This
piece Ran in today's LA Times:
Rebellion Creeping Through Caucasus
Russia has tried to tame this southern region for decades, but its policies seem to only stoke anger fueling a militant Islamic movement. By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer
GHIMRI, Russia -- A dripping and cavernous tunnel, three miles through the belly of the mountain and lighted only by a spindly strand of dim bulbs, marks the entrance to the land of deep gorges and outlaw villages of the Caucasus range.
Emerging in the bright daylight on the other side is like entering another world, a Russia that is not Russia. Road signs every few feet are bright green with Arabic script: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet." Several dozen signs bear the words of a legendary Caucasian warrior: "He who thinks about consequences is not a hero."[snip]
Note how this piece opens with a statement about `taming' the region. The second paragraph paints a picture of the region as a hotbed of radical Islam.
To tame a thing is to bend it to your will, to subdue it in order to make it more docile and obedient. There's no need to `tame' reasonable people...unless you are demanding that these people quietly accept your unreasonable demands.
Taming neither compromises nor deals. To tame something is to subjugate it, to show it that you are the master and they, your subjects.
Methinks this reporter chose the word tame deliberately as we press on:
Moscow's disorganized and violent attempts to suppress Caucasian Muslim insurgents have swept up thousands of innocent believers in the process. The brutal arrests, police raids and mosque closures appear to be alienating a population that until now had largely sympathized with Russia's attempts to quash terrorist attacks and bring peace to the region.[snip]
The village of 3,800 has also imposed many aspects of Islamic Sharia law as a supplement to Russian law. Thieves may be asked to make a public apology at the mosque, rather than going to a government-run jail.
Residents here have unabashed contempt for the regional government.
"People turn to Sharia law because the authorities who are supposed to represent the law breed lawlessness. People have very little hope of getting any justice from the secular authorities, so they turn to the muftis for support," said Kazimagomed, 38, an unemployed construction worker who declared "it will be the end of me" if his last name were published.
Already, Kazimagomed said, there are signs of a clash of civilizations at his own doorstep. "If we don't change everything from the roots to the very top in Dagestan, then war will be inevitable -- and not war like Chechnya, or some of those other places, those small run-ins, but a war that will last for centuries."
We don't see police crackdowns on Muslim communities here in the US but in the former Soviet Republics there are entire regions that subscribe to the Muslim faith...regions that were conquered by the communist regime of the past.
That said, I think it's interesting to note that Kazimagomed doesn't even mention Islam in reference to the problems his people are facing with the local government, a conflict so dire that it threatens the region with civil war.
In a report to the Kremlin leaked to the Russian media this year, President Vladimir V. Putin's envoy to the region, Dmitry Kozak, warned of a backlash over corruption and poverty that he said could lead to instability across the northern Caucasus.
Could the circumstances be stated more clearly? The issue here is poverty and corruption. Islam may be the predominant religion in the region but it isn't the Muslim faith that is repressing the people, it's the policies of the government.
Yet the `official' spin reads as follows:
"Sharia enclaves" -- a logical projection of what is starting to happen in Ghimri -- could lead to the emergence of an Islamic state in Dagestan's mountains, the report predicted.
It goes on to state:
"The unsolved social, economic and political problems are now reaching a critical level. Further, ignoring the problems and attempts to drive them down by force could lead to an uncontrolled chain of events whose logical result will be open social, inter-ethnic and religious conflicts in Dagestan," said excerpts of the report published in July by the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.[snip]
In Dagestan, where 90% of the 2.6 million people are Muslims, the greatest frustration is with the Moscow-backed authorities, whose pervasive corruption has established a stranglehold on nearly every conceivable form of economic enterprise.
Magomedali Magomedov is the Kremlin-backed leader of the republic. His three sons control oil transshipment and two of the other most lucrative businesses in the republic. Businessmen close to the government control everything else -- from big industry to corner mini-marts. Residents who hope to get a leg up by getting a government job or studying at the police academy must pay thousands of dollars in bribes.
Meanwhile, the average Dagestani earns $101 a month, less than half that in the rest of Russia. At least 30% of the people are unemployed.
Resentment has soared over the last two years with a series of crackdowns on non-government-sanctioned Islamic practice all over the North Caucasus -- the response to a sharp increase in militant Islamic insurgent attacks. More than 970 Russians, soldiers and civilians alike, have been killed in the last two years. Dagestan has seen almost daily attacks against police and government targets.
Does being raised Muslim make these `insurgent attacks' Islamic by default when religion isn't the primary motivator?
In the republic's capital, Makhachkala, police have swept through mosques and arrested hundreds of worshipers during prayer. In southern Dagestan, police destroyed the minaret of a mosque, said the editor of an Islamic newspaper in the area.
A massive insurgent attack that authorities say left more than 125 people dead in the nearby republic of Kabardino-Balkaria this month was preceded by the closure of mosques, the harassment of men with beards and women with head scarves, and numerous brutal interrogations of suspected insurgents.
The situation there became so aggravated that 400 Muslims asked Putin in August for permission to emigrate -- a petition that was ignored.
