#10 - RW 267
Novye Izvestia
July 31, 2003
NEW PUBLIC ENEMIES
Human rights groups warn that Russia is heading for civil war
Author: Alexander Kolesnichenko, Shagen Ogandzhanjan
Source: Novye Izvestia, July 31, 2003, p. 2
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]

THE MOSCOW HELSINKI GROUP INTENDS TO SUE INTERIOR MINISTER BORIS GRYZLOV AND MAYOR OF MOSCOW YURI LUZHKOV. IT ALLEGES THAT THEY HAVE INCITED ETHNIC AND RELIGIOUS HATRED WITH THEIR STATEMENTS ABOUT FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBERS AND "CHECHNYA LINKS" IN THE MOSCOW BOMBINGS.

The war on terrorism is taking ugly and unconstitutional forms

The explosions at the Tushino rock festival in Moscow have led to relations between Muslims and the rest of Russian society deteriorating further. Until recently, the primary targets for police were men - especially bearded men - of non-Russian ethnic origin. These days, police attention is also focusing on women of non-Russian ethnic origin, particularly those wearing headscarves. The daughter of Nafigulla Ashirov, co-chairman of the Council of Muftis of Russia, has been detained by police on four occasions already, and Ashirov's wife was recently denied entry to a supermarket in Moscow. But the terrorists who blew themselves up at Tushino were wearing miniskirts, not the kind of clothing Muslim women usually wear.

Geidar Djemal, Chairman of the Islamic Committee, belives that the anti-Muslim hysteria and terrorism-mania in Russia are being inflamed deliberately. According to Djemal, this is being done in order to shift existing social problems onto the ethnic plane - which could lead to racial and religious apartheid and eventually to a civil war. There are 20 million Muslims in Russia, and their numbers are growing.

In the meantime, there is already a civil war in a Muslim region of the Russian Federation: Chechnya. In the rest of the country, the war on terrorism has taken ugly and unconstitutional forms, human rights groups say. Essentially, this war is restricted to humiliating ID checks and extortion. Lyudmila Alexeeva (Moscow Helsinki Group) believes that the secret services are only emphasizing their own incompetence by such actions.

Human rights activists recently surveyed several popular federal and regional tabloids, looking for anything that may be regarded as inciting ethnic hatred. They took into account both direct calls for action and unpleasant statements about various ethnic groups. The human rights activists counted five "outcast" groups in Russia: Chechens, people from the Caucasus (this category includes residents of Central Asia and even Arabs), Americans, Jews, and the Chinese.

Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Globalization Institute, maintains that the growing split between Islam and the rest of the world is a trend that is not confined to Russia alone. He believes that the current international situation resembles the late 1920s and early 1930s, when fascism arose in Germany and the Soviet Union plunged into totalitarianism. Muslims in non-Islamic countries are like Jews in Germany in the early 1930s. This state of affairs is playing into the hands of the secret services, for they will never be out of work. It is also playing into the hands of the elites in Russia and in the West, because it enables them to ignore real problems and concentrate on the mythical threat of Islamic terrorism - especially since terrorists nowadays strike at ordinary citizens, not at VIPs.

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