Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 18 – Daghestan leader
Ramazan Abdulatipov’s campaign against even moderate Salafi Muslims is driving
them underground and into the ranks of the extremists, thus further
destabilizing conditions in what is already now the most unsettled and unstable
republic of the North Caucasus, according to experts.
And that trend is made still worse,
other experts say, by the republic head’s decision to rely on druzhinniki in
local areas, popular police forces that often reflect the complex ethnic
divisions of Daghestan and thus may be used less for the establishment of law
and order than for the promotion of the personal or ethnic goals of the
officials who organize them.
Indeed, in Daghestan at the present
time, the only positive change Abdulatipov has made that could reduce the
number of miitants fighting in the mountains is his decision to make the –re-adaption
process anonymous so that those who go through it will be less likely to face
reprisals from the fighters.
As a result of this combination and
Makhchkala’s increasing reliance on the use of force despite all its suggestions
that it is doing otherwise, Daghestanis “now fear the siloviki, but by all
appearances, the siloviki are afraid of the local residents,” a situation that
does not promise stability anytime soon.
In a presentation to a Moscow
roundtable earlier this week, Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, a regional expert of the
International Crisis Group, gives credit to Abdulatipov for making the program
to re-adapt militants anonymous, something she says will make more militants
willing to use it.
But she says that the new republic
head’s campaign against even moderate Salafi Muslim groups is driving ever more
of them underground and into the embrace of the armed militants Makhachkala and
Moscow hope to defeat (kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/227214/ and
Abdulatipov’s new
anti-Salafi effort looks like “a purge” more than anything else. If under his
predecessor, the Daghestani authorities allowed moderate Salafis to “participate
in social life” and engage in religious work, “now almost all these initiatives
have ceased to function,” with the Salafi mosques and courses closed down.
Many of these moderate Salafis,
Sokiryanskaya says, now “are being subjected to tracking, repression and
pressure. A significant portion of them have been forced to leave, some are in
a semi-legal status.” That in turn means that some of them, albeit still a
small proportion, “will take up arms” against the regime.
But the prospects for the future are
not good, she continues. “In the absence of the opportunity for free action and
also under conditions of repression which now exists in many villages of
Daghestan, one can expect unfortunately a radicalization of this community and
a deterioration of the security situation.”
In an article on the Kavpolit.com
site this week, journalist Rasul Kadiyev suggests that Abdulatipov’s support
for local governments to form druzhinniki from among local people is also
making the security situation worse. Indeed, he says, they constitute a most “dangerous
game” as far as security is concerned (kavpolit.com/opasnye-igry-v-bezopasnost/).
Some local officials in Daghestan,
he points out, are using these druzhinniki not to fight terrorists but rather
to settle scores with local people of their own or different nationality with
whom these leader have problems. Thos subject to such attacks aren’t going to
Makhachkala or Moscow; they are “going into the forest” to fight.
Abdulatipov, Kadiyev points out, “is
not a criminologist and he does not know that there are risks of increasing the
number of cases of violence if the number of people having arms goes up or who
are given the right to promote law and order but without a corresponding system
of preparation.”
Because Abdulatipov has said that
there must not be any Salafis in these groups, what is in fact happening,
Kadiyev continues, is that local officials are “arming and organizing one part
of the population against another according to a religious principle,” an
arrangement that is exacerbating tensions and mking the situation worse.
The journalist says that he “does
not consider that Abdulatipov and his command are intentionally pushing
[Daghestanis] oward a civicl war. They
have simply made a mistake,” one made more likely and more dangerous because of
the absence of transparency in the way these decisions are being made.
Meanwhile, a second journalist,
Mariya Klimova, argues on Kavpolit.com that what Makhachkala is doing so is
what the Chechen authorities did a few years ago but that this approach won’t
work in Daghestan because of its complicated ethnic and religious population (kavpolit.com/dagestanskie-vlasti-vzyali-na-vooruzhenie-chechenskie-metody/).
But Abdulatipov, she says, citing
the words of several experts, does not recognize that the Chechen model is
going to prove counterproductive and has already created the most dangerous of
situations: Daghestanis “are afraid of the siloviki, but by all appearances,
the siloviki are afraid of the local residents.”
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