Catholic World News News Feature
Jihad in Chechnya? January 11, 2002
By Lawrence A. Uzzell
When the Russian Army's tanks and troop carriers roll through the hills of Chechnya, children shout defiantly at them, "Allah wakhbar." ("Allah is great!") A Protestant leader told Keston News Service, "That used to be just a religious slogan here, but now it's been turned into a political one."
In a five-day visit to the Russian Federation's southernmost republic, we found that the struggle between the mostly Chechen secessionists and the mostly Slavic unionists is still essentially an ethnic and political one. But its religious elements have grown more prominent and more militant since the federal army seized Grozny, the republic's capital, last winter in an assault described as "genocidal" even by a cabinet minister of the provisional government which Moscow has installed.
The guns never pause for long in Chechnya. After dark the firing intensifies: from automatic rifles and machine guns, grenade launchers, occasionally rockets and light artillery. Grozny residents make sure to return before sunset to their spacious, detached one-family houses, which look like Western suburbs by comparison with the cramped flats of Moscow. Isa, a Grozny businessman, told us that bullets often fall on his roof. His two young sons, like combat veterans, have learned when to ignore distant gunshots and when to dive to the floor. "It's going to be like Palestine," Isa said. He and his neighbors are no longer waiting for "normal" conditions to return. They expect that the sniping, raids, and other violations of the current "truce" will continue indefinitely--that they will be living and raising their children for decades amidst pervasive violence or even full-fledged war.
REBELS IN CONTROL
Both in Grozny and in the southern highlands, the Russian federal troops seemed to control only the ground they stood on. Even in the town of Chiri-Yurt, in the relatively flat countryside just south of Grozny, the federal presence was so weak that the Chechens were holding captured Russian soldiers there--and governing the town's life in accordance with the Shari'a, the traditional Muslim law code. Farther south in Shali--still well to the north of the southernmost Russian troop positions--the road was lined with graffiti in support of secessionist leader Dzhokar Dudayev: "Ruslan (Khasbulatov), go home to your Russian mother!" "Chechnya is a subject of Allah!" Nobody had tried to erase them.
Several middle-aged Chechen women on a Grozny mini-bus did not hesitate to tell a reporter, a brand-new acquaintance, of their passionate support for Chechen independence and for Dudayev. One said that she goes to pro-Dudayev rallies in the heart of the city every day. If any of the other passengers were pro-Moscow, they did not feel bold enough to say so.
In a bizarre symbol of the current pseudo-truce, federal and Chechen outposts are interspersed with each other along the road to the south. Just outside Grozny stands a federal strongpoint, a few miles down the road a Chechen one, a few miles farther another federal one, and so on until the road reaches firmly Chechen-controlled territory in the Caucasian foothills. The irregulars manning the Chechen posts are called "local self-defense forces," but everybody knows that they are really boyeviki (warriors) loyal to Dudayev, who continues to broadcast defiant speeches and press conferences from his ever-changing hideouts in the south. Sometimes these Chechen and federal posts are only a mile or two apart; opposing local commanders often meet to discuss issues such as prisoner exchanges or Chechen accusations that random Russian fire is killing livestock.
Last winter, when the Russians took weeks to subdue Grozny in spite of their overwhelming advantages in high-tech firepower, an anti-war member of the federal parliament told Keston News Service that the reasons were as much ideological and spiritual as tactical: "The Chechens know what they are fighting for, our soldiers don't." Bouncing over the potholed roads of the southern highlands in the imported jeep of a Chechen rebel volunteer, we heard vivid confirmation of that view from the jeep's tape deck. The heroic, tuneful ballads of Muslim imam and bard Alim Sultenov, a contemporary Chechen version of Sir Walter Scott, celebrate the struggles of a nation of close-knit mountain clans bound even closer by Moscow's efforts to atomize and Sovietize them, such as the mass deportations of the Stalin period. The pro-union side has no such songs or symbols.
CONTEMPT FOR THE ORTHODOX
Chechen commanders went out of their way to say that "this is not a religious war," that "we are not fundamentalists." But all agreed that the war had reinforced their own and their people's self-identity as Muslims. "All of the boyeviki whom I know are men who say their prayers," one commander said.
Inevitably, the war has made Chechen religiosity even more tribal in character. we frequently heard Chechens using the words "Orthodox" and "Russian" interchangeably: for example, a Grozny gas engineer complained that the most brutal of Moscow's military attacks had come on what he called "Orthodox holidays," which in his view was no accident. When we asked him which "Orthodox holidays" he meant, it turned out that they were New Year's Day and Russian Army Day.
