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New counter-terrorism targets: jamaats in TatarstanIn January 2008 17 people were convicted by a court in Tatarstan. The defendants, who received guilty verdicts from a jury of the Tatar Supreme Court, were said to be members of Islamic Jamaat, an alleged terrorist group. It was the second trial: in August 2006, five minors of the same Islamic Jamaat had been sentenced to five to six years of imprisonment. The group was accused of planning a series of terrorist attacks on the eve of the celebration of the millennium of the Tatar capital, Kazan. According to the secret services, the group intended to carry out explosions at the KAMAZ truck plant in Naberezhnye Chelny, the local petrochemical plant and the Kazan Helicopter Plant. The final goal of the group was said to be the establishment of an Islamic state bordering on Central Asia and the North Caucasus. In reality, no attacks took place during Kazan’s millennium celebrations. The group was discovered by the local departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB following the investigation of the mysterious murders of several couples making love in the woods. A young Tatar named Khafiz Razzakov turned out to be responsible for the killings because their amorous behavior offended his sense of Islamic morality. He confessed to most of these crimes and that might have been the end of it except for official interest in his religious motivation. During the investigation a few extremist books, four Kalashnikovs rifles and two hunting rifles were found at the home of some of his friends. All of sudden this raised the significance of the case. The FSB presented the group as the most important terrorist organization ever to have existed in Tatarstan - the second largest Muslim-dominated region in Russia with the population of over 3.7 million - and the director of the FSB mentioned the case as one of the greatest successes of the Service in 2008. It was the first time the security services had faced a new challenge: the community of adherents of so-called “non-traditional” (for Russia) Islam beyond the borders of the North Caucasus. According to Russian tradition, the “traditional” Islam is an officially registered Muslim community, mostly based on example of the Ottoman Empire (the Ottoman experience in administrating Islam was seriously studied in tsarist Russia). In a difference from the Muslim communities in the Middle East, the Turkish way of management of Muslims was not just closely connected with the state, but subordinated to the authorities (Sheikh ul-islam, the chief mufti of Istanbul and a head of the religious hierarchy, was appointed by the Turkish Sultan) and had a vertical hierarchical structure. This tradition appears to be inherited by the Turks from the Byzantine Empire, where the Orthodox Church was always subordinated to the Emperor in contrast to the Western tradition where the Popes were constantly struggling with the Kings and Emperors. The Turks adapted the Byzantine model, having replaced Christianity by Islam and expanded it to all regions controlled by the Ottomans, including Tatarstan. Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, had been invaded by the Ivan the Terrible in 1552, but the Russian Tsars decided to keep the same system of administration for the conquered Muslim population. The muftis were to be appointed by the Tsarist administration. In the late eighteenth century the hierarchical structure was established with a network of regional so-called DUMs (Dukhovnie upravleniya musulman – the Muslim Spiritual Directorates), the first of which had been created in Orenburg in 1789. Meanwhile, the Russian authorities kept direct control over their Muslim populations since 1832 through the Departament dukhovnih del inostrannikh ispovedanii DDDI (Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Confessions) within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Although the 1917 revolution had granted Muslims their independent status and mufti started to be elected, in essence the Soviet authorities kept Muslims under strict control through the same DUMs, inherited from the Tsarist times, and the leaders were always chosen in accordance of KGB proposals. The DUM in Tatarstan was always considered to be central. Not surprisingly, after the fall of the Soviet Union this “traditional” Islam was viewed by many Muslims as compromised and corrupted. The communities, influenced by Arab scholars, started to appear in the North Caucasus as well as in Bashkiria and Tatarstan. The same time the “traditional structure” kept their closeness both to the state and Turkish tradition. Remarkably, in 1990 Talgat Tagudin, the chief of the Central DUM (in other words, the head of the official Muslim structure in Russia), was given the rank of Sheik-ul-Islam, previously granted only to the chief mufti of Istanbul in time of the Ottoman Empire. DUMs also maintained their ties with the FSB. “We have officers attached to the DUMs and in most cases the muftis know who they are”, said one FSB colonel, who worked in the “religion” section of the Federal Security Service in the early 2000s. When in 1999, at the beginning of the Second Chechen War, Bay-Ali Tevsiev, the mufti of Chechnya, declared a gazavat, the launching of an Islamic holy war (gazavat and jihad are equal, though gazavat is mostly in the tradition of Muslims in Turkey and the Caucasus,), Tagudin supported Russian troops. By then a few young people from Tatarstan were already in the Kavkaz training camp in Chechnya commanded by Amir Khattab. Among them was Khafiz Razzakov, who in 1998 met Airat Kamaletdinov who had gone through military training in the camp. In March 1999 they returned home in Tatarstan. It was not the last trip for Razzakov, who with Ilgam Gumerov and Ilshat Sharafullin went to Khattab’s camp in June 1999. On that occasion the Chechens took them for FSB agents and made them hostages with dozens of other volunteers from Tatarstan. At the court Gumerov recounted the terrible things he experienced while captive until the insurgents let them go in spring 2000. After returning to the city of Naberezhnye Chelny, the former captives of Khattab kept their relationship and attended mosque together. A large group of Muslims gathered around them, including Nafis Kalimulin, a criminal from the city of Aznakaevo, who brought to the community five religious teenagers. Gumerov, as the eldest among the community, was elected Amir (Head) of