Chechnya’s History of Violence: Did It Influence the Tsarnaev Brothers?
By Ishaan TharoorApril 19, 201310 Comments
Efrem Lukatsky / AP
Three Chechen boys play war with wooden guns outside their home in a village near Grozny, Jan. 15, 1995.
As more is learned about the background of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged suspect in the Boston bombings who is now the subject of an unprecedented manhunt, the teenager’s ethnic Chechen heritage has led to a frenzy of speculation .. http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/19/boston-terror-making-sense-of-the-tsarnaev-brothers/ . It’s important to note, however, that it’s not even clear how much time Tsarnaev — who, according to his uncle, immigrated as a young child to the U.S. from the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan — ever spent in Russia.. http://topics.time.com/russia/ ’s restive North Caucasus and how formative the region’s troubles were in his adolescent mind. There’s still no concrete evidence linking him and his now deceased older brother Tamerlan to organized jihadist activity.
But their role in the current crisis has reminded the world of the recent history of violence that has plagued their ancestral homeland, which is a republic in the Russian Federation. Unsurprisingly, Razman Kadyrov, the barrel-chested strongman who has been Chechnya’s leader since 2007, rejected the attention, posting this statement on his Instagram account, translated by Foreign Policy .. http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/04/19/chechen_leader_on_boston_suspects_seek_the_roots_of_evil_in_america :
-------- Any attempt to make the connection between Chechnya and [Tsarnaevs] if they are guilty, [is] in vain. They grew up in the United States, their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. --------
But the peripatetic life of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his relatives hint at a wider story. The Chechen diaspora that lives in Kyrgyzstan is largely a relic of the brutal population transfers authored by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who distrusted the mostly Muslim Chechens, fumed at their resistance to his collectivization policies and suspected Chechen collusion with the Nazis. Starting in 1943, some 350,000 to 400,000 Chechens were forcibly deported .. http://www.massviolence.org/The-Massive-Deportation-of-the-Chechen-People-How-and-why?artpage=4#outil_sommaire_2 .. to the eastern hinterlands of the Soviet Union .. http://topics.time.com/soviet-union/ ; according to one account, one-fifth of that number died in grim conditions in Siberia and the Central Asian steppe. After Stalin’s death in 1953, tens of thousands made their way back home, but the memory of that exile still shapes the Chechen national imagination.
In the post-Soviet era, Chechnya’s first rebel leader came from the Kyrgyz diaspora. Dzhokhar Dudayev unilaterally declared independence from Russia in 1991, though few nations recognized the fledgling Chechen state. Between 1994 and 1996, Russian troops fought a bitter, bloody war with Dudayev’s forces. Some 100,000 people died during the conflict (including Dudayev, who was killed in a Russian missile strike), but the dogged Chechen guerrillas emerged victorious, maintaining de facto independence until hostilities flared up again in 1999 following alleged Chechen involvement in a series of deadly bombings in Russia and a Chechen incursion into the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan.
This time, the Russian offensive was spearheaded by the country’s new Premier, a former KGB chief named Vladimir Putin. Russian planes pounded Chechnya’s cities and towns. Grozny, the Chechen capital, fell in February 2000 to Russian forces; by then, much of the city was a smoldering pile of rubble. Thousands died, while the fighting displaced hundreds of thousands more.
The brutality of the Russian campaigns turned what was a largely secular struggle into a pan-Islamist cause. Arab fighters flocked to the Chechen banner. Certain Chechen warlords cultivated links with jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda. Some reports suggest that Chechen fighters later joined the ranks of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as radical militant groups fighting against the Indian occupation of Kashmir. There’s evidence that Chechen fighters are also on the ground in Syria. But others contend .. http://easterncampaign.com/2007/08/24/imaginary-chechens-attack/ .. that the extent of the Chechen presence in many of these conflicts is overstated. Military analysts often tag foreign fighters as “Chechen” even when they’re from other corners of the former Soviet Union.
Despite Russia’s ruthless efforts to quash rebellion, a low-level insurgency still simmers in Chechnya and the neighboring Russian republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia. Chechen militants have exacted a heavy price over the years. In 2002, Chechen gunmen seized the Dubrovka theater in Moscow, taking hundreds hostage. The Russian commando raid that followed led to more than 120 deaths. In 2004, alleged Chechen and Inghush fighters captured a school in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia. The resulting three-day hostage crisis ended with the deaths of nearly 400 people, many of whom were children. In 2010, two female suicide bombers detonated themselves in a Moscow subway station, killing 39.
But the disaffection of many ordinary Chechens is palpable. Increasingly, experts warn .. http://www.jamestown.org/programs/gta/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=36594&cHash=c29485e9c5 , young men in the North Caucasus have started to turn away from the region’s long-standing tradition of Sufi Islam in favor of the more puritanical Salafi creed imported from the Middle East. Judging from Tamerlan’s YouTube feed .. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/348372 , the Tsarnaev brothers may have subscribed to Salafist dogma, which could suggest that their apparent campaign of violence this week in the Boston area had a jihadist motive. But as their irate uncle urged the press on Friday morning, the brothers’ alleged actions didn’t represent the “Chechen ethnicity” in any way. They have coped with enough bloodshed already.