Chechen boyeviki at one rebel-controlled town proudly introduced an eight-year-old boy who does not speak a word of Russian--even though he lives within half an hour of cosmopolitan Grozny. Intentionally or not, one result of such artificial linguistic isolation will be to cut this boy off from possible exposure to the Christian Scriptures: only two books of the New Testament have ever been translated into Chechen.
The rebel commander of another town said that it used to have many Russian residents, but nearly all of them moved out after Dudayev came to power in 1991; he said that this was because they lost their jobs when the local factory closed. At his invitation we visited the apartment of one of the few remaining Russian families. The woman of the household said that she was Orthodox, but no longer goes to worship at the nearest Orthodox church because the trip is dangerous--which indeed it is. Asked why she had no icons or other Orthodox symbols on display, she said that the apartment had just been repaired. Asked if she wears a krestik or Orthodox neck cross, she paused and said, "I have a krestik." Every indication was that she felt it prudent not to proclaim her Orthodoxy in public.
The parishioners of the Russian Orthodox Church of Mikhail the Archangel in the centre of Grozny, mostly middle-aged and elderly women, painted a different picture from that of the Chechen boyeviki. They said that most of their children and grandchildren had moved out of Chechnya altogether during the Dudayev years--well before the war--because of anti-Russian job discrimination, ethnically motivated assaults and rapes, and violent seizures of apartments. "We used to have lots of inter-ethnic marriages in this city, between Chechens and Russians," one of the parishioners revealed. "All the ones I know of ended in divorce in the 1990s." Asked what she thought of last winter"s Russian military attack, she said "I don"t consider that it was an attack. Russia had no choice but to do what it did." Did she think that the specific methods used, such as the prolonged bombardment of central Grozny which demolished her own church building, were justified? Yes, she replied.
A "PUPPET GOVERNMENT"
But tribalism is not the only element in inter-confessional relations. Lyudila Luganskaya, head of the Christian section of the interim Chechen government"s Ministry for Religious Affairs, reported that even though Dudayev's constitution formally proclaimed Chechnya to be an Islamic state, the Dudyaev forces have been more tolerant of Christian believers than of non-believing Russians. (But she added that the pro-Dudayev Muslims have been friendlier to Chechnya"s Protestants than to its Orthodox Christians.) Both Orthodox and Protestant clergymen said that during the years when Dudayev controlled Grozny, before Moscow's tanks rolled in, the capital's Christian congregations experienced no attempts to interfere with their worship services, educational programs, or other religious activities--even while their individual members were often suffering psychological and physical harassment as ethnic Russians.
At least one Christian confession is managing to win converts from Islam even under today"s difficult conditions. Baptist pastor Pavel Sumin, a 73-year-old who moved from his native Siberia to Grozny while serving in the Soviet Air Force during World War II, said that his congregation numbered about 200 in the 1980s, fell to 100 as ethnic Russians fled Chechnya during the Dudayev years, but is now back up to 200. But he said that Chechen converts often experience heavy pressure from their families: one young woman was recently threatened with death by her own father.
Caught between the fanatics on both sides is Chechnya"s new Minister for Religious Affairs, Abuzar Sumbulatov. A practicing Muslim and professor of Russian literature, Sumbulatov allowed that his ministry of nine professional staff members does not include a single former employee of the Soviet-era Council for Religious Affairs--by which measure it is less Soviet than any other such structure which Keston News Service has visited in any other Russian republic or oblast, including even Moscow. He said that the only former official of the old Council with whom he has had any contact is its former chief, now a retired KGB officer, who invited him to visit so that he could give Sumbulatov compromising information on various clerical leaders. "He was very surprised when I refused," Sumbulatov mentioned.
Sumbulatov harshly condemned last winter's federal assault on Grozny; he accused Moscow of deliberately annihilating centrers of Chechen culture such as Grozny University, the national archives, and the national library--not a single book of which survived, he said. "My students now have to study without textbooks," he lamented. "The only books we have are those from my personal library." Asked if other cabinet ministers in Chechnya"s current government are equally critical of the military action which brought them to power, he replied that he had attended cabinet meetings only twice since his appointment in June. "I don't represent the government, but rather my people," he said. "I think it's important not to be seen as a representative of this puppet government."
But the minister also criticized the previous Dudayev government, which he said had protected Chechens but not the Russian-speaking population, allowing the latter to be subjected to lawless rape and pillage. Dudayev's parliament, he said, had included only one ethnic Russian; the republic"s schools had virtually ceased to function under his government; and his radio programs had spread what Sumbulatov considered a caricature of genuine Islamic values--the constant playing of militant songs to create a background for political agitation. "But we're not glad of the changes," Sumbulatov told us. "They call us part of Russia, but they waged a genocidal campaign against us. The Russians here naturally fear that there will now be an even crueller reaction from the Chechen side."
