The “CTO” is a question, not an answer By Demis Polandov, special to Prague Watchdog
The news that a counter-terrorism operation (CTO) regime has been introduced in the Elbrussky district of Kabardino-Balkaria may seem unexpected to outsiders, but is unlikely to come as a surprise to local residents. The mountain districts of Balkaria and Karachay were long ago turned into a location for the insurgents’ weapons caches and a platform for the preachings of the Salafists. Gunfire and explosions are frequently heard here, but the incidents mostly go unreported in the media, and even sensational terrorist attacks are lost in the general flow of negative reports from the North Caucasus, particularly its eastern part.
Now the federal government appears to have woken up and finally decided to impose order. If there are Wahhabis, then a counter-terrorist operation must be launched. There will be some flying over gorges, a dozen or so people will be shot and killed, a report will be filed – and the “CTO” will be over. One or two human rights workers will no doubt once again try to make sense of what happened and find out who actually shot who and for what reason, but who ever listens to them?
In "twinned" republics like Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia, the CTO is a tool that is less than effective. Even if the fight with the Salafists inflicts some damage on their popularity and possibly their fighting capability, more problems will inevitably appear from the other direction – that of inter-ethnic strife.
In the North Caucasus today there are only two viable ideologies – nationalism and Salafist Islam. These doctrines have long been engaged in a head-to-head struggle with each other.
Since the Salafists are at war with Russia, it is the central government’s unspoken duty to provide moderate support to the nationalists. This, however, presents great dangers in a region where two peoples who speak languages that belong to different families have been forced to live together within artificial administrative boundaries that were drawn up in Stalin’s time. Which nationalism is Russia to support? Which national elites will take responsibility for the suppression of radicalism?
The problem lies in the inability and even the unwillingness of the national elites to make any serious effort to neutralize radical Islam. In the conflict between the ethnic clans in the twinned republics, the Salafists are a very convenient tool. In fact, if there were no Wahhabis there, they would have to be invented. The presence of an external arbiter - the federal government – allows the national elites to use the strategy of "soft" blackmail: by pointing a finger at the religious extremism of their opponents, they can seek substantial preferment.
The resulting situation is a stalemate. With each year that passes the inter-ethnic discord increases, and many in the Caucasus now believe that it will only be a few years before it breaks out in the form of armed conflict. Today it is the Salafists who play the role of moderators in the dialogue between the Caucasian mountain tribesmen, explaining that the ethnic conflicts are triggered by the Russian kafirs and that all the issues can be resolved peacefully among brother Muslims.
In addition to their appeal to those who talk about “land and blood”, the nationalists’ principal weapon against the preaching of the Salafists is, of course, the successful experiment that has been conducted in Chechnya. No matter how many mosques Ramzan Kadyrov may build (not only in Chechnya but also in the rest of the North Caucasus), the plan for Chechen pacification is primarily a project of national revival (regardless of whether it is so in reality). Within the framework of Russia a unitary Chechen state has been created, receiving gigantic federal government grants in exchange for demonstrations of loyalty. But in Chechnya there is peace (or at any rate it appears so from outside).
However, for the national elites of Kabardino-Balkaria and Kabardino-Cherkessia the “Chechen route” is now closed, because the federal centre is no longer even considering the separation of the twinned republics. And any national movement that is denied the right to declare as its ultimate goal the acquisition of a state of its own (even in the form of an autonomous region) is left without a source of energy and is unable to develop a sense of distance. The puppet-like socio-cultural entities that were invented back in Soviet times out of an avowed concern for the preservation of folkloric traditions, have nothing to pit against the call of the Salafitsts, who offer a program for the reconstruction of society on the basis of justice and divine order.
The local elites are completely paralyzed. They have nothing like the rights and privileges that were granted by the Kremlin to Ramzan Kadyrov so that he could launch the ideology of nation-building, and there are no other ideas that come anywhere close to the Salafist reorganization of the world. Therefore the national-ethnic clans will try to justify their failure to solve the problem by the complexity and conflict-ridden nature of the republics’ inter-ethnic relations, and will take great pains to conceal the truth.
The alternatives for the future of the peoples of both republics are fraught with the threat of disaster – either a Salafist revolution, or, more probably, a bitter ethnic conflict, similar to the one between the Ossetians and the Ingush. In its turn, that conflict will have to be wound up, either by an ultimate separation along national-ethnic lines, or by a Salafist revolution. And in those separate areas no counter-terrorist operation will be of any avail.
There is a third option – the creation of strong legal institutions, the building of a strong civil society, and economic transformation (a guarantee of property rights, a land reform). Unfortunately, this is a utopia for Russia as a whole, and not only for the North Caucasus region, mired as it is in archaic clan strife on the one hand, and the growing influence of a theocratic project on the other.
Photo: kailash.ru. (Translation by DM) (P,DM)
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