A gun for a gun

In the news...terrorist attack seriously wounds the president of Ingushetia.

For over 200 years the many small nations in the Caucasus have resisted Russian aggression. From the 1834 campaign through to Stalin’s genocide against the Chechen and the Ingush people during World War II, little trust was won for the federal government they never asked for in the first place. The ethnic, cultural and religious rift between Russia and its southern republics is so deep and violent, that it makes the Irish conflict seem like a family squabble over Christmas dinner. 

On June 6, 2009, the Dagestani Minister of Interior was shot dead on third assassination attempt. On June 10, the speaker of the High Court of the Republic of Ingushetia was killed; on June 13, the ex-prime minister. On Monday, June 22, a suicide bomber rammed into the presidential cavalcade severely injuring the current leader of Ingushetia Yusur-Bek Yevkurov. The ex-KGB commander - who came to international prominence as a head of the Russian troops in Kosovo in 1999 - was flown to Moscow with head trauma, injuries to the chest and multiple internal organs. 

President Medvedev - visiting at the hospital - has told the doctors and the state TV that he expects Mr. Yevkurov to be in fighting order soon. Such delusional optimism used to frame the Russian authorities’ lying through their teeth when it comes to the situation in the Caucasus is not winning them any supporters, on any side. And despite the fact that a terrorist attack has been waged against a head of local government, no official statement was made. Instead, Medvedev took off to Africa the next day. Mr. Obama paid more attention on the train-crash in Washington. Priorities.

In April this year the 15-year long anti-terrorist operation was finally lifted in Chechnya. The two-stage war, which began after Boris Yeltsin decided to crush the republic’s bid for independence in 1994, cost Russia not only thousands of lives, but reputation. Indiscriminate killings, rape and carpet-bombings resulted in over 150,000 civilian deaths in Chechnya, and over 500,000 misplaced lives. The war, that catapulted Putin to the presidency in 2000, has become a mark of shame on Russia’s already spotty face. 

Under Ramzan Kadyrov, a son a Chechen freedom-fighter, the republic seems more peaceful than one could hope. Kadyrov’s cut-throat methods of control include extra-judicial killings, kidnappings, torture and secret concentration camps. On the surface, schools and roads are being built, as well as Europe’s largest mosque. All with Russia’s money. The carpet-bombings levelled Grozny with the ground, costing the military millions and millions of dollars. Now, some 100 billion rubles are pumped into Chechen economy yearly. Russia is desperately bribing the most powerful man in the Caucasus to at least help keep the appearance of peace. Kadyrov has even been named the member of the Russian Academy of Sciences - a title that academics work for most of their lives. Speaking in April, Russian foreign minister commented on the renovation of the Grozny airport and claimed that Chechnya is blooming as a tourist destination. Holidays in hell, anyone?

Peace in Chechnya may be fragile, but after years of severe brutality, the people there seem to be enjoying it. Wahhabism seems to be out of fashion, while Muslim practices and -  in places - Sharia law are allowed. Unemployment is only 50%, compared to Ingushetia’s 80%. So the people’s revenge army, curtailed by Kadyrov’s power, has been spilling into neighbouring, less stable republics. Years of Russian federal lawlessness will not go un-forgiven in a culture, where to avenge the death of a family member is a matter of honour.

When the war on terror became a fashionable word in international politics, President Putin eagerly jumped on America’s anti-Islamist bandwagon to give Russia some kind of excuse for what it was doing in the Chechnya. The hype had gone, the problem remained and festered like a sore. This year only, over 300 terrorist acts have been carried out in Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and three other small republics. Kremlin-appointed government officials are being swatted like cockroaches. So are the members of the anti-Kremlin opposition. Russian army’s dodgy dealings with the militants it is allegedly seeking to destroy blurs all boundaries of a clear-cut policy. The war is on between the Islamic militants, the federal forces and the puppet government. And again, it is the people on the streets that are losing. 

Little coverage of the conflict, which many news agencies are calling civil war, makes the Russian state news. Occasionally there is a mention of an interception of militants. Recently, Channel 1 ran a story about the ‘arrest’ of a group of armed rebels and their leader. Then they showed a dead man surrounded by Russian soldiers. A televised Freudian slip. 