the jamaat (community). Although the members of the group were considered to be adherents of “non-traditional” Islam, the jamaat did not have an obvious conflict with the official Muslim community (local DUM). No one from the group studied Islam in Arab countries. The jamaat in Tatarstan did not have any support from abroad: it was not financed by foreign charity funds and no-one supplied them with weapons. The machine guns and pistols they had belonged to Kalimulin and were the memories of his criminal past in the middle of the 90’s. The jamaat members appear to have had no direct links with the Chechens: it’s dubious that even the amir Gumerov retained any relations with the Caucasian underground. The members included people of various ages living in various cities and villages of Tatarstan, many of whom do not appear to have known one another until they were charged and some of whom appear to have been more interested in the group’s sports activities (something prosecutors presented as especially sinister) than in anything else. “It’s a group of believers that got to face a trial and many of them even do not know one another” said Elena Ryabinina, a prominent human rights activist within the “Civil Assistance” Committee who is watching the trial in the capacity of observer. Mostly, they had very simple occupations: some worked in a parking lot; some were self-employed taxi-drivers. Sharafullin, the only person with higher education among them, was a foundry worker in KAMAZ. It was only Kalimulin, the criminal, and small businessman Latypov who had some real money. It appears that the jamaat consisted of around 50 persons. However, many of them did not know one another, as the jamaat consisted of several communities. It did not have vertical hierarchy or obligatory membership, and it was open to new people without binding them with any rigid purposes. However, there were brutes too. Denis Gabdulkhakov and Vener Khazetdinov left Tatarstan with their wives just before the arrests began. They stole horses in the neighboring Bashkiria hoping to pass the border that way. When they found themselves to be chased after they began to shoot and killed a police officer and wounded a local. According to testimony by Sharafullin, 32, the community was far from nationalism. He told at the court how he once addressed a meeting of Tartar nationalists “It’s not a nation, but religion that we need. Islam is above nation.” After that he had to beat off the meeting’s participants with a fire extinguisher. The security services became interested in the jamaat after a series of mysterious murders in the wood near Naberezhnye Chelny. The investigation found Khafiz Razzakov. Although he admitted only the ninth murder committed by him – that was a woman who was disrespectful about Islam – few have doubts about his guilt in the other murders. But because Razzakov had invoked Islam as an explanation and because in the late 1990s he had gone to Chechnya, government investigators assumed his actions had to be more than those of a simple criminal and focused first on other Tatars who had fought in the North Caucasus and then on their contacts in Tatarstan. As a result, about 50 people had been detained at the end 2004. Half of them were released, while 23 members of the community were tried, five among them being under age. All of them were accused of forming an unlawful armed unit, Islamic jamaat, and preparation of terrorist acts, as well as membership of Basayev’s organization. According to the investigation the Jamaat consisted of six combat groups led by amirs and had a common money fund. The amount found, though, was only 6,000 rubles (less then $200) passed by one of the accused, businessman Salavat Latypov, to amir Gumerov. The prosecution considered it to be terrorist financing. The Jamaat was equipped with four Kalashnikovs, seven pistols, a gun Izh-58, a sniper rifle, five grenades and some cartridges. According to the judge, the group also had 580 g of plastic explosive. The prosecution believed that the members of the group had built a military camp where they “were trained for jihad”. In the Beloretsky district of Bashkiria in the Urals a dugout was found where, in the investigators’ opinion, members of the jamaat buried weapons and food. However, no guns were found there because, according to the indictment, “they were hidden so well that it was impossible to find them”. The prosecution affirmed that in November 2003 in a flat in Naberezhnye Chelny, Gumerov, the amir of the Jamaat, said he had been commissioned by Khattab (who had been killed by that time) and Basayev who had sent him to the town to organize terrorist acts in Bashkiria and Tatarstan with the purpose of seizing power and creating a caliphate. That statement has been recognized to be sufficient evidence of a direct relation to the Caucasus underground. The local enforcement officers believed that in 2004 members of the Jamaat began to start preparing for terrorist acts due to be carried out in 2007-2008: namely to blow up KAMAZ plant in Naberezhnye Chelny, water intake facility in same town, the local oil-factory in the city of Nizhnekamsk, and also helicopter plant in Kazan. The explosives allegedly were to be delivered from Chechnya. Then the plan was “perfected”: according to investigators Gumerov set out a new task of organizing explosions in Kazan in August 2005 during public events dedicated to the 1000th anniversary of the city, and to begin shooting the police officers. However, no proofs for this plan were ever found. The enforcement officers tend to act in accordance with fixed ideas: thus if more than two people are involved, that means an organization; if it is an organization, it must have its structure, weapons and financial sources from the outside. Almost all those features that special services are used to look for can be found with the Islamic jamaat. However, 6,000 rubles cannot be called serious finance, and a few guns and half a kilo of explosive seem not to be enough to blow up the KAMAZ plant, let alone seize power. That some of the members of this group had radical ideas, owned weapons or engaged in criminal activities is beyond question. But instead of focusing on specific statements and crime, prosecutors felt they had to uncover a radical Islamist conspiracy in Tatarstan on the North Caucasus model. To get the evidence for their theory of a jamaat-type conspiracy, local human rights groups and the relatives and lawyers for the accused said, the police used