From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Blood and Belief
A terrorist horror. What was radical Islam's role?
More than 350 people murdered, primarily children, along with teachers and parents: Even among terrorist incidents, this one stands out for its horror. Russians, staggered by what happened this week in the north Ossetian town of Beslan, are trying to understand the nature of the enemy they confront. So are the rest of us, since it may be our enemy too. Is it?
For President Vladimir Putin, the answer is clear-cut. Russia is fighting extremist Islam, and it must be destroyed. From what we know so far, such a characterization accurately describes the child-killers in Beslan, who acted in accordance with "religious" instructions, issued on a Chechen Islamist Web site, that distort the Koran to justify the taking and killing of non-Muslim hostages. But Mr. Putin wants to claim that the broader Chechen separatist movement is rooted in extremist Islam, as if the region were a wholly owned subsidiary of al Qaeda. The truth is more complicated.
Radical Islam has never been a powerful force in Chechnya. Chechens are traditionally adherents of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, and a moderate one. Generations of Soviet rule--including Stalin's brutal exile of all Chechens to Central Asia for more than a decade--had the effect of strengthening the people's links to Sufism, a means of preserving their distinct national identity.
As Chechens made a bid for secession from Russia in the early 1990s, their leaders--though hardly democrats--avoided the rhetoric of radical Islam. Chechnya's first president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, even warned against its dangers. Its second, Aslan Maskhadov, a former Soviet colonel, is a religious moderate. (While he included Muslim fundamentalist warlords in his government in a bid for national unity, they came to resolutely oppose him.) Nor are most Chechen clerics radical Islamists.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, extremist Islam--which most locals label Wahhabism or Salafism--has seized on Russia's bloody prosecution of the Chechen war to try to make inroads among the region's inhabitants. It usually targets small, impoverished villages for recruitment, indoctrinating jobless and orphaned adolescents. Chechnya is, in short, an opportunity for Muslim radicals, not their natural home. And, in fact, they have broadly failed to win Chechens over to their side.
At first, the Chechen people welcomed the support of foreign Islamic radicals in their liberation struggle, but the majority soon came to resent their growing influence. Fundamentalist clerics who came to Chechnya after it declared independence in 1992 were hostile to the centuries-old Chechen Sufi tradition, and there were intra-Muslim clashes.
In 1996, after President Dudayev's assassination by Russian forces, conditions were such that the man who succeeded him, Zemlikan Yandarbiyev, was a proponent of Islamism. He issued a decree abolishing secular courts and replacing them with Islamic Shari'ah courts at the local level, copying the criminal code from the Shari'ah code of Sudan.
More than a criminal code has been imported. The Chechen war and widening attacks throughout the northern Caucasus are a magnet for extremist Muslims from around the world. Some have trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In October 2002, a German court was told by a radical Islamist that the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had wanted to fight in Chechnya. And U.S. intelligence intercepts from 2002 indicated that Islamist fighters near Chechnya were in contact with al Qaeda.
A central figure in the creation of the radical terrorist network in the north Caucasus was an Arab fighter known as ibn-al-Khattab. (He was killed in 2002.) It was Khattab who did the most to popularize the Chechen cause among Islamist extremists. He worked closely with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who gradually embraced the rhetoric of radical Islam. This network of terrorist fighters is most likely behind the atrocities in Beslan.
But Chechnya's broader separatist movement, including Mr. Maskhadov, is not made up of extremist Islamists or Wahhabis. Its leaders regularly repudiate acts of terrorism against civilians, though at times equivocating by asserting that such attacks are understandable if regrettable responses to Russian atrocities. Mr. Maskhadov, in fact, has issued dozens of calls for a peaceful, negotiated solution to the conflict only to be repudiated by Mr. Putin. His emissaries in the West, Akhmed Zakaev and Ilyas Akhmadov, have echoed these calls and repeatedly denounced the use of terrorism.
Although a complete profile of the Beslan terrorists is not yet known, it appears they were a multinational unit seeking to trigger a region-wide holy war--not Chechen independence. This agenda is not that of the Chechen people. Here, perhaps, is the only glimmer of good news that can be found in the devastated and bloody landscape of the northern Caucasus.
Mr. Karatnycky is a senior scholar at Freedom House in New York.
