Paul Goble
Staunton, July 5 -- Russian prosecutors have brought to trial on charges of extremism ten residents of a village in Kabardino-Balkaria for the activities over the course of six years as members of a Shariat patrol which sought to impose its standards of behavior on the population there.
According to prosecutors, this Shariat Patrol between March 2017 and November 2023 put psychological pressure and even beat with sticks 16 local residents to force them to behave according to Islamic norms as understood by the patrol (kavkazr.com/a/borjba-za-nravstvennostj-ili-ekstremizm-v-naljchike-sudyat-shariatskiy-patrulj-/33463773.html).
Three aspects of this situation are worth noting: this patrol functioned for so long, charges against it were brought only recently, and it is only the tip of the iceberg of something that has received remarkably little attention given Moscow’s obsessions with Islam and the media’s readiness to attack such manifestations of Islamic growth.
As Aleksandr Cherkasov, a human rights activist with the Memorial organization points out, Russia has “a quite long history” of such groups, one going back at least to the end of Soviet times when Kazakh Muslims in Moscow organized themselves into such patrols in the Russian capital.
According to the Memorial expert, such “vigilante” groups – and he includes the notorious Russian Community as well – arise whenever there is a legal vacuum, something that exists when the civic authorities either cannot or do not enforce the laws. Others rush to fill in, often in ways that violate the legal code.
The authorities have a complex relationship with such groups, sometimes defending them as in the case of the Russian Community and sometimes attacking them with repressive force as in the case of Shariat Patrols. But the real message the existence of such groups send is of the decline in the capacity or willingness of the state to defend its own laws.
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