Moscow bombings: Putin and Medvedev have only themselves to blame

Russian authorities have blamed North Caucasus separatists for yesterday’s Moscow underground attacks without releasing a shred of evidence in support or any claims of responsibility. The death toll in the Lubyanka and Park Kultury metro station bombings rose to 39 today after a young woman died in hospital. 71 others remain in hospital, five critically injured. Russian Intelligence services say the bombs were planted by two women wearing belts packed with the explosive hexogen and metal shrapnel. It was FSB boss Alexander Bortnikov who said those responsible had links to the North Caucasus but he offered no supporting evidence of his charge.

Meanwhile Russia’s tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee leaders Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin tried to outdo each other in fatuous condemnation without either making any effort to apply wisdom to the situation. Medvedev said “they were simply beasts” without really saying who these beasts were. But whoever “they” were, Medvedev went on to make the ludicrous claim “I don’t have the slightest doubt: we will find and wipe out all of them.” Putin was no better, apparently blaming the attack on dogs or horses when he said those responsible for the attacks would be “destroyed”.

The fact is the Russian government is sowing what it reaped with these and other so-called terrorist bombings in recent years. After the Russian annihilation of Chechen separatists in the 1990s, the opposition has turned to a more extremist Muslim leadership with Saudi Wahhabist leanings despite the fact that most people in the area have peaceable Sufi leanings. The extremists want to declare a Caucasus Emirate and have killed 5,000 people since 2002 in their jihad against Moscow.

The Guardian said the two latest targets appeared to have been carefully chosen to represent a symbolic attack on Russia’s government. The first bomb went off opposite the headquarters of Russia’s FSB anti-terrorism intelligence agency at Lubyanka in the city centre. They say the second bomb may have been intended for Oktyabrskaya station, next to Russia’s interior ministry in the city’s south west.

However it is not beyond the realm of possibilities these may have been false flag operations. The FSB has form in this department. In the Russian apartment bombings of 1999 which led directly to the Second Chechen War, the failed attack on the building in the city of Ryazan was carried out by FSB operatives who were arrested by police. A hugely embarrassed then FSB director Nikolai Patrushev laughed off the incident as a “training exercise”. Those in Grozny did not see the funny side of it as 50,000 civilians were killed in the massive military assault.

Chechnya has had peace of a sort since then but it is a Russian imposed peace and a low-level insurgency continues. And as the Guardian’s Tom Parfitt said last year, Chechnya’s peace is based on murder. Its Kremlin backed government is run by a 33-year-old thug named Ramzan Kadyrov who was appointed by Vladimir Putin. Kadyrov brooks no dissent in his fiefdom, and his soldiers have repeatedly been accused of torture, kidnappings and extra-judicial killings. He has killed off his political and media opponents while Moscow has turned a blind eye. As Parfitt notes Russia has signed “a Faustian pact with [Kadyrov] to quell insurrection and stop terrorist attacks reaching the Russian heartland, in exchange for wide autonomy on his home turf.”

But that is proving an elusive goal. Chechens are still succeeding in bringing the war to Russia’s own turf. The two suspected suicide bombers are part of what the media loves to dub “black widows”. These were women who lost husbands or brothers to the Russian war and who made a spectacular leap into public consciousness during the Moscow theatre siege “dressed in black chadors, their waists and chests adorned with bombs”.

But while the bombs might be hidden behind chadors, the war of ideas is hidden by the bombastic rhetoric of Putin and Medvedev. Their naked greed and imperialism is taking Russian into a dangerous and almost fascistic phase. They have plundered the country’s wealth, killed with impugnity and destroyed the hopes of democracy inherited from the work of Mikhail Gorbachev. They are the real murderers, the “beasts” which should be “destroyed”.

Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova murdered in Chechnya

Another human rights campaigner has been silenced in the time-honoured Russian fashion as Natalia Estemirova was abducted and then murdered in Chechnya. Four men seized the 50 year old Estemirova as she left for work in the capital Grozny yesterday morning. She shouted out "I'm being kidnapped” before the men dragged her into a waiting vehicle. Her body was found later that day dumped on a main road near the village of Gazi-Yurt in the neighbouring federal republic of Ingushetia. She had been shot twice in the head and chest.