THE TASK OF RECONSTRUCTION
One of Sumbulatov's principal tasks now is to allocate subsidies received from Moscow for the reconstruction of mosques and churches destroyed by the war. The federal government has promised 6 billion rubles (about $1.3 million) for this purpose, he said; so far 3.5 billion rubles of this sum has actually been received, of which 3 billion has gone to mosques and 0.5 billion to churches. Most of this money is going to areas now occupied by the boyeviki, he said, since those are the areas where most of the wartime destruction took place.
Chechnya now has more than 3,600 registered mosques, Sumbulatov said. The Christian presence is much smaller: six Orthodox parishes, one Adventist, and one Baptist. There were fewer than 100 Catholics in Chechnya before the war, and their small parish has now been dissolved. Most of the republic's Armenians emigrated even before the war began--Sumbulatov thinks because they feared a generalized Muslim reaction to Armenia's war with Muslim Azerbaijan. The country's one synagogue was destroyed by Russian air raids, and there are no plans to rebuild it.
We asked Sumbulatov whether the government is interfering with his distribution of this aid for reconstruction; he said no, but some Muslim leaders are trying to. "I'm like a competing figure to them--but we met up in the hills two weeks ago and had an interesting dialogue."
Will the imams, or some faction of them, proclaim a full-fledged jihad against the Russians at whose hands they have suffered so much? Just before we left Grozny for the return flight to Moscow, a Protestant leader told us, "On the official level, there will never be a jihad. But on the unofficial level, it has already begun."
[AUTHOR ID] Lawrence Uzzell writes from Moscow for the Keston News Service, a service of Keston College, Oxford.
[SIDEBAR #1
A TERRORIST'S THEOLOGY
Shamil Basayev has a strong claim to be the world"s most successful living terrorist. With a single act--the June 1995 kidnapping of hundreds of civilian hostages in the southern Russian town of Budennovsk--he forced a fundamental policy change on the government of a nation which outnumbers his own beleaguered Chechnya by more than 150 to 1. The subsequent uneasy truce and negotiations have given Chechnya"s rebels the breathing room they needed to recover from the fall of Grozny and keep alive the cause of Chechen independence.
It was almost midnight, on November 19, as rebel boyeviki guided Keston's reporter and two Russian friends--a journalist and an Islamic-studies scholar--up a pitch-black footpath to the house high in the Caucasian foothills where Basayev was waiting for us. Lower-ranking Chechen commanders had had a meeting with us earlier in broad daylight, but Basayev is a wanted man: he told us that federal forces have been hunting for him with helicopters.
Our four-hour meeting began as a conventional interview, but turned into something more like a debate as Basayev insisted on asking questions of his own. After the first hour he took off his gunbelt and camouflage jacket, pulled his chair up to the low table between us, and had his companions serve a full-fledged meal. Both he and his guests repeatedly returned to the topic of Budennovsk, especially as a moral and spiritual issue.
Basayev put considerable effort into the argument that his Budennovsk operation was morally justified, and that he and his fellow boyeviki had gone out of their way to minimize civilian casualties. He agreed that it would have been wrong for the Chechens to use their hostages as human shields while Russian special forces were storming the hospital, but vigorously denied that they had done this. He insisted--as in previous statements to other journalists--that originally he had planned for the operation to take place farther north, that he had been forced to execute it in Budennovsk by circumstances beyond his control. "I'm ashamed of the way it turned out," he said; the abrupt change of plans caused his own force to suffer higher casualties than it would have otherwise, especially during the operation's first day.
Even if one accepts Basayev"s narrative of what happened--if one rejects, for example, claims by Russian sources that the Chechens stockpiled weapons and equipment in Budennovsk in advance of the operation--one still has to ask just what he is "ashamed" of. Is it merely the technical failure to execute the operation originally intended--or the deliberate waging of war on unarmed civilians as well? Basayev seemed to be troubled by both questions, saying that "for us Budennovsk was a very difficult question" and that "there was a moment when we wanted to leave the civilians behind in the hospital." He admitted that "there were civilians whom we killed; I cannot say that there were none."
We asked Basayev to state his position more precisely. If Chechnya were, as he wants it to be, an independent state committed to international accords such as the Geneva convention, would not the Budennovsk operation be considered a violation of those accords? He responded with a list of Soviet and Russian atrocities undeniably worse than Budennovsk, such as the bloody deportation of the Chechens to Kazakhstan in 1944. He also said that "my own"--his fellow Chechens--"are more precious to me than others."
