Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 20 – Most commentaries
in Moscow and the West have argued that the recent terrorist actions in
Volgograd were undertaken to disrupt the Sochi Olympics, a suggestion that some
in the Russian capital have invoked to justify even tighter security for that
competition.
But even if those behind the attacks are
not unhappy with the attention this linkage gives them, Nikolay Protsenko
argues in today’s “Ekspert Yug,” their actions reflect broader developments
among both the militants and the Russian force structures and point to more
serious violence in the coming years (expert.ru/south/2014/04/delo-ne-tolko-v-olimpiade/#.Ut0I1LROmM9).
The current upsurge of terrorist
activity in the southern portions of Russia, the analyst says, “is only in time
connected with the approaching Olympiad.”
Instead, it reflects the reality that today “hotspots of extremist
activity exist in all southern regions” of the Russian Federation and not just
in some of the North Caucasus republics as was the case earlier.
Many Russian officials there and in
Moscow had been lulled into a sense of security because “just a week before”
the Volgograd attacks, the Kavkaz-Uzel news agency had reported that the number
of those killed and wounded in terrorist actions had fallen since the formation
of the North Caucasus Federal District in 2010.
That does not mean things were quiet,
Protsenko says. “Terrorist acts and counter-terrorist operations as before
repaied a daily reality in the North Caucaus, but in 2013, there were in
practice no large and noteworthy terrorist attacks with a large number of
victims as there had been in previous years.”
The Russian force structures had some
notable success is decapitating many groups, and as a result, the groups have
been going through the process of generational renewal. But instead of that being a step forward toward
pacification, Protsenko says, the new generation of militant leaders is likely to
be more violent than its predecessors.
On the one hand, he points out,
these new men have an interest in winning authority and attention to themselves. Organizing major attacks is one of the best
means of doing so. And on the other, the
new militant leaders come out of an even more violent milieu than did their
predecessors, one more radically Islamic and more likely to have experience abroad.
Russia’s various force structures
have had real successes against the militants in the past, Protsenko says, but
at the same time and in some measure because of that very success, “the level
of the effectiveness of the work of law-enforcement organs has declined from year
to year.”
He suggests that the abolition of
the MVD administration for struggle with organized crime in 2008 played an
especially negative role in that regard because it prompted many of the most
experienced officers to leave the service and thus meant a new generation of
siloviki would have to learn on the job without them as teachers.
The Volgograd events underscore this
and several other disturbing realities. “Volgograd
was chosen by the terrorists far from accidentally,” Protsenko says. It wasn’t just about Sochi or about revenge
for Moscow’s diplomacy in Syria. It was first and foremost about the growth of
an Islamist group in Volgograd and the shortcomings in the work of the police
there.
Volgograd’s police demonstrated
their weakness at the time of the latest violence. They were just about the last of the force
structures to arrive on the scene, the analyst says, a sad fact that calls
attention to two other problem: Volgograd is “much more weakly included in the
federal vertical” than neighboring regions and its economic is “chronically
depressed.”
Those three things have created the
perfect breeding ground and operational area for militants. Moreover,
Volgograd, a Russian city on the edge of the Muslim world, has become a place
where militants are successfully converting ethnic Russians to their brand of
radical Islam and militancy.
According to one Russian specialist
on the issue, there are about 7,000 ethnic Russian Muslims at the present time –
a figure others would dispute – but this researcher, Rais Suleymanov of Kazan,
says that they contribute in percentage terms far more terrorists than do much
large Muslim nations.
Protsenko concludes his article by
saying that his survey of expert opinion on terrorist found near unanimity that
there will be more major terrorist attacks in the near future and their “geography”
will broaden. Moreover, the experts
said, these won’t end with Sochi because even after the Olympics there will be
other events that the terrorists can use to attract attention.
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