The term ‘human rights abuse’ doesn’t apply in the Caucasus. There is no law. But there are guns. Ramzan Kadyrov has promised a revenge for the assassination attempt on Mr. Yevkurov, ‘highlander style’. Kremlin had asked him to follow federal law in aiding the investigation. Who were they kidding? Themselves, if anyone at all. Having destroyed any illusion of justice in the region, Russia has only violence to resolve to. When a peaceful demonstration following the murder of Ingushetia’s opposition leader in 2007 publicly plead with President Putin for help, he ignored it. He left the people no hope of trust or understanding from the far-away Moscow. 

Meanwhile, the Western observers are calling for the cessation of violence and the establishment of judicial structures. Considering NATO’s involvement in the war with the Taliban, this seems a double-standard at best. After all, the Russian state cannot take the terrorist aggression lying down. But when its own tactics become synonymous with those of the insurgents - mired in ethnic hatred and vengefulness - even a long-term solution seems to escape even the most optimistic and self-deluded of imaginations. It is too late to suggest that the Russian government should have read more history books. When the military command claimed that the Chechen operation was going to take ‘one night’, the government bottled up all common sense and threw it overboard. And now no one is even interested in finding the bottle, floating in the sea of hatred, corruption and blood.

Iran, uploaded

In the news...Iran’s contested election results lead to mass uprisings by the opposition.

‘Iranian democracy’ is not a phrase that flows easily off a Western tongue. The chart-topper at Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch group and the International Press Institute, modern Persia seems to mock its history as a progenitor of the first recorded human rights declaration. But on Friday, June 12, 2009 over 80% of the Iranian people came out to vote in the presidential election.  When Iran’s supervising theological body - the Guardian Council headed by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - announced on Saturday that the president-incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won with 63% of the national vote, opposition protesters took to the streets. For the past week, Iran has been delivering images of a democratic struggle that would make Che Guevara proud.

Over the past four years of his presidency, Ahmedinejad made the world flinch more than once. Speaking at Columbia University, he announced that homosexuality does not exist in Iran. At the United Nations he infamously declared the Holocaust to be a ‘myth’ and called for the annihilation of the state of Israel. After a negative response from the international community, official Iran tended to blame the mistranslation of the president’s words. In equating Zionism with Nazi Germany’s territorial aggression or in declaring that 9/11 was just a ‘collapsed building’, the Iranian leader has dealt the Western cultural canon a blow below the belt.

Ahmadinejad seemed to perfect his image as a renegade leader of an antagonistic state to the tic. Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, most people associate Iran with the scandalous book-burning of the Satanic Verses and the Ayatollah’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, or, more recently, with the mass outrage over the Prophet Mohammed cartoons. In a state where under the Shari’a law adulterers are allowed to be publicly stoned and thieves’ hand cut off, it does not come as a surprise to the Western public that someone like Ahmadinejad would win the public vote.

But it is at best careless to dismiss the current president as a nut-case leader of a backward nation, even though it appears that it’s exactly what the Western media would like us to do. It is very difficult to find any affirmative information about Ahmadinejad in the foreign press, that swells with generalisations like ‘corruption’, ‘cronyism’ and ‘repression’, while the opposition is ubiquitously referred to as ‘liberal’. Like  some sort of a black-and-white game of chess. Iran does not have a government - it has a regime. That’s the Western consensus. Ahmadinejad’s socialist policies of distributing oil revenues to help the poor or his food subsidies are largely ignored. Much like Mir Hussein Mousavi’s support for the Iranian nuclear programme. The international media has come to the information buffet and picked out the junk food.

Mr. Mousavi - the former Prime Minister during the Iran-Iraq war and a favourite of the Revolution’s Supreme Leader - is the new favourite liberal pin-up for the West. Unlike Ahmadinejad, who looks more like a foreman of a not-so-well-off kolhoz from a distant Soviet era, Mr. Mousavi photographs well. He is handsomely intellectual. In a country where women’s rights are a subject of human rights abuse groups, his politically active wife is always by his side. In that he resembles Mihail Gorbachev, who was the first Soviet leader to travel with his university-educated couture-clad wife, unleashing waves of envy and derision in the USSR while promoting the idea of ‘socialism with a human face’ in the West. Similarly, Mr. Mousavi’s tailored suits and stylish glasses make his seem like someone we can talk to, someone we like.