Estemirova was an acknowledged expert on abuses in Chechnya where the long separatist war has morphed into a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. She documented hundreds of cases of torture carried out by Chechen security forces. In recent years, she focused on kidnappings that she believed had been carried out under the authority of the Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov. The 32 year old Kadyrov inherited Chechnya on the death of his father and runs the state as a personal fiefdom with the complete backing of the Kremlin.

Estemirova has had several run-ins with Kadyrov. In March 2008, after Estemirova criticised a law requiring Chechen women to wear head scarves, Kadyrov summoned her to his office and threatened her. Estemirova was so frightened she went abroad for several months. But she eventually felt compelled to return to fulfill her fate. Estemirova’s human rights group employers Memorial were quick to blame Kadyrov for her murder. Chairman Oleg Orlov put a statement on the Memorial's website where he said Ramzan had already threatened and insulted her and considered her a personal enemy. "I know, I am sure of it, who is guilty for the murder of Natalia,” Orlov said. “His name is Ramzan Kadyrov."

Kadyrov was also implicated in the murder of Estemirova’s close friend, the journalist and writer Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya was an implacable critic of Russia’s policy in Chechnya and was shot dead outside her Moscow apartment in 2006. When asked whether he was responsible for that death, Kadyrov’s response was “I don’t kill women”.

No one has ever been charged for Politkovskaya’s murder and anyone who has tried to subsequently seek justice in the matter has been gunned down. Her lawyer Stanislav Markelov was shot dead in Moscow in January this year. A young investigative journalist named Anastasia Barburova was also killed when she tried to apprehend Markelov’s murderer. In a chilling postscript to the double murder, a party of Russian nationalists brought champagne to the murder scene the following day to celebrate the “elimination” of their enemies.

Russia continues to be one of the most dangerous places in the world for investigative campaigners, particularly journalists. In 2008 two died in Russia’s troubled southern republics (Dagestan and Ingushetia). The Kremlin has been of little help in solving any of the murders. Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika blamed Politkovskaya’s death on people “trying to destabilise Russia from abroad”. The administration’s most implacable enemy, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (co-founded by Mikhail Gorbachev) has been worst affected with four journalists murdered in eight years. The Reporters sans Frontieres Russia report for 2008 found that, independent newspapers shut down and journalists were imprisoned for attending opposition rallies. In a frightening reminder of Soviet practices, at least two reporters were forcibly sent to psychiatric hospitals for criticising local authorities.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has piously claimed to be “outraged” by the latest murder in Chechnya and has ordered an investigation. But given that Russian leaders have made similar unfulfilled promises in the past, there is little reason to believe this one will lead to anything substantial. Especially as it is extremely likely that the killers are either acting under the orders of the Russian Government or at the very least, have the tacit approval of Putin to remove unwanted critics of the administration. Russia remains a place where political murders are committed with impunity.

Newsy.com's report on the killing:

Little Saddam takes control of Chechnya

Chechnya is gearing up for the controversial inauguration of new Moscow-installed president Ramzan Kadyrov later this week. The 30 year old Kadyrov has planned an ostentatious event with a ceremony involving 1,500 guests, a French pop diva and champagne and caviar at a cost of $US 800,000. Due to fears of an assassination attempt, rehearsals for the event are being held in several locations to keep the venue secret.

Kadyrov spends most of his days in his home village of Tsentoroy because of fear of his enemies in the capital Grozny. Known as “Little Saddam” Kadyrov is a Moscow puppet, installed as president by Vladimir Putin. He was formally elected on 2 March by a vote of the Chechen parliament after the post had been vacant since the resignation of Alu Alkhanov the previous month. But behind the scenes the Kremlin was pulling the strings.

It was Putin who signed the decree removing Alkhanov from the presidency after a power struggle with Kadyrov who was the country’s prime minister. Putin has already awarded Kadyrov the Hero of Russia medal, the country’s highest accolade. Kadyrov would probably have been appointed president earlier but for an inconvenient matter of the constitution which forbade the appointment of a president under 30 years of age. Kadyrov turned 30 in October.

Kadyrov is credited with a reconstruction boom during his term as prime minister. Grozny was destroyed in years of devastating wars but is now being transformed from a mess of rubble and shattered buildings. Kadyrov has built an airport and new roads. Shops are re-appearing in the city in an attempt to seek some semblance of normality. The reconstruction program has helped Russia defeat the rebels but at a cost of entrenching Kadyrov’s sinister grip on power.