This reporter has done an outstanding job of reporting the facts at hand. It's up to the reader to recognize that these people are being `victimized' by their government not because they have done anything wrong but because they are Muslims.
It's not too hard to imagine that this article is eerily similar to reports leaked out of Nazi Germany in the run up to the Holocaust...just substitute the word Muslim for Jew.
"Up until now, the people of the Caucasus saw Moscow as a possible arbiter and supporter in their clash with the local clannish elites," said Kheydar Jemel, head of the Moscow-based Russian Islamic Committee, who has been a strong advocate of Muslim rights. "But the Kremlin's errors have been so insistent and so stupid that at last I think people have lost all hope of using Moscow as a base for reform -- and the worst separatist has become the Kremlin itself."
Gassan-Hadzhi Gasanaliyev is the imam at a Dagestani mosque raided by the police last year. "It's as if the police were waging war against their own people," he said. "They don't ask who's guilty and who's innocent. People go searching for their relatives who've been taken away, no one knows where they are. They disappear, or come back maimed.
"People dream of revenge," the cleric said. "There is now an undeclared, invisible war that no one can stop."
Authorities say the vast majority of Muslims reject violence and do not wish to see their religion hijacked by extremists.
It's obvious the `extremists' here are not those sporting beards or headscarves. The `extremists' are the ones wearing jackboots and brandishing riot batons.
People here in Ghimri insist that they are looking not for the establishment of an independent Islamic state, but for the election of honest government officials, jobs, an end to brutal police operations and gardens big enough to grow vegetables.
"If a referendum were held in Dagestan, 50% would support Sharia law. They're the true believers. The other 50% would support corruption, prostitution, mafia, drug addiction and bribery," said Kazimagomed, who sat one evening last week in a vine-covered courtyard with his friend Shamil, 40, as the sun slipped below the dizzying granite cliffs that rise above the village.
Kazimagomed said he had been unable to find a job since getting laid off from a nearby hydroelectric construction project 2 1/2 years ago. He supports his wife and two children on government stipends of about $5 a month, plus the occasional odd job. Shamil hasn't worked since the tunnel was finished in 2000.
"Only about 5% of the population works. The rest live without money. I have three children, me and my wife -- five people. How do I feed them? What do I do?" Shamil said.
"Honest government officials, jobs, an end to brutal police operations and gardens big enough to grow vegetables." It's not religion but desperation that cause people to rise up against repressive, corrupt regimes yet these peaceful, humble people are being scapegoated for their religious beliefs.
The two men traveled to Moscow last year and worked on a construction project for two months. But when it was over, the employment agency that issued their contract went bankrupt -- a common scheme -- and didn't pay them.
"If you're interested in finding some kind of militant or contract killer, it isn't that hard to do," Kazimagomed said.
"If you come up to somebody and work them over psychologically, for $25,000 or $30,000, they'll do anything," he said. "Look at me. I'm impoverished. I'm indigent. I have nowhere to turn. And if you offer me that amount of money, what do you think will happen?"
As the muezzin made the evening call to prayer marking the end of the daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan, they each lighted cigarettes, smilingly apologizing that it was frowned upon in Islam, but they couldn't help it.
"We don't support all this talk about separatism," Kazimagomed said finally. "I want to take my wife and children to go to the sea, to Moscow. I don't want to only see these four mountains on all sides of me for the rest of my life."
But the road out of Ghimri goes through a tunnel three miles long, and off the road lies the abyss. Some Dagestanis say they long ago came to believe there is no exit from the impasse with Russia.
One recent morning in Makhachkala, two old friends drove through the city center. One of them, Magomed, railed at the government. "Russia was our motherland -- but she turned into a mother-in-law!" he grumbled.
"He's always complaining," the other man, Ali, said, smiling. "You want to know what it reminds me of? There's sometimes a fish that gets caught in a net. The fish keeps writhing and striving, because she has one hope in her mind -- the sea.
"But I can see her from a distance," he said. "I know she'll never get out."
While this a long diary I cut a considerable portion of it out, not only for brevity but clarity. The reporter presents both sides of the issue; that of a severely repressed people and the `danger' of an Islamic revolt.
A revolt that would seem to have far less to do with Islam and a lot more to do with the global spread of government abetted corporate corruption and its ugly bastard child, social Darwinism.
This `disease' is no longer confined to single nation and it threatens to devour the entire world. That said, this disease is blind to sex, religion or race. It uses these natural divisions as tools to achieve its nefarious ends of subjugating, or `taming' if you will, anyone who stands in it's way.
Without justice there can be no peace and without peace there can be no prosperity for each of these aspects of our existence are intertwined.
Justice brings peace and from peace flows prosperity IN THIS ORDER! You'd think after a million years our self-professed `betters' would have learned that you can't `tame' humans. You can get them to kneel all right but if you do so you must never turn your back to them for they are more than your equal.
Justice and equal treatment under the law are the bedrock of any civil society. Once justice is compromised everything else falls apart.
Justice is key, without it we're all nothing more than bunch of savages where the `strong' prey upon the weak.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner