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On a Personal Note
Russia Profile Staff
07/20/2012
Russia Profile brings you some of the best analysis on top stories in Russia today. But there’s always more behind them. Each Friday, our writers provide their own take on the news, offering unique commentary to put events into a different perspective. This week, Dan Peleschuk ponders the newly-emerging Islamist threat in Tatarstan and Tai Adelaja wonders if we do need a dress code in our Constitution.
The Threat in the Heartland
By Dan Peleschuk
For a while it seemed that the Kremlin had altogether forgotten about the Islamist threat that persists, with a deadly explosion or two each week, in its soft underbelly. Indeed, it’s easy to take for granted the violent insurgency that plagues the North Caucasus – it’s just always been there. But Thursday’s attacks on two high-profile religious officials in the Muslim republic of Tatarstan, deep in Russia’s Volga Region, shows that it may be time for the Kremlin to start paying closer attention.
For many casual observers, it was a total surprise: two separate, yet apparently coordinated attacks engineered to sever the highest echelon of official spirituality in Kazan, the republic’s capital, which has rarely – if ever – seen such acts of violence, are certainly out of the ordinary. As a result, Valiulla Yakupov, the republic’s deputy mufti, was gunned down outside his home, while his boss, Mufti Ildus Faizov, narrowly escaped death in a car bombing.
But upon closer inspection, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Analysts have pointed to the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism – Salafism, Wahhabism, call it what you like – within a heavily Muslim republic once touted as an example for interethnic stability in Russia. They say a battle has been quietly raging between the official ranks of Muslim clerics, which have sought to work with the local authorities to quell any sign of radical Islam, and an increasingly emboldened group of Islamists bent on spreading a purer form of Islam – the kind, for instance, which can be found in the ever-troubled North Caucasus.
Islamic terror may be reaching across Russia beyond the North Caucasus.
Granted, the details are still incredibly scant. Investigators have announced that they’ve caught four suspects, one of whom runs a travel agency which sends local Muslims on the hajj. Even the well-informed analysts and high-ranking muftis I’ve spoken to have held back from decidedly pointing the finger at one particular faction or another. Because that’s just the thing: there is no “one faction.” Radical Islamic networks, though pried open slightly with the widespread use of the Internet, are a notoriously difficult thing to pin down. At this point, it’s still tough to say whether the Kazan attacks were exported from the Caucasus or devised locally – or a combination of both.
But one thing seems clear: there’s a greater threat now in a region in which the Kremlin couldn’t have earlier suspected such high-profile attacks to occur. And because the threat is still seemingly amorphous, it becomes all the more dangerous.
Our Morality Police
By Tai Adelaja
These are testy times for Mother Russia. Just when you thought the emboldened opposition movement – that had the temerity to challenge the untouchables – was Russia’s only heartache, our giggling girls went riotous, desecrating the country's Holiest Temple. But now that they have been driven from their symbolic self-assertion to self-emasculation through a hunger strike, it seems just right to take on their disciples.
This explains why concerned citizens like Tatyana Moskalkova, a member of the Just Russia Party, have jumped to action. Moskalkova was no ordinary woman. She was a former deputy department head with the Interior Ministry and the only woman with the rank of general-major in that ministry. But her plan, which is tactical, rather than strategic, was to insert in the Criminal Code a provision that will “protect the honor, dignity and respect of others in the community and severely punish actions that injure the social and moral fabric of society." Are you thinking of Pussy Riot? Yeah, you’re right.
"We urgently need a dress-code written into our Constitution."
"The most destructive threat to a state comes not from its economy, but from a counter-cultural erosion of moral foundations of society," Moskalkova philosophized in an interview published by Izvestia on Friday. Moskalkova said her efforts are not directed specifically against Pussy Riot. “It is necessary to preserve certain standards of behavior or moral principles which society respected for ages,” she said. Then added: “If someone wants to go naked in the street, to show off his body, there are special places and establishments for this."
Moskalkova was apparently referring to one of the despicable acts of the art performance group Voina, in which the members had public intercourse in the Museum of Nature and then posted the video online. But what really irked Moskalkova, according to RBC Daily, was a video showing one of the Pussy Riot girls stealing a chicken from a supermarket, sticking it between her legs and carrying it out of the shop without paying for it.
But as sickening as those acts may be, Moskalkova's alacrity to protect us from them may yet suffer a setback in the State Duma. Vladimir Ponevezhsky, a United Russia deputy and a former prosecutor, said a provision to punish attacks on morality may be too broad and lend itself to different interpretations. "How does one qualify an attack on morality?" Ponevezhsky asked. It's a question I didn't expect from a member of a party that has voted overwhelmingly to criminalize libel and insult and made opposition protesting all but impossible.