Kadyrov runs his own private army known as the Kadyrovsky. The Kadyrovsky consists of thousands of armed former rebels who are personally devoted to Kadyrov. The militia has been linked with a series of kidnappings, torture and murder and are now the most feared group in Chechnya. The American aid group Refugees International has described Chechnyan human rights abuses and war crimes not as aberrations but tactics. In essence the Kadyrovsky terrorises anyone who resists his rule.

Kadyrov is the prime suspect of the October murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya was a veteran reporter of Chechnyan affairs and met Kadyrov in his home village in 2004. Politkovskaya make Kadyrov look like a dangerous fool in their interview. When she asked him what kind of law he was studying in, he replied "I can't remember. Someone wrote the topic down for me on a piece of paper, but I've forgotten. There's a lot going on at the moment."

In the last interview she held before she was killed, Politkovskaya raised doubts that Kadyrov would become president. Kadyrov had turned 30 two days earlier and was now eligible for the presidency. She said construction projects were carried out under his “personal control,” and Chechnyan bureaucracy is corrupt from top to bottom. Many suspect Politkovskaya’s murder as an act of revenge by Kadyrov, “whose activities she wrote and spoke much about.”

Ramzan is the son of former Chechnyan leader Akhmad Kadyrov who was assassinated in 2004. Kadyrov the elder was Chechnya’s first pro-Russian leader appointed in 2000. He was a Mufti (religious legal expert) with a separatist past having declared jihad against Russia in 1995. But he fell out with warlord Shamil Basayev who branded him “enemy number 1”. Russia appointed him leader when it regained control at the turn of the century in the Second Chechen War. He won a dubious election in 2003 but was killed a year later a bomb attack on a stadium in Chechnya during a parade to celebrate Russia's WWII victory over Germany. Putin eulogised: "Kadyrov passed away on the day of our national holiday and he passed away undefeated."

The West has been reluctant to push Moscow and its client state in Grozny for fear of upsetting Putin and losing his support in the so-called War on Terror. The NGO Human Rights Watch criticised a White House meeting between President Bush and Russian General Vladimir Shamanov this week. HRW claims Shamanov was responsible for serious rights abuses during the Chechnyan war. A Russian Embassy spokesman refused to discuss Shamanov's record in Chechnya saying “it is a very good journalist trick if someone is doing something worthwhile and you take out - excuse me - dirty clothes."

With the appointment of Kadyrov, Moscow is conducting a celebratory washing of its dirty clothes in front of a bemused and cowed Chechnyan public.

The Beast of Beslan is dead

Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev was killed overnight. Russian Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev told President Vladimir Putin in a televised meeting that Basayev and many other rebels had been killed in an operation in the Ingushetian republic which borders Chechnya. An Ingush regional interior ministry official said the rebel leader was accompanying a truck filled with 100 kg of dynamite that blew up in the Ingush village of Ekazhevo. The Chechen rebel leadership have yet to confirm his death.

The 41 year old Basayev is the supposed mastermind behind the 2004 Beslan school siege which claimed 311 lives. Although Vladimir Putin and the Russian administration are equally culpable for the massacre, it was Basayev who acquired the nickname ‘the Beast of Beslan’. Alu Alkhanov, president of the Kremlin-backed government in Chechnya, rather hopefully said the killing is likely to undermine the Chechen rebel movement irreparably. Putin called Basayev's killing "deserved retribution" for terror attacks such as Beslan and others.

Chechnya is an Islamic landlocked country in the northern Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas. It is surrounded by other Russian republics and the independent state of Georgia. It was conquered by the Russian Empire in the 1870s and has a long history of rebellion against Russian and Soviet era governments. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chechnya sought independence once more. It was opposed by Boris Yeltsin on three grounds. Firstly, Chechnya had not been an independent entity within the Soviet Union (unlike the Baltic, Central Asian, and other Caucasian States) but a part of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. Secondly, Chechen independence might start a domino effect with other ethnic groups wishing to secede from the Russian Federation. Thirdly, Chechnya was rich in oil. Independence would hurt the Russia’s economy and control of oil resources.

