Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Here is a potpourri of media reaction to the Moscow Domodedovo Airport blast:

Mark Ames has an interesting piece on what he anticipates the Russian reaction to yesterday's blast will be: little to nothing.

It takes a lot to terrorize a Russian. Compared to the truly spectacular acts of terrorism and violence that Russians have suffered over the past two decades, today’s suicide bombing at Moscow’s busiest airport, Domodedovo, is too small-time to have much of an effect besides pissing off an already-pissed-off population.Busy days in DC, folks. I'm spending a lot of time moving in, getting started, and trying to make things work.

Later in the piece, Ames contrasts the reactions of Russians to terror with the response of Americans after 9/11:

As appalling as it might seem, let’s remember what America’s far more sentimental reaction to 9/11 got us: two disastrous wars, tens of thousands of deaths, and the sorts of police-state measures once thought unimaginable. The difference may be more in our sentimentality than in our brutality.

Too true, but responses to terrorism in Russia—while not always eliciting the panicky policy responses of the Bush administration post-9/11—have nevertheless brought about terrible consequences. Sometimes these consequences have come in the form of war (such as the escalation of fighting in Chechnya after attacks in Moscow earlier this decade), and sometimes in the form of power consolidation by the center (like when the Kremlin canceled the process of presidential elections in Russia's various republics, replacing this system with one in which republican presidents are selected by Moscow).
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Russia Today (an official government mouthpiece) sez the government of Chechnya, which is Moscow-installed, has accused Duma buffoon Vladimir Zhirinovsky of ethnic hatred.
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Predictably, Russian PM Vladimir Putin is calling for revenge. But it's also noteworthy, I think, that Putin called the act a "crime" that "will be solved." At least he's not stooping to the "good vs. evil" rhetoric that some of our presidents have found convenient to employ.
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The Mufti of Ingushetia, Isa-Hajji Khamkhoyev, has denounced the attack.

Ingushetia is a predominantly Muslim republic in the north Caucasus, located right next door to Chechnya. Ingushetia and Chechnya have very closely connected histories, and the two republics used to be united in a single republic (the Chechen-Ingush Repulibc), which broke apart in 1991. Now they are two separate republics within the Russian Federation.



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Meanwhile, some people already seem certain the perpetrators are Muslim, and that this tells us something about "Muslims" (and "Islam") more generally.

On the positive side – assuming there is one – such a horrendous attack by Islamic terrorists should make Russia’s leaders (ostensibly President Dmitry Medvedev but really Prime Minister Vladimir Putin) more appreciative of the problems faced in the West with militant Islam.

It's tempting, I suppose, for some people to blame this on "Islam." But consider the fact that there are about 25 million Muslims in Russia today, not including the large numbers of Muslims (mostly from Central Asia and the Caucasus) who are non-citizen (legal or illegal) resident of Russia. 

Not all of these groups have bad relations with Moscow. There are sizable Muslim populations in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two republics of Georgia that have in recent decades sought protection from Moscow (leading to the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia). Do all of these Muslims hate Moscow? Meanwhile, relations between Moscow and republics within Russia like Tatarstan and Bashkortostan (which have majority Muslim populations) are nothing like they have been with the Chechens and, at times, the Chechen government (though not today, since the leadership in Chechnya is Moscow-installed).

Chechen separatists have taken their war to central Russia because Chechnya has been largely pacified, at least in the cities.


Grozny in the 1990s was a mess, to say the absolute least


But it's looking better today

As was the case with the Crimean Tatars, Germans, and other nationalities, the Chechens were deported en masse from the north Caucasus in 1944. While figures are difficult to rely upon, the numbers that are bounced around regarding ultimate deaths (within a year of the expulsion) often hover around the one-third range.

Then there were the events of the late 1850s and early 1860s, when hundreds of thousands of north Caucasus Muslims—including Chechens—were driven from their homes and lands in the highlands. Rather than accept relocation to the lowlands, hundreds of thousands crossed the mountains into the Ottoman Empire. The toll upon the migrants of exposure, disease, and starvation was catastrophic.

So you know, there are reasons why the Chechens might bear some historical grudges against the Russian state that have absolutely nothing to do with Islam or fundamentalism. True, many of the Chechens who carry out terrorist acts in Russia do so in the name of the Wahhabist Islam that acted as an ideology for many of the early anti-Russian fighters. But Islam had little or nothing to do with the creation of anti-Russian feelings among the Chechens. Instead, we should do more to look at Russian policies.

I mean, wasn't that one of the lessons we were supposed to have learned from September 11? The United States didn't begin to make a positive response to September 11 until Americans began to look beyond "Islam" as a cause of their heartache and instead started to look at America's role in contributing to the awful state of relations between the US and the world's Muslims that existed before September 11. This is something we're still sorting through.

The Russians, hopefully, won't panic. I hope Ames is right in that respect.
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