Paul Goble
Staunton, December 4 – Farid Salman, the former mufti of Tatarstan, says that “there is no Salafite underground in Tatarstan because it has been integrated into the official religious organizations,” consists of children of the elite, and enjoys the protection of the republic leadership, assertions many in Kazan dispute and that some of them sought to block this week.
That Salman, who lost his post in Tatarstan in 2000 because he was tied to the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Talgat Tajuddin, has his own agenda and reasons for making such claims is clear, but the controversy over the venue of his latest remarks has the effect of calling attention to them.
Earlier this week, the National Anti-Terrorist Committee of the Russian Federation and the Security Council of the Republic of Tatarstan jointly organized a scientific-practical seminar entitled “Salafism in Tatarstan: Its Distribution, Conflict Potential and Means of Countering It” (www.regnum.ru/news/polit/1352872.html).
According to the Regnum news agency account, which cites Yana Amelina and Rais Suleymanov, researchers at the Center for Eurasian Inter-Ethnic Research at the Kazan Federal University, some officials in the apparatus of the republic president sought to prevent the meeting from taking place.
The two said that Aleksandr Terentyev, the chief of the Domestic Policy Administration of the President of the Republic of Tatarstan had sought to disrupt the proceedings by announcing the day before the seminar was to be held that it could not take place in the buildings of the Kazan Federal University. Consequently, the organizers shifted it to “a reserve location.”
FSB Colonel Vyacheslav Popov who came for Moscow for the seminar and who represented Moscow State University’s Institute for Retraining and Increasing the Qualificaitons of Instructions of Humanitarian and Social Sciences, expressed “surprise” at official opposition in Kazan and also to the absence of even “one representative” of the republic presidency.
Official opposition in Kazan had two other effects as well. On the one hand, “of the 14 invited speakers who had agreed to participate a month before the seminar, in the end only five showed up.” Among the no-shows were two deputy muftis of Tatarstan, the rector of the Islamic university there, and the chief of the religious affairs administration in the Tatarstan government.
And on the other, when the meeting opened, the hall was filled, Regnum.ru reports, with “representatives of Tatar nationally-oriented youth” who attempted to interfere with the proceedings by shouting down speakers. They were partially successful, but ultimately, the news agency report, the organizers were able to conduct the reduced program.
The report that generated the greatest interest and the most negative reaction from the republic Muslim hierarchy and government, Regnum says, was offered by Farid Salman, who following his dismissal as mufti has been head of the Tatarstan public organization, the Center for Research on the Koran and the Sunna.
Salman began his remarks by saying that he had wanted to call his report “Thye Structure of the Salafi Underground in Tatarstan,” but he had decided against that because “there is no Salafi underground in Tatarstan since it is integrated in the official religious hierarchy” and enjoys the protection of government officials.
“To deny that is possible,” Salman said, “but [to do so] is senseless.”
Wahhabism began to appear in Tatarstan in the early1990s when representatives from abroad and “in the first instance from Saudi Arabia” arrived and sought to recruit people to their side from among local Muslims. Twenty years ago, Salman said, “the first stage of the Wahhabization” of Tatarstan occurred.
But now has come “the last stage, which is characterized by the deep penetration of Wahhabis in all spheres of social life, the economy, the administration, and what is the main thing in the leadership of the Muslim community of the republic.” According to him, the current mufti, Gusman Iskhakov “and his entourage … are Wahhabis.”
More generally, Salman continued, “the social portrait” of radical Islamism is “significantly different” from that of this trend in the North Caucasus and in Daghestan and Ingushetia in particular. “The present-day Salafites in Tatarstan are young and hardly poor; on the contrary ‘these are children of very well-off parents.”
It is thus incorrect “to think that Tatarstan Salafites are Muslim lumpen, rural youths driven to despair by poverty and need.” There are some like that, who may be used as “cannon fodder,” but the core of the Salafi movement in Tatarstan consists of young people “from well-off families,” whose parents work in the power structures and protect them.