We asked Basayev whether as a religious believer he holds certain eternal principles to be even more precious than Chechen victory. Is there anything that he would not do, simply because it would violate his religious convictions, even for the sake of an independent Chechnya? He answered simply that he would not abandon the Islamic faith. But then is there any act against Russians which he would not commit, if he were certain that it would lead to independence for Chechnya? He failed to name one.
[SIDEBAR #2]
THE SPREAD OF ISLAMIC LAW
If Grozny were a western city, Chiri-Yurt would be considered one of its suburbs. The drive between them takes only about half an hour, even if Russian federal troops stop one"s car for a weapons search. Unlike the Russian posts along the highway and in Russian-occupied Grozny, the entrance to the town is not even fortified; a modest sentry post is almost the only hint of war. But Chiri-Yurt is solidly under the control of the Chechen rebels, and is governed by a law code which cannot be found in the handbooks for international businessmen sold in the kiosks of Moscow: the traditional Islamic law of "sharia."
Significantly, the Shari"a code was put into effect in this town not when President Dudayev launched his drive to make Chechnya an independent Islamic republic in 1991, but only in February 1995--after Moscow turned central Grozny into rubble and thousands of its citizens into refugees. Rather than bringing the secessionists to heel, the federal government"s savage methods only unleashed a new surge of Chechen militancy.
Most of the offences punishable under Shari"a would also be illegal in Western countries: bribery, robbery, rape. A major exception is the selling or drinking of alcohol--especially important since the Chechens" Russian neighbours boast one of the hardest-drinking cultures in world history. Since the northern, more urbanized part of the republic includes many ethnic Russians, and also many Chechens who adopted this feature of Russian life over the nearly two centuries of tsarist and Soviet rule, the effect is somewhat like that of Prohibition in the United States; disregards for the law contributes to the strength of a powerful criminal class.
Isa Madayev, the rebel commander of Chiri-Yurt, said that his boyeviki are the only men available to enforce the Shari"a code: there simply is no other police system. He also said that the town has squads of teenage boys who patrol the bazaar and publicly shame people who sell alcohol, but that these youngstes do not have arrest powers.
We asked him what had been the most severe punishment meted out so far under Shari"a. Madayev replied that a young Chechen had stolen and butchered a cow belonging to another Chechen family. When caught he was beaten with 40 strokes of a rod and imprisoned for three days; his relatives agreed to compensate the victims for the loss. Had the same crime taken place a decade ago, Madayev said, there would have been no beating.
Chechnya"s national hero and arch-terrorist Shamil Basayev told us Keston during our midnight meeting in the southern highlands that the Shari"a tradition strictly regulates the style of such beatings. He emphasised that the rod must be neither too thick nor too thin.
Another method of punishment allowable under the Shari"a code is the chopping off of fingers. A Grozny Protestant leader told Keston that this method has indeed been revived in practice, but none of the rebel commanders with whom we met would admit to having used it. The Shari"a tradition, like Russia"s penal code, also includes execution.
Keston asked Madayev, the Chiri-Yurt commander, about the place of minorities under Shari"a. What do he and his neighbors do if one person in a hundred does not want to live under the traditional code? He answered that their town is a democracy, so the majority sets the rules for all. We asked, "What if a Russian, a non-Muslim, wanted to sell alcohol or to drink it in private?" He answered that if the Russian is not a newcomer, but somebody who has lived among them for a long time, then he would be considered nash Russky ("our Russian") and nobody would disturb him if he wants to drink vodka behind closed doors in his own flat. But displaying and selling alcohol from a public place like the bazaar or a shop, even to other non-believers, would be forbidden. Could a Russian sell or give vodka in private to another Russian, then? Yes, he said. "Religion should not be forced on non-believers," Madayev told us. "Shari'a is only for believers."
Reassuring though that may sound to Western supporters of freedom of conscience, it is not entirely consistent with Chechen rebel practice. Elmurzayev Magomed, the rebel commander at Tsa-Vedeno farther up in the southern hills, told Keston that he personally opposes the Shari'a tradition and would prefer to live by secular law. "Real believers will obey spiritual laws out of personal conscience," he said, "not because of the state." Nevertheless, he enforces Shari'a within his territory. Like Madayev, Magomed is an articulate, well-travelled leader who would not seem out of place in a Moscow seminar, but he is enforcing what may be the only legal tradition that can command popular legitimacy among Chechens who have known no alternative but imperial bureaucracy.
