Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 9 – Neither in the
North Caucasus nor in Russia as a whole are people surprised by reports about
the kidnapping of Muslims for thinking or dressing differently, but such popular
indifference marks the appearance in Russia of homo sacer, that is, people who are deemed worthy of destruction as
such, Badma Byurchiyev says.
And the appearance of such people
represents a threat to all of Russia because history suggests that in a state
with few well-developed institutions, it is almost impossible to prevent the
powers that be from adding new groups to that category and thus visiting terror
on the entire society.
In a new commentary on the
Kavkazskaya politika portal, the North Caucasian commentator argues that it
doesn’t matter very much whether this indifference is genuine or reflects the
sense of the Russian population that it is powerless to do anything about it (kavpolit.com/articles/vlast_i_obschestvo_ubijstvennaja_chrezvychajschina-28620/).
Closing one’s eyes
to such actions, he says, is “in a direct sense dangerous for life, and not
only for the live of citizens inclined to protest.” That is because “to keep the use of force within
the borders of the legitimate is much more difficult than to give it its head.”
The first process takes centuries; the second, he says, can happen overnight.
Since the start of the school year, Byurchiiyev
says, the situation in the North Caucasus has deteriorated regardless of what
officials say. Ever more pupils are being persecuted for wearing hijabs. The death
squads, which experts say are linked to the authorities, have stepped up their
activities. And kidnappings have increased in number across the region.
None of this has generated a reaction
in Russian society as a whole. Indeed, some Russians have justified these moves
as necessary to protect the state and society from Islamist challenges,
Byurchiyev continues. But this is “a dangerous development,” one even greater
than a simple case of the violation of human rights.
“Limiting freedoms in the name of
concern about security is a trick that has been unmasked long ago,” he says.
Governments invoke it whenever they want to go “beyond the framework of the law
and arbitrarily interfere in the personal space or even deprive the lives of
their subjects.”
In the most general terms,
Byurchiyev argues, “this is a path back to the archaic world, a return to the
period before contemporary states arose.
And he points to one aspect of those pre-modern states that Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben has talked about, the “homo sacer” or an individual
who can be sacrificed without any constraints.
To reduce society to this state,
Agamben argues, governments introduce “extraordinary” situations, which
contribute little to the security of the population but do a great deal to
build up the state itself and to allow it to “stand above the law” and act as
it wants regardless of what the laws say.
“The longer a society lives in
[this] situation,” Byurchiyev continues, “the more of its representatives will
fall under the category of homo sacers,”
that is, the more people who will fall into the category of those who can be
killed without a crime being committed.
But concern about building power is
not the only thing driving the expansion of this category, he says, pointing to
the argument of French anthropologist Rene Girard who argued in his 1972 book, “Violence
and the Sacred,” that the holy is “channeled violence” and that sacrifices or
scapegoats are periodically required to support it.
According to Girard, “a scapegoat is
often destroyed and always driven out of the community,” and the threat he or
she posed is considered to have been driven out as well. In antiquity, real human sacrifices were
required; they were then replaced by animals; but now, tragically, some are
returning to the period of human sacrifice.
If Girard is right, Byurchiyev says,
then the silence of Russian society in the face of the repressions in the North
Caucasus is understandable if not forgivable.
Russians have been led to believe that the destruction of such homo sacers is necessary for “the
restoration of the [proper] order of things.”
Some Russians, including human
rights activists, are paying attention and criticizing what the authorities are
doing; but “even those groups who are in opposition to the state secretly hope
that society will in the end limit itself to these ‘scapegoats’ and that such
actions won’t reach them.”
Today, Byurchiyev
says, “Muslims no under the control of the official clergy are in the worst
position. Having landed on ‘Wahhabi lists,’ they are not even sacred victims,
the murder of which consolidated the remaining society. These Muslims … are the
very homo sacers whom the authorities can destroy without committing a crime.”
“But their unenviable leadership in
this regard doesn’t mean that tomorrow liberals or even supporters of the state
won’t find themselves in a similar situation,” Byurchiyev says.
In the absence of effective social
and political institutions, the process that has engulfed these Muslims “inevitably
will ever more go out of control” because for an ineffective state, using such
methods is the line of least resistance.
Indeed, “already today, under the wheel of the siloviki are falling not
only Muslims who think differently.”
Summing up, Byurchiyev says that “the
difference between scapegoats and homo
sacer is that the murder of the first does not pass unnoticed. It is
significant for society, even as to the fate of the second, the masses are
indifferent.” That is why, at one level at least, scapegoating works for a society,
but homo sacer works only to increase
the power of the state.
But that benefit to the state is
only temporary, he suggests, because after a time, “when the use of force goes
out of control, it eliminates the border not only between the sovereign and the
law … but also between silence and quiet disappearance.” And that creates a
Hobbesian world in which even the state using such techniques is at risk.
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