RUSSIA MAY have declared in 2009 that the war in Chechnya was over. Sadly, like George Bush’s predictions about Iraq, it was also seriously premature. As the country was again brutally reminded on Monday at Domodedovo airport, the simmering insurgency running through the North Caucasus region is far from finished. Responsibility for the suicide bombing that killed 35 people, including eight foreigners, at Moscow’s airport has yet to be claimed. But few doubt its origins.
Two civil wars in Chechnya and wretched poverty throughout the region have left a legacy of hatred and desire for revenge among its largely Muslim population. A sporadic 15-year terrorist campaign has exported the violence to Moscow where, only last March, two female suicide attackers from neighbouring Dagestan killed 40 rush-hour commuters on the metro.
In Dagestan and Ingushetia there are daily reports of police killed by rebels or of shoot-outs in a slow-burn civil war between Moscow-backed regimes and nationalists/bandits turned radical Islamists fighting for an Islamic caliphate. They are nominally led by Doku Umarov, self-styled “Emir of the Caucasus”.
Moscow’s reaction to the exporting of the war to the capital is predictably bellicose, even blood-curdling. President Dmitry Medvedev spoke yesterday of “liquidating” those responsible. “We must not stand on ceremony with those who resist,” he said, “they must be destroyed on the spot.” Critics rightly warn, however, that a major factor in the continuing support for Umarov has been precisely the effect of Moscow’s no-holds-barred approach, which has been widely condemned by human rights groups.
Airport officials found responsible for negligence would also be fired, Mr Medvedev said, insisting that security at airports and for upcoming international events, including the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, on the edge of the North Caucasus, would be upgraded.
But the violence has also dangerously fuelled tensions between increasingly fearful ethnic Russians and the 20 million Muslims who make up a seventh of Russia’s population. Last month in Moscow, just a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, a mob of 7,000 young nationalists attacked passersby who appeared to be non-Slavic.
And there are serious concerns that such attitudes are being encouraged by the inflammatory rhetoric of politicians, not least Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and even implicitly condoned by the authorities in the course of their “war on terror”. Many security officials are embittered veterans of those wars, and last week Russian human rights group Memorial accused law enforcement agencies of kidnapping and torturing eight ordinary Muslims from the North Caucasus since September. During the important religious Kurban Bairam holiday in November, Muslims in Moscow complained of being manhandled by police close to their mosques.
The danger is that the self-fuelling spiral of terror, repression and demagoguery will ensure that the tragic events at Domodedovo are certain to be repeated.