[ very short video "CNN newsource: chechen president reacts to boston suspects..." embedded ]
Ishaan Tharoor is a staff writer for TIME magazine and co-editor of TIME World, based in New York City.
Like everyone else, I woke this morning to news of the shootout and the manhunt in Boston, which was soon followed by the revelation that the two suspects were Chechen — or born to Chechen parents — and that they were raised, before coming to the United States, in Dagestan, which borders Chechnya and was attacked in the late ’90s by Chechen rebels bent on creating a single Islamist state. What I thought of almost immediately was an article that Elizabeth Rubin wrote for this magazine back in the summer of 2001, which I was lucky enough to edit. “Only You Can Save Your Sons” .. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/magazine/only-you-can-save-your-sons.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm .. is an extraordinary feat of reporting and writing, as powerful and haunting as any magazine article I’ve ever read. It turned out that other editors here at the magazine were thinking about Elizabeth’s story, too, and as the discussion on Twitter and elsewhere throughout the day turned to questions of whether the Tsarnaev brothers were influenced by the Chechen war — and as the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, announced that the root of the Tsarnaev’s “evil” lay in America and not in Chechnya — it seemed like a good idea to reach out to Elizabeth and get her thoughts, which follow below, on the Chechnya she experienced then and its connection, or lack of connection, to the men thought to have bombed the Boston Marathon.
Gabrielle Plucknette/The New York Times; Original photograph by Stanley Greene for The New York Times The Times Magazine, July 8, 2001.
Elizabeth Rubin writes:
My first thought after I read that the Boston bombers were Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, from Chechnya was: Poor Chechnya. Do the Chechens really need another violent stain on their image? And what do all these people who they killed and maimed at the Boston Marathon have to do with their plight and rage? We don’t know yet how the brothers, who have moved around quite a bit in their short lives, became infected with the idea that violence against unrelated innocents could possibly fix whatever personal and political wrongs they faced. Their uncle is telling reporters that the boys are losers, a shame on Chechnya. He does not want to dignify them with a cause, and maybe he is right.
I went to Chechnya in the winter and spring of 2001, during the second Chechen war, when Tamerlan would have been around 14 and Dzhokhar around 7. I lived with Chechen families, with mothers whose sons were missing, rounded up by Russian soldiers and dropped into fetid pits in the ground, left for months to howl in the dark.
Needless to say, it was a chaotic time. Chechen society was so crushed physically, emotionally, psychologically, that I remember a mother telling me: “Trust my sister? I don’t even trust my own shadow.” Few had money. And you could earn fast cash, enough money for a meal or some fuel to drive your car, by selling information to the Russians. There was almost no electricity or heat. The buildings were carcasses. And the Russians, too, were paranoid. One evening I heard that just that morning a girl living downstairs had poked her head out the window maybe to gaze on the view below or get some fresh air, and a Russian sniper, thinking she was a sniper scoping him out, shot her in the head. No one I met was sane.
Every day I met beautiful young Chechen boys who told me they were ready to blow themselves and the Russians up until every last Russian soldier left their soil. They had lost a brother, a sister, a parent, and they would never stop avenging those deaths. The Chechen patience in blood feuds is legendary and can last a century or more. I remember a 46-year-old Chechen commander who was a professor of philology telling me: “This generation of monsters will create another Afghanistan. They’ll know only Islam, weapons, knives. They won’t value their own or anyone else’s lives.” That was 2001.
We don’t know if that was the journey of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, and who knows if we’ll ever fully know. But there is another Chechnya I remember, and want to leave you with it, lest we tarnish the whole nation. There was Hava, a 17-year-old girl, with long red hair and bright blue eyes. She had learned English by memorizing five Dickens novels. She could recite them and knew what every word meant. She wanted to be a teacher of English literature. “I know if you have a goal you will reach it,” she told me. “And mine is to be the best master of English in Chechnya!” There was the librarian in Grozny still attempting, amid unimaginable terror and chaos, to preserve shelves and shelves of Russian books. There is the image of my friend frying up chirimshala, wild garlic root greens that grow only in Chechnya under the snow. She was obsessed with their health properties and said they possessed the only nutrients that could stave off the poison from the bombs, the fires and the methane gas that was the Grozny air. And there was the rigor of Chechen tradition that has held families together through deportation and wars. These were people with a sense of shared cultural history who were doing everything the could to hang onto it even as it was breaking down.
Gabrielle Plucknette/The New York Times; Original photograph by Stanley Greene for The New York Times ”
The UNPO was a body that gave a voice to small nations trapped inside the boundaries of bigger states - Chechnya, Tibet and East Timor to name a few - and the elder Saro-Wiwa's Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, or MOSOP, had just joined. The Ogoni, a tribe of about 500,000 people inside Nigeria, were trying to win greater control of their tribal lands and drive Shell out. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=38694636
Inside the Taliban's besieged Swat fortress as battle rages [.. one bit ..]
They left behind a ghost city controlled by the Taliban, under siege from army mortar fire and helicopter-gunship assaults, and tensed in the expectation of an army ground offensive that could lead to urban warfare reminiscent of Russian bids to clear Grozny, Chechnya, in 1999 and 2000. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=37687060
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