torture to get the members of the Jamaat to provide the “evidence” the authorities needed to make such charges. These tactics are well-known in the North Caucasus, notably during the investigation of the attack on Nalchik in October 2005. The appearance and rise of such alienated young Muslims may constitute a serious threat, as the experience of European countries with “Islam of the basements and garages” has shown. This term, coined by French President Nicolas Sarkozy after the places where these informal communities meet, describes the radical Islam preached by clerics who are for the most part self-proclaimed to their flock which are mostly uneducated, economically suppressed people with no trust in the official ulema. The groups like the Jamaat in Tatarstan might be dangerous: they are autonomous, can arise in any region of Russia, act without financing from outside, and have some access to weaponry and explosives, but it is far from clear that they are or will become terrorists. But the Russian security services appeared not to know what to do about them. Instead of focusing on this new danger, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB and prosecutors have fallen back on what they do know and treated the acts of such individuals as if they were part and parcel of “a powerful Islamist militarized organization”, pretending that what they are facing now in the Middle Volga is what they have confronted in the North Caucasus. The court sentenced Razzakov to life imprisonment; the other 16 members of the group were sentenced to 6 to 16 years' imprisonment. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tatarstan proudly announced that “the group has been sentenced to a total of more than 100 years in prison”. Thus the unwillingness to recognize this new phenomenon resulted in the court’s decision in which people who were ‘guilty’ only of having been members of a certain structure and who did not commit a single terrorist act were sent to jail for many years. At the same time, while the jamaats beyond the borders of the North Caucasus were prosecuted, other international Islamic organizations attempted to develop their cells on Russian soil, notably the Islamist party Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Considering all “non-traditional” Muslim organizations as a potential threat, the Russian secret services were unlikely to stand idly by. Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation), which is more like a political party than an underground terrorist group, has operated in Russia for almost a decade and in many countries of the Middle East since its founding in 1953 in Jerusalem by Taqiuddin al-Nabhani. The political goal of Hizb-ut-Tahrir is the utopian idea of combining all Muslim countries in a unitary Islamic state or Caliphate, ruled by Islamic law. But the party never included Russia as candidates for inclusion in the universal caliphate; Hizb ut-Tahrir has repeatedly rejected the use of force, even though its positive reaction to terrorist acts by others has given it a reputation for radicalism. The first Hizb ut-Tahrir supporters appeared in Russia at the beginning of 2000s, having mostly fled from the persecutions of the notorious Karimov regime in Uzbekistan. Karimov’s law enforcement agencies had begun mass repressions against the party because it was said to be complicit in a series of bomb attacks in the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent in 1999. In fact, it is likely that these attacks were carried out by Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). However, no proof was presented, and in the documents of the investigation of the attacks there was no mention of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir. But the statement of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan prompted a series of arrests of the party’s members. The first mass arrests took place in early 2000, when not only those suspected of membership were arrested, but often all the men in a suspect’s family. According to the International Crisis Group’s report,
The Russian authorities decided to support their Central-Asian partner and in February 2003, the Russian Supreme Court put the Hizb ut-Tahrir on a list of banned terrorist organizations. In June 2003 the Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested the first illegal immigrants from Uzbekistan suspected of having ties with the party, a practice that was to expand in the years ahead. But in spring of 2008 the Uzbek President’s enemies were announced to be a threat to Russian national security: Nikolai Patrushev, then FSB director, stated at the meeting of the National Counterterrorist Committee in Khanty-Mansiysk that "There have been repeated attempts by the international terrorist organizations Hizb ut Tahrir al-Islami and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to move their operations to the territory of the Russian Federation, including the Urals region". He said security bodies have discovered over 80 active members of such organizations over the last two years in Russia's Tyumen and Chelyabinsk regions, adding that the number of terrorist and extremist crimes in the Urals Federal district had grown in 2007. However, by the middle of 2009 there was no credible evidence that the members of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir were involved in carrying out terrorist attacks in Russia. On 16th April 2009 the Kremlin declared that the counterterrorist operation in Chechnya was over, and that the major rebel groups were considered to be long suppressed by the authorities, but its place was captured by adherents of non-traditional Islam. Sometimes these new Islamists established groups called jamaats; sometimes they joined the ranks of the prohibited Hizb-ut-Tahrir party. But these groups are no longer limited by the borders of the North Caucasus, they can be found everywhere – in Moscow, in the Ural region or the biggest Russian Muslim region, Tatarstan. These changes might be decisive for the next 10-20 years, but the response of the secret services to this new threat is mostly brutal and disproportionate. These groups are suppressed without distinction, whether they are Islamists who prefer the militant way of jihad or they limit themselves to religious propaganda. In a country where more than 12% of the population are Muslims, it might be the biggest threat to national unity. Agentura.Ru, December 22, 2010 |
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