Fareed Zakaria: How Russia Created Its Own Islamic Terrorism Problem
[Fareed Zakaria is editor-at-large for Time Magazine.]
...It's now conventional wisdom that Moscow faces a brutal Islamic terrorist movement, bent on jihad, unwilling to compromise and determined to inflict pain on Russians almost as an end in itself. That's the view presented by Russian officials and accepted by Western leaders. Over the past decade, George W. Bush and Tony Blair reacted to terrorist incidents in Russia by quickly condemning them and describing them as instances of Islamic terrorism, tied to al-Qaeda and its fanatical vision. This unthinking acceptance of the Russian narrative allowed Moscow to respond with brutal violence, often against innocent civilians and without prompting international criticism.
A little history provides a different perspective. Chechnya's struggle against Russia, at root, has nothing to do with Islam. About 200 years ago, the Russian empire began a war of colonial expansion in the tiny area called Chechnya. After resisting for several bloody decades, the Chechens were forcibly incorporated into the empire in 1859. As soon as the Czar's rule ended in Moscow, the Chechens began clamoring for independence, which they were granted in 1918.
By 1920, Lenin had invaded the region and brutally suppressed the independence movement and all subsequent revolts. But the problem did not go away, so Lenin's successor, Josef Stalin, applied an even more brutal solution. In 1944 he deported most of the Chechen population — nearly half a million people — to central Asia and burned their villages to the ground. Still, the Chechens retained their identity and national desires, so in the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev allowed them to return to their homeland....
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...It's now conventional wisdom that Moscow faces a brutal Islamic terrorist movement, bent on jihad, unwilling to compromise and determined to inflict pain on Russians almost as an end in itself. That's the view presented by Russian officials and accepted by Western leaders. Over the past decade, George W. Bush and Tony Blair reacted to terrorist incidents in Russia by quickly condemning them and describing them as instances of Islamic terrorism, tied to al-Qaeda and its fanatical vision. This unthinking acceptance of the Russian narrative allowed Moscow to respond with brutal violence, often against innocent civilians and without prompting international criticism.
A little history provides a different perspective. Chechnya's struggle against Russia, at root, has nothing to do with Islam. About 200 years ago, the Russian empire began a war of colonial expansion in the tiny area called Chechnya. After resisting for several bloody decades, the Chechens were forcibly incorporated into the empire in 1859. As soon as the Czar's rule ended in Moscow, the Chechens began clamoring for independence, which they were granted in 1918.
By 1920, Lenin had invaded the region and brutally suppressed the independence movement and all subsequent revolts. But the problem did not go away, so Lenin's successor, Josef Stalin, applied an even more brutal solution. In 1944 he deported most of the Chechen population — nearly half a million people — to central Asia and burned their villages to the ground. Still, the Chechens retained their identity and national desires, so in the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev allowed them to return to their homeland....