Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 26 – For the
last three months, Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov has been engaged in a very
high-profile campaign against witches and fortune tellers in his republic, an
effort experts say is intended to show that he is in total control of the
situation and to boost his popularity among Muslims who reject such practices,
two experts say.
Aleksey Malashenko, a researcher on
Islam at Moscow’s Dialogue of Civilizations Institute, says that by this
campaign, the Chechen regime which “in fact” is totalitarian wants to “extend
its influence not only in the sphere of traditional Islam but also in the
occult sphere” (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/340567/).
But
Akhmet Yarlykapov of the MGIMO Center for the Study of the Problems of the
Caucasus disputes that. He says that Kadyrov isn’t trying to take control of
the occult but rather “to cleanse the Islamic space from those who might be
beyond the control” of traditional Muslims and win support from them for that
effort.
The
danger, as events in Daghestan a decade ago, is that such an officially
sanctioned fight will get out of control and others who oppose magicians and
the like may decide that they have the right to attack and even kill those who
practice these arts. In Daghestan
between 2011 and 2015, a number of witches, fortune tells and the like were
killed.
A
similar danger exists in Chechnya, Ruslan Kutayev of the Assembly of Peoples of
the Caucasus suggests because “our society does not accept the activities of
these people and considers their activity contradicts all the canons of Islam.
That the authorities are working against
the witches is something which the residents of Chechnya will only welcome.”
Witchcraft,
fortune telling and the like are not illegal in the Russian Federation, but
rights activist in the North Caucasus say that none of those involved in these practices
in Chechnya have yet appealed to them for defense.
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