Russia's repression of muslims
As Russia tries to cozy up to several Islamist states Russia masks its abysmal record of repressing muslims inside Russia.
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CHERKESSK, Russia: Security officials here in Karachayevo-Cherkessia, a restive republic on Russia's mountainous southern border, have a secret list of people who are kept under scrutiny. Those on it have committed no crime, but are considered suspect because they are Muslims who practice Islam outside of the state's sanctioned mosques.
"We know who they are," the republic's president, Mustafa Batdiyev, said in an interview. He declined to elaborate, but said the list included about 150 people.
A former member of a committee that compiled it, Murat Kkahtukayev, said the list was far longer.
Ovod Golayev is on it. He lives in Karachayevsk, a city nestled in the foothills of the Caucasus, where he works for a tourist company that organizes skiing and hiking excursions. He wears his hair and beard long. He prays five times a day. He fasts during Ramadan.
In the past month, he said, the police have detained him four times, twice in one day. The last time was on Oct. 28, after two days of violence that killed at least 138 people two weeks earlier in Nalchik, the capital of the neighboring republic, Kabardino-Balkaria.
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Russias place - International Herald Tribune
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3. Practices in the fight against extremism:
The harassment of certain groups -Muslims, nationalists, extreme left- through incrimination (involvement with an extremist group or distributing extremist literature) which is the equivalent to criminalizing their opinions or beliefs ;
The intimidation of NGOs or other forms of associations through the use of “warnings” handed down by the prosecutor that can lead to their dissolution;
The creation of a climate of suspicion and intimidation and of constant social and political repression. One is witnessing the passage from the former institutionalized military-police/FBS system to the instrumentalization of the judicial system through the criminalization of behaviours that come under the freedom of expression and belief.
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[ Grave Abuse of The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism in Russia - WWW.FIDH.ORG ]
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Within recent years however, all across Russia, Muslims have reported instances of harassment and Islamophobia. Russia\\\'s Islamophobia has taken on many forms, from violence, like the skinhead rampage in a crowded Moscow market in 2003 allegedly aimed at \\\"persons of Muslim nationality,\\\" to newspapers that run pictures of local Muslim leaders next to photographs of Osama bin Laden. Human rights groups have reported an upsurge in hate crimes throughout Russia, some related to ethnicity, others connected more directly with the presumed Islamic heritage of the victim. The Washington Post reports that since September 11th, a Muslim cemetery has been desecrated in Krasnodar in southern Russia, a mysterious shooting took place inside a mosque in Irkutsk, Siberia. And in Volgograd, a gang broke into a mosque construction site an hour before the groundbreaking ceremony, protesting, \\\"We don\\\'t need a mosque here.\\\"
On the 5th March 2004, mosques in Moscow were raided by security personnel from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Federal Security Services after Friday Prayers. At least 18 people were detained under the pretext of foiling “terrorist operations”. Russian federal forces launched similar raids on the 27th of February 2004 and rounded up at least 84 people, the majority of whom were released without charge.
The Bigotry Monitor reported that on the 30th May 2003, glass bottles with flammable mixtures were thrown into a packed mosque in Irkutsk Oblast, damaging the roof and walls.
In July 2003, Russian local authorities prevented the construction of a mosque in Soshi in the Krasnodar region in southern Russia. Rose Ramadanova, the head of an Islamic organization in Soshi, declared to the Russian Islamic newspaper Al Sandorr News that the 43,000 Muslims in this city of 267,000 are unable to pray publicly as they have no mosques except a small mosque in the garage of a small building in the city. Muslims in this city are prevented from celebrating Islamic weddings. Muslims are also unable to pray for their dead or bury them as Islamic shari’ah dictates.
A number of mosques in Russia were also burnt out by arsonists since the beginning of the holy Islamic month of Ramadan in 2003. On the 13th of November, two mosques were set ablaze in western Russia, causing 130,000 rubles ($3,000) worth of damage.
Muslims have also scant political participation. The most recent parliamentary elections, held in December 2003, resulted in electing only one Muslim representative.
Muslim leaders are also targeted in assassination attacks. The former head of the Union of Russian Muslims, Nadirshakh Khachilayev, was assassinated on the 11th of August, 2003, in Dagestan. Khachilayev was a deputy in the State Duma where he served as the leader of the Islamic Opposition. His outspoken views caused the Russian government to strip him of his parliamentary immunity and he was prosecuted for terrorist activities of which he was ultimately acquitted. The shooting attack against Khachilayev came two days after Prominent Russian specialist in Islamic affairs Grigory Bondarevsky was found killed in his Moscow apartment. Nothing was found missing from Bondarevsky’s apartment except a detailed research document on the struggle for Chechen independence. To date, nobody has been prosecuted in relation to either assassination.
In Tatarstan, some Muslim women have reported being harassed on the street, their scarves ripped off their heads. Mullahs are no longer invited to open Tatar political meetings with prayers after Sept. 11 for fear of controversy.
In the industrial city of Naberezhnye Chelny, a madrassa was closed last year when authorities claimed religious extremism was being taught there. Russian media reported that some of the school\\\'s students had turned up fighting in Chechnya. And at least two of the seven Russian citizens captured by the United States in Afghanistan and held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also allegedly passed through the madrassa.
On the 11 February, 2004, a nine-year-old Muslim Tajik girl, Khursheda Sultanov, was beaten and stabbed to death by Russian extremist neo-Nazis skinheads, severely wounding her father and 11-year-old cousin in St. Petersburg. In April 2004, a Russian mob rampaged through a market place employing immigrants, mostly Muslims, in the South-western city of Volgograd, killing at least one Muslim and injuring around 40 others.
Muslims throughout Russia have been demonised by the mass media as “Islamic terrorists”. In April 2004, the Union of Journalists of Russia accused the country’s press of stirring up international and religious discord. It charged that Moscow had “no newspapers that [we]re free of Islamophobic, racist and fascist publications.” In the same month, a group of Russian Muslims brought an action against the newspaper Izvestia and 2 of its columnists for the publication of an article containing calls to genocide of the Muslims and to a war with the Islamic world. Although, the plaintiffs were defeated at the initial stage, they are appealing the decision. Should they ultimately, succeed, Islamophobia in its various guises would be officially declared illegal.
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IHRC - BRIEFING: The Russian Federation and Muslim Minorities
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04-21-2008, 08:53 PM
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