanded, despite the fact, Pelevina says, that it was “completely effectively” and had established a network of agents which had “played a key role” in preventing attacks.

 

            But because the authorities had concluded at that time that “terrorism had been defeated” in Russia, she says, “part of the department was eliminated” – its staff was told it wasn’t needed any longer -- and part” – and this she says deserves the closest attention – was shifted to work against the opposition.

 

            Those who remained began to see on their desks not dossiers about terrorists but rather “dossiers about opposition figures.”  Some, upset by their new task, quick, Pelevina reports, pointing out that they were trained to deal with real terrorists rather than “pale” opposition figures carrying “paper placards.”

 

            Russians should remember, Pelevina says, how many terrorist acts occurred after this decision was taken and also how the regime has treated the opposition. And they should begin to ask whether the Kremlin’s calculation that it won’t have any more such acts if it continues to buy off Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov, given that so many Chechens have fought with ISIS forces.

 

            Moscow needs to fight terrorism, but it appears, the commentator says, that “at this stage of the Putin regime, it simply doesn’t want to do it. And thus it is no accident that certain ‘specialists’ say that in Russian the main terrorist is in the Kremlin.”