There is a sense of general euphoria about the triumph of information technology over dictatorial governments. In the Soviet Union, it was satellite television - in Iran, the world wide web. YouTube, and - as a consequence of the information ban, the leading networks - are full of images of students being shot in the streets of Tehran. The world is applauding the audacity of the uploading revolutionaries. Iran’s government tried shutting down the social-networking site Facebook as a precaution. But they were just not on the young population’s beat. Who would have thunk that the 20-somethings would prefer Twitter? Exactly.

In accusing the United States of economic and informational terrorism, Ahmadinejad's Iran is ironically not very far from George W. Bush’s famous ‘you are either with us or against us’ stance. Unpopular as he was, Bush had his supporters for a stronger, harder-headed America. Why does Iran have to be different? For us - here inside the mind of Western democracy - the fewer people we see speaking in their strange doctrinal, religious tongues, the tighter we sleep at night. Globalisation is the new, world-wide peace treaty. And it seems to be conquering an insurgent government, click by click.

The Swat Shop

In the news...A bomb blast in Peshawar, Pakistan, kills at least 18, a bomb blast in Lahore destroys an anti-Taliban school.

Over the last months, Pakistan has been making the unwelcome headlines. Military action, civilian refugees and an increasing number of Islamist suicide bombings have taken the country to the top of the most dangerous places to be, according to The Economist . Number one is still Baghdad. Afghanistan is third. Given America’s involvement in the region, the battle for democracy is threatening to leave no demos to practice it.

On June 10th, another explosion in Peshawar, close to the border with Afghanistan, is said to leave at least 18 dead and another 60 injured. More bodies are being found under the rubble. The Pakistani Taliban, led by Baitullah Mehsud, have not yet claimed responsibility. But it’s just a matter of time. The war-game is on.

It is as early as February this year that the Pakistani government has called off a four-months long operation in the North-Western Frontier Province (NWFP) against the local Taliban led by Mullah Fazallulah. April 13th saw a signing of a cease-fire that would allow for the introduction of sharia law in the region of Malakand. $10 billion of U.S. counterinsurgency aid since 2001, you could argue, were not spent the way America had hoped. Especially considering the fact that the Taliban did not lay down arms, but quickly followed with the take-over of the Buner region, just 60 miles away from Islamabad. We all saw Mrs. Clinton’s face.

This last attack proved to be the last drop in Pakistan’s seven-year struggle against the Taliban in the NWFP. Following a number of terrorist attacks, including the one in Mumbai last November, and with America and the rest of the world watching more closely than ever, President Asif Zardari had to do more than just pretend everything was under control. On April 28th, the Pakistani army moved into Swat. The plan was to clear the Buner district of militants within a week.

Six weeks into the offensive, Pakistan seems more fragile than ever before. UN humanitarian agencies are estimating around 2.4 million displaced civilians. The number of civilian deaths is unknown. But the pictures of children dying in the arms of their parents after U.S. air force raids have been diligently taken off air. Hearts and minds, hearts and minds...

Bombs are landing everywhere. Hospitals are running out of means to help. The UN is asking for $600,000; so far, less than half that has been promised. According to The Economist, a recent survey by an American NGO revealed that 69% of Pakistanis thought of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban as a threat, and 45% backed the army’s fight against then in the NWFP. With the number of victims of terrorist attacks throughout the country reaching 2,300 last year, the government is going to have to work a bit harder to maintain this support.

Having fallen off President Bush’s anti-terrorist bandwagon, much like America itself, Russia seems all but too eager to brush all the reminders of Islamic extremism under the carpet. No one likes to think about Chechnya, anymore. Or Pakistan, for that matter. These are not Russia’s worries, anymore. Only occasional bomb-blasts make the Russian news; no one is trying to understand the workings of someone else’s fight against extremism. Which is a shame, really. If the current unrest in the Caucasus is anything to go by, then Russia’s fictitious office-made peace in the region will prove far more headlines-prone than it would like us all to think.