Chechnya refused to sign the 1992 treaty outlining the new Russian federation. It declared independence but was not recognised by any other country. Yeltsin refused to negotiate and the situation descended into full scale war in 1994. Russia expected to quickly win this war but they suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Chechen rebels. Use of massive air strikes on the capital Grozny alienated any support it had in the country. War crimes were common on both sides with kidnappings, torture and summary executions widespread. In 1996 Yeltsin sought a ceasefire. A Russian election was looming, the war threatened to spread to neighbouring Dagestan and morale was poor among Army conscripts. He signed a treaty with Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov in 1997. It lasted barely two years.

The second Chechen war started in 1999 and continues to this day. Russia became increasingly intolerant of the Grozny government’s ability to control terrorism in the country. Despite the treaty, Chechen rebels had carried out a spate of attacks in Russia and elsewhere. A series of apartment bombings in 1999, which killed 300 people in Moscow and elsewhere, were the last straw for the Russian administration. The Russians blamed Chechen militants and responded by bombed targets within Chechnya. A ground invasion soon followed. Learning from their mistakes from the first war, the Russians slowly advanced on the capital and besieged Grozny after an intense shelling campaign. They took the city after a bloody battle in February 2000. Many Chechen soldiers escaped to continue a guerrilla campaign from the mountains.

Shamil Basayev came from a proud tradition and notable family of Chechen fighters. He learned the war trade in the Soviet military in the early 1980s. He moved to Moscow and spent some time at Moscow’s Engineering Institute of land management before being expelled for poor grades. In 1991 he allegedly joined Yeltsin on the barricades around the Russian White House during the short-lived Russian coup. When Chechnya declared independence later that year, Basayev quickly became involved. He was part of a team that hijacked an Aeroflot plane, en route to Turkey in November. They and threatened to blow up the airplane unless the state of emergency in Chechnya was lifted. The hijacking was resolved peacefully in Turkey and the hijackers got safe passage back to Chechnya.

Basayev took an active role in the First Chechen War, successfully commanding a 2,000 strong battalion which inflicted major Russian losses in the battle for Grozny. He also conducted a terrorist attack on the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk seizing a hospital with hundreds of hostages before escaping back to Chechnya after a gun battle. His actions helped him become chief of the Armed Forces and when the war ended he was appointed Prime Minister of Chechnya by President Aslan Maskhadov for a six month term, after which he resigned.

During the second war he masterminded the rebel withdrawal from the capital and lost a foot after stepping on a landmine. He escaped to the mountains where he remained a figurehead of resistance. In 2002, he claimed responsibility for the Moscow theatre siege. But it was his role as mastermind for the Beslan school siege that cemented his reputation for savagery. Beslan is a small town in the neighbouring Russian republic of North Ossetia. On 1 September 2004, a group of about thirty insurgents attacked School Number One in Beslan. 1 September is the first day of term and is a Russian tradition known as “Day of Knowledge”. Parents and relatives accompany the children and attend ceremonies hosted by the school. The attackers seized the school building taking more than 1,300 hostages. Five police officers and one terrorist were killed in the initial attack.

The area was cordoned off by Russian security forces. The attackers moved the hostages to the school gymnasium and mined the buildings with improvised explosive devices surrounded with tripwires. They demanded total withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya. Leonid Roshal, a paediatrician whom the hostage-takers had reportedly asked for by name and who had helped negotiate the release of children in the theatre siege, led the hostage negotiations for the first two days. The world’s media moved in to cover the siege. All hell broke loose on the third day. There are conflicting stories as to how the violence erupted. There was an explosion which killed medical workers removing bodies from the grounds but it is not known whether it was caused accidentally or deliberately by Russian or Chechens. The explosions triggered an assault on the building and a bomb destroyed the gymnasium. It took over two hours for the army to overcome the kidnappers. 344 civilians were killed, 186 of them children and hundreds more wounded.

Basayev claimed responsibility for the attack in 2005. The Russian government put a bounty of 300m roubles ($10m) for information leading to his capture. The Russian appointed leader of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that upwards of 3,000 police officers were hunting for Basayev in the southern mountains. This was personal as Basayev organised the assassination of Kadyrov’s father Akhmad in 2004.

Yesterday Shamil Basayev was confirmed as killed in the village of Ekazhevo, in Ingushetia, He was riding in one of the cars escorting a truck filled with explosives in preparation for an attack when the truck exploded decapitating Basayev. Authorities sent his remains for DNA analysis and confirmed his identity. While the Russian-backed leadership celebrates, it is unlikely that Basayev’s death will end Chechen resistance to their rule.