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Reader Comments
Glaucio Sombra
The United States does not have economic, social or political policies for the FUTURE of America in the MIDEAST. The USA principal policy in the Middle-East is military without an army, just giving guns to mercenaries, which are the opposition rebels. As there are no guarantees for the future, the United States may then leave its unsuccessful Mideast campaign with no benefits to America until a decade from now when the reputation of the US is and will be tarnished when comes into question USA military. The American MORALE is very low in the Mideast.
Glaucio Sombra
The way that the United States and the Russian Federation see the global economy differs somehow. The CURRENCY for the USA is an INTERFACE, a big transition, as Dollar paper bills that can simulate, that emulate business, and commmerce transactions cannot mean business "as a whole", forming, in this way, an abyss between paper money bills and "TRUE" business. The Russian concept involves more business, commerce, in itself and does not mind much about the Dollar bills or reserves coming after, just the business maneuver, step-by-step and not going through speculation. America counts with the alibi that it has the only international reserve of the globe and that the USA Dollar can substitute any business venture while Russia thinks that the BUSINESS ACTION in itself can be much more important than the mere PRINTING OF MONEY that is done by the United States currency, the Dollar. For the USA the Dollar has a lot to do with the values of the economy attributed to it, but Russia deals with BUSINESS ITSELF, like commodities coming from the field in pipelines that can be even considered to be an alternative currency.
Glaucio Sombra
The conflict in Syria is already lasting too much time, something that America never accepted nor expected to happen. In the beginning of the War the USA even denied that there were rebels in Syria. Today, this day all the world knows that the United States is supporting the rebel movement in Syria. The West only repeats and repeats sluggish and empty maneuvers, both diplomatically and in terms of warfare. The natural swing of things is that Assad will win; NATO is too weak in the region to intervene; the USA is a military camp using a Laconian vocabulary restricted to the word - war. 70 percent of the US Army may go all to the Asia-Pacific and the whole Middle East will soon lose its priority geopolitically for the USA. Even the American Space Program depends on rides of US Astronauts in Russian spaceships until 2017.
Glaucio Sombra
The World public opinion "knows", is sure and certain about all the faults of the United States in the Middle East. The US censorship is not working. Global people may be very aware that America is in deep crisis in many respects to the hearts and minds of the world. People just know that the United States and Britain, with some allies, invaded Iraq, skipping the United Nations, in a policy that was already abandoned by the USA; the freeing of Afghanistan may be complete in 2014. The USA because of the inadequacy of its military machinery in the region of the Mideast, has made the American government to finance terrorists and mercenaries to fight against the Syrian administrative bodies. The global community is very much aware of OCCUPY WALL STREET and the debacle of the United States' currency, the US Dollar, and the American economy recession that "the world knows", is in debt crisis with no solution in the near future. Most American policies, military and monetary, political have not changed at all in the past 5 months. There are no alternatives for the US other than WAR. America does not want any truce in Syria, no diplomcacy as remnants of its awkward and weird Imperialism and Cold War. Strange, bizarre, in a losing game.
Glaucio Sombra
The United States only wages and invents Wars in the Middle East, while Russia stops and abolishes, aborts Wars there. Bad USA REPUTATION.
Glaucio Sombra
In the last war that Russia had to do with fire power, it involved the Republic of Georgia, South Assetia, Abkhazia. USA lost by absence.
Glaucio Sombra
Julian Assange is the political DISSIDENT of the West; a human rights violation of England and the United States.
Glaucio Sombra
The BALANCE OF POWER in Latin America is shifting away from America and England when one analizes the Julian Assange affair and its repercutions world-wide. The American "censorship" and disinformation are not working. The world is not ingenuous.
Glaucio Sombra
The positive and negative points in the indexes of the American and English STOCK MARKETS do not represent real commerce ventures, not true business, something that does not happen in German stock market or Russian stock market. The USA and UK are more worried about PRINTING MONEY; The British and American Stocks behavior does not represent the truth. The latter two countries are in economic dire straits as many USA and UK citizens themselves may proclaim in OCCUPY WALL STREET movement. America does not even have a true Space Program until 2017.
Glaucio Sombra
When one talks about global public opinion, diplomacy, human rights, political dissidents in the USA and in England, it drives us to think that America and United Kingdom are acting as UNDERGROUND institutions, this, when they can be overtly called disenfranchised institutions that rule against citizenship of the worst kind inside their own USA and UK territories.
© Russia Profile, 2011