On his recent visit to Brussels, Russian President Vladimir Putin stunned European leaders and journalists alike with his comments about the Islamic desire to establish a global Caliphate. Sensational in his rhetoric, Putin presents Russia's brutal war against the Chechens as his country's contribution to the international war against Islamist terrorism. But is it really?
Russia's attempts to subdue the Chechen insurrection are but another bloody chapter in a 200-year colonial policy that began with Russia's subjugation of Caucasian mountain peoples in a cruel war that lasted for 30 years. This war lingered and flared well into the early Soviet era and, in 1944, the entire Chechen population was forcibly deported to Central Asia.
ILLUSTATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Fifty years later, president Boris Yeltsin resumed the war when Chechens made a new bid for independence. So, from a historic perspective, it is more appropriate to compare today's Chechen war with the other great wars of the era of de-colonialization, particularly the bloody French war in Algeria, than it is to view it as a "clash of civilizations" or a war on terror.
All the while, the fighting and ruined cities of Chechnya cast a shadow on the otherwise much more complex encounter of Russia with the Islamic world. Indeed, the Chechens are only a fraction of the 13 million Muslims who live in Russia -- 9 percent of the total population.
But simultaneous with its attempts to crush the Chechen rebellion, Russia has pursued a very different path in its relations with the Volga Tatars and Bashkirs, who live in their own republics in the Volga-Ural area. In the early 1990s, Yeltsin concluded bilateral agreements with those republics, conceding extensive autonomy to Tatarstan and Bashkortostan.
Although restoration of centralized political power in the Kremlin has marked Putin's presidency, Moscow and the two Muslim-dominated Russian republics still adhere to the Yeltsin-era bargain.
The ambivalent relationship between Russia and its Muslims is deeply rooted in history. Russia conquered Muslim territories in the Volga-Ural area, Caucasus and Central Asia, and brutally suppressed any resistance. However, after loyalty was secured, the government adopted a more pragmatic policy.
Until the mid 19th century, sedentary Muslim elites were co-opted into the imperial aristocracy, just as, in the 20th century, national communist elites were absorbed into the Soviet nomenclature.
Indeed, Russia's contacts with the Muslim world go back thousands of years and were rooted in a tradition of tolerance. With a few short-lived exceptions, Russia's imperial government did not support Orthodox evangelism. Forced conversion was unknown and Russia's policy with regard to Muslims was guided primarily by the political and economic interests of the state.
After the Revolution, Soviet policy preserved the most important aspects of the old imperial approach. To be sure, the Communists tried to repress Islam as a religion -- as they tried to repress all religions.
But the Soviets encouraged the development of nations based on ethnic identity -- Stalin, it is to be recalled, fancied himself a theorist of nationalities -- and the ethnic identity of Soviet Muslims derived largely from their Islamic culture. In this sense, the Soviets helped keep Islam alive.
What few people realize is that, overall, the history of Russian-Muslim relations stand in sharp contrast with the policy pursued by most West European governments over the centuries -- policies that have been rooted in anti-Islamic stereotypes since the Middle Ages.
In Spain and Sicily, Muslims were discriminated against, forcibly baptized, and expelled since the 15th century. Five hundred years of warfare against the Ottomans also helped to fuel anti-Islamic prejudices and intolerance. Indeed, whenever Russia (as in the first half of the 18th century) or the Soviet Union (in the late 1920s and 1930s) combated Islam, its rulers pointed to the Western example.
The policy toward the Muslims pursued by the Russian Empire, by contrast, largely preserved ethnic and religious communities. This pragmatism has mostly been preserved to this day. Reverting to the imperial Russian tradition, Boris Yeltsin, as the first president of an independent Russian nation-state, sought realistic solutions for the Muslim republics that desired autonomy or, as Chechnya, independence.
This tolerant posture gave way to war in Chechnya in 1994, but the armistice of 1996, which de facto recognized Chechnya's independence, gave rise to new hopes of a better future.
In 1999 Yeltsin and Putin, his then prime minister, resumed combat. The Chechen war was exploited in Putin's presidential election campaign and, after the Sept. 11 attacks on the US, Putin has tried to legitimize his intransigence by presenting the war in Chechnya as Russia's contribution to its emerging partnership with the US in the war against terrorism.
With the Soviet Union's disintegration, Russia and the West lost the enemy each had seen in the other. Both deem Islam the new enemy, one held in common.
What they fail to see is that Islam is not a homogenous entity and that today's conflicts do not have religious or civilizing causes, but are rooted in political, social and economic reasons. Indeed, many Islamic movements are largely a reaction to former or still existing colonial dependence.
The Putin government's focus on violence demonstrates that Russia hasn't learned from its long history of engagement with Islam. The Chechen War is not part of some Clash of Civilizations, but a retreat to a colonial policy that failed.
Andreas Kappeler is director of the Institute for East European History, University of Vienna. He is the author of, among other books, The Russian Multi-Ethnic Empire.
Copyright: Project Syndicate and Institute for Human Sciences
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action. In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them. Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most
Most schoolchildren learn that the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000km. They do not learn that the global economy depends on just 160 of those kilometers. Blocking two narrow waterways — the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait — could send the economy back in time, if not to the Stone Age that US President Donald Trump has been threatening to bomb Iran back to, then at least to the mid-20th century, before the Rolling Stones first hit the airwaves. Over the past month and a half, Iran has turned the Strait of Hormuz, which is about 39km wide at
The ongoing Middle East crisis has reinforced an uncomfortable truth for Taiwan: In an increasingly interconnected and volatile world, distant wars rarely remain distant. What began as a regional confrontation between the US, Israel and Iran has evolved into a strategic shock wave reverberating far beyond the Persian Gulf. For Taiwan, the consequences are immediate, material and deeply unsettling. From Taipei’s perspective, the conflict has exposed two vulnerabilities — Taiwan’s dependence on imported energy and the risks created when Washington’s military attention is diverted. Together, they offer a preview of the pressures Taiwan might increasingly face in an era of overlapping geopolitical
RSS