Dagestan: Rhyme or Reason in Russia's Counter-Insurgency?

Witness  |  Robert A. Horton, Dec-Feb 2010

[Witness stories are considered biased viewpoints. If you would like to counter or clarify the argument, please write to the editors. Only well-written and well-argued stories or comments will be considered for publication. Also, the thoughts expressed in this story are of the author and not those of the US government, Department of Defense, or the National Defense Intelligence College]

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The recent suicide car bombing which killed seven in Makhachkala, as well as the assassination of a local police chief, Abdul Magomedov, in Dagestan, demonstrates the continued and enduring problem Russia has faced with insurgency.

Until all the major countries undertaking counter-insurgency operations adopt unified strategies respecting core agreements, including aspects sensitive to the realities faced by local noncombatants caught in the crossfire, countries battling extremism will continue to fight a fractured conflict against what is becoming a global war.  

[Continued below]

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Downtown Makhachkala, Dagestan, Russia, Timo Vogt. 

My research while at the National Defense Intelligence College has revealed that in Russia the innocent people in Dagestan often pay the price of "security operations." Today, it seems as if the average resident just wants peace, and doesn't care who provides that peace.

Dagestan now falls only behind the republic of Ingushetia in increased levels of violence. It is the developing front in an expanding North Caucasus insurgency. The republic has outbursts of daily low-level violence, pitting security forces against Islamic armed militant groups and committing abuses against civilians suspected of sympathizing with or abetting the militant groups. 

Asymmetric Human Geography, Asymmetric War

Ever since one man has attempted to politically dominate others, there have been insurrections spawning from grievances with ruling regimes. These maladies provide the prime ingredient of any insurrection, grievances translated into a cause.  If the cause is found compelling, people will lay down their lives to attain their goal. Likewise, the ruling state will look for methods to put down these insurrections, and counter any attempt to subvert its authority. 

Asymmetric warfare is a common method for the weak to win wars.  When confronted by the superior resources, technology, and firepower embodied by most modern states, the insurgents adapt their modes of warfare to provide military blows where they are able. Therefore, raids, ambushes, sabotage, and terrorism become the weapons and tactics for insurgents. 

Dagestan has many similarities to Chechnya in terms of the factors fueling insurgency and radicalization. However, while the policy of Chechenization has provided short term stability for Chechnya, Dagestan represents the extension and growing front in the Caucasian insurgency.

The largest republic in the Russia’s Southern Federal District, also known as the North Caucasus, Dagestan has a population of 2,500,000 people, sixty percent in rural areas. The republic is home to sixty ethnic groups and indigenous peoples, speaking over thirty different languages, making it one of the most ethnically-diverse populations in Russia.[i] 

The general instability in the North Caucasus region, Russia’s financial and economic crisis, and Dagestan’s inability to adapt its post-Soviet economy to a post-modern industrial economy has amplified the severity of the economic condition in Dagestan.

The majority of Dagestan’s population and ethnic groups belong to the Ibero-Caucasian family of languages.  The Avars, Dargins, Lezgin, Laks, Tabasrans and Chechens constitute this wing of “Dagestani” languages. A minority of the population speaks either a Turkic tongue, or languages belonging to Indo-European languages. The vast array of languages spoken not only helps reinforce Dagestan’s plurality, but also identifies fractures in Dagestani society, that can be exploited by extremist.

Dagestan has been marked by inter-ethnic competition for power.  Attempts to out maneuver varying ethnic groups in politics, land, and economic factors, was a central theme in post-Soviet Dagestan until the Putin era.

An attempt to accommodate the many ethnicities in the region required the addition of a clause to the Russian Federation law “On the Guarantees of the Rights of the Indigenous Small Peoples of the Russian Federation” providing special dispensation to allow the Dagestan People’s Assembly to include its many small ethnic groups.

Without the protection provided by this clause, many of Dagestan’s ethnic groups would find themselves shutout from any representation within the government. Dagestan’s broad variance in ethnic composition and distribution, combined with inter-ethnic power competitions only highlights potential fault lines within Dagestani society.

The ethnic fault lines in Dagestan are cross-divided by the village or jamaat socio-political structure.  In Dagestan, the groups of villages are tied together based upon contiguous territory. The jamaat system in Dagestan allows some degree of ethnic comity, by coalescing people of different ethnic groups to cooperate and support one another for the common good the village grouping.

However, identification with ethnicity outweighs loyalty to a particular jamaat. This identity within a local jamaat adds another dimension of fractionalization in Dagestani society; it is unique to Dagestan as it is not found in any other North Caucasus republics. This is significant when compared to Chechnya, where the teip system is based more on blood kinship than on locality.

Dagestan Absorbs the Chechen-led Insurgency

Dagestan is the historic and current center for Islam in the North Caucasus and acted as the doorway for Islam to enter and spread throughout the region.  In the late 7th century, Islam began to spread in Southern Dagestan, and by the end of the 16th century, most Dagestanis professed the Sunni Islam according to the Shafi’i school of thought. Northern and Southern Dagestan proved the only exception, with the minorities professing beliefs of Sunni according to the Hanafi school of thought and also a number of Shi’ites.

In the Middle Ages, Dagestani Islam had adopted a Sufi philosophy. Therefore, Dagestan’s local Islam became deeply Sufi in style; this is apparent in present-day Dagestan, in the form of four orders: Naqshbandiyah, Shaziliyah, Jazuliyah and Qadiriyah.

In the 1990s Dagestan’s Islam experienced a “religious renaissance”.  Radical Islam began to come into Dagestan in the 1980s during perestroika. However, for most of the time until the mid-1990s only 3% to 4% of Dagestani Muslims were newly-converted “Wahhabi,” a name used for those who practice an ultra-conservative or “Salafi” Islam similar to the Wahhabi practice in Saudi Arabia.

By the late 1990s, Shamil Basayev, a Chechen rebel leader who achieved some success and broad loyalty fighting Russia in the First Chechen War, was influenced by his Jordanian advisor, a man known as Khattab, and began to foster the primary shift in the insurgency from Chechen nationalism to Wahhabi-based Islamic radicalism. And the shift began not in Chechnya, but in Dagestan. 

In August 1999, Basayev and Khattab attempted to liberate Dagestan from Russia and create a Chechen-Dagestan Islamic republic with a 1,400-strong army of Islamist fighters. But at that time Basayev did not find much support from the majority of Dagestan’s population.  Only the new Wahhabis in Dagestan welcomed Basayev’s army as liberators. 

Basayev’s actions, shifting the rebellion into a regional Islamic radical insurgency threatening multiple republics, precipitated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention into Chechnya, the Second Chechen War, and in turn supplanted elements which helped to grow radicalization in Dagestan.

In the end, the prolongation of the current economic and social disorder, and the association of the traditional Sufi Islam with the ineffective government, may have increased the attractiveness of the Salafi option in Dagestan. 

While the security situation has stabilized in Chechnya, with a sharp decline in violence over the last 4 years, the overall number of attacks and killings have increased in Dagestan. In 2008, militants conducted 96 separate attacks, killing over 34 Interior Ministry officials[ii].  In the entire North Caucasus, there were a total of 81 security officers killed in 2008; thus, Dagestan represented 42% of the killing of security officers in the North Caucasus in 2008.[iii][iv] 

Counter-Insurgency and Human Rights Violations

The year 2008 saw the security services of Dagestan chalking more effectiveness in combating armed networks. Dagestani security services have killed dozens of fighters during “special operations”, including some high profile, notorious leaders.  However, in the prosecution of the operations, security servicemen committed grave violations of human rights. Over time, the patterns of abuse have changed.

In 2007, human rights organizations reported an unprecedented wave of disappearances in Dagestan. However, in 2008 there have been no reported cases of people disappearing without a trace. Instead, fabricated criminal cases have replaced disappearances.

In 2004-2006 Chechnya and Ingushetia were leading the trend of fabricated trials. By the summer of 2007, the human rights situation improved in neighboring Chechnya. ORB-2, a notorious torture compound was closed. As a result, the number of fabricated cases decreased. In Ingushetia, trials by jury often acquitted victims of torture in fabricated cases, and so the security services changed tactics since mid-2007: instead of arresting their suspects, they started killing them during detainment, claiming afterwards that the suspect resisted arrest. Thus, Dagestan emerged and took the lead in criminal case fabrication.

In 2008, it became more difficult to ensure due process in cases investigations.  The mechanism for fabrication follows a standard modus operandi.  Suspects are abducted, and subsequently “disappear” for a period. At a later date, the suspects are discovered in pre-trial detainment facilities. 

During their time in detainment, the suspects have already confessed to participation in armed activities or terrorist acts.  Suspects often show signs and have reported torture and savage beatings as methods to induce the aforementioned confessions.

The Russian human rights organization, Memorial, has documented numerous cases of the arrest and torture of young men who incur suspicion simply by virtue of being devout Muslims.  Furthermore, counterterrorism operations conducted by republic and federal troops with an excess of zeal, have killed people who are posthumously shown to have had no connection with the Islamic resistance.[v] A majority of these operations use indiscriminate means of artillery or cordon and sweep operations to cleanse villages.

In an opinion poll conducted by the Dagestan's Ministry of Education, Science, and Youth Policy, 16.8% of the youth listed police brutality among factors that drive young men to join resistance, 16.4% listed violations of civil rights and freedoms, and 15% religious convictions.[vi] 

While the percentage of youth identifying police brutality in does not appear staggering, when taken in context, it becomes significant compared to the percentage identifying religious conviction as the driving factor for radicalization.  Moreover, brutality and rights infringement combined equated to one-third of the populations drive to radicalization.  In this manner, human rights abuses have had a serious impact upon the number of young people supporting the resistance.

In the republics of Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan many of the militants act as the avengers seeking to exact revenge for killed relatives or personal experiences of humiliation and torture.  In all the three republics, a significant percentage of militants are people who have left “for the mountains” as a result of persecution by security services, or out of fear of being abducted, tortured, and “lost” by state agents. It is those militants in the mountains that begin to adhere to a fundamentalist philosophy of Islam.

Trapped in a Cycle

Human rights abuses have fueled the spread of the insurgency in the North Caucasus.  Not only have the abuses been the primary fuel for increased violence, but the abuses also have impacted other underlying issues causing the spread of violence.  Corruption and a depressed economy are the main grievances providing support for the insurgents.  These issues are entwined with the abuses, and have resulted in a spiral effect.  Russia will not be able to start to fix the issues in the Caucasus and stop the spread of violence until they abandon the practice of human rights abuses and break the cycle of violence.

The abuses suffered by the populations of the Caucasus have provided the entry portal, allowing radical Islam to grow. Russia has encountered an expanding insurgency because of these abuses.  Human rights abuses have also begun to shift the nature of the insurgency and Islam within the Caucasus.  As such, Russia faces a growing wave of radicalization of its Islamic citizenry.  This increase in extremism is bad not only for Russia, but for local and global security. 

Russia needs to rethink its approach to the North Caucasus, and to win the support of the people for a legitimate government. Failure to do so may unleash further violence, and have consequences beyond the region.

HELO

www.Helo-Magazine.com

After a Russian counter-insurgency operation in Makhachkala, Dagestan, Russia,Timo Vogt.