This pattern reflects the fact, the former mufti said, that “a significant part of young Muslim believers in Tatarstan sympathize with the Salafites who have as do the Wahhabis serious support from abroad.” Saudi leaders “finance various Russian projects connected with ‘the rebirth of Islam,’” and many are interested in taking part.
Because of the actions of the siloviki in Chechnya, Salman said, “the Saudis and others have had to shift their attention away from that republic and instead are concentrating on Daghestan, Ingushetia, Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. And they can do so because “in Tatarstan, the majority of traditional Muslims consider the Salafi part of the umma.”
Such attitudes have allowed the Salafites to continue to recruit and in an increasing number of cases convert these recruits into “religious fanatics,” all the more so because Salman insisted, “the measures taken by the powers that be for the struggle with the Salafi-Wahhabi danger in Tatarstan are ineffective.”
According to Salman, “the next stage of Wahhabism is the creation in the republic of jamaats and structures which in Tatarstan may be associated with separatist and nationalist trends.” But he suggested that the nationalists will be disappointed with these allies because the Salafis “do not recognize the nation and their goal is worldwide jihad.”
In the medium term, however, the two can work together because “the task of Salafism is to work so that the Muslims of Russia will come out against Russia.”
The events in Tatarstan’s Nurlat district on November 25th where Salafis and government forces exchanged fire and took losses is evidence, Salman said, of just how far things have gone in this regard. And he said that efforts by Kazan to dismiss this as an exceptional case were driven by a desire to ensure that Moscow will continue to invest in the Universiad-2013 games.
Salman’s speech should not be taken at face value. He has his own reasons for bitterness about the Tatarstan authorities, and he is clearly quite prepared to cooperate with the FSB and other structures in Moscow who are interested in invoking Islamic extremism in order to justify moves against Kazan.
But at the same time, the former mufti’s argument is not without foundation. Clearly, Islamic radicalism is spreading in the Middle Volga, something officials in that region and in Moscow as well would not happen given the traditional moderation of Muslims there, if not yet to the extent he suggests.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Window on Eurasia: More than One Russian in Ten Lives in Places Still Not Connected to Outside World by Roads
Paul Goble
Staunton, December 4 – Moscow media have devoted a great deal of attention to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan for a massive road building effort in rural areas, but a “Krestyanskiye vedomosti” writer says that this program will do little to help the more than 10 percent of the population still living in places not connected to the outside by roads.
In a commentary posted on that newspaper’s website yesterday, Konstantin Mezentsev says that in order to understand what this program will actually do, one must look beyond the big numbers Putin announced to the specific plan the ministries of transportation and agriculture have agreed to (www.agronews.ru/newsshow.php?NId=63183).
On Wednesday, the Russian prime minister announced that the federal budget would spend 18 billion rubles (600 million US dollars) over the next three years for the construction of rural roads, five billion rubles in 2011, six in 2012, and seven in 2013, figures that are large or small depending on how one looks at them.
According the agreement the transportation and agriculture ministries have reached, Mezentsev continues, the money is intended to help in the first instance residents of settlements with at least 125 people in them and which are situated no more than five kilometers from existing highways.
So far, so good, Mezentsev continues, but “as always,” the devil is in the details. The Russian government plans to spend 630 billion rubles on roads in 2011. That makes the 18 billion for rural roads look quite small, and it is smaller yet because about half will be spent not on building new highways but on repairing old ones.
Obviously, in tough budgetary times, everyone must make sacrifices, the commentator continues, but any fair assessment of the situation would suggest that the government should be devoting six to seven times more to rural roads, given both the way in which they are financed and the needs of integrating the country.
“According to official statistics,” Mezentsev says, “15 million people exist in conditions of complete roadlessness” – that is, they live in places not connected to the country’s road network – and this figure is “more than a tenth of [all] Russian citizens,” a shocking figure for any country with pretensions to modernity.
If one looks at the rest of the world, one sees a far greater attention to the need for rural roads. US President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s helped get his country out of the depression “thanks to the construction of roads in rural areas.” Moreover, French law requires that any population point with at least five persons in it be connected by modern highways.
The Chinese, on the basis of a program adopted in 2008, are building roads in rural areas at a rate that will link into the national grid “all rural regions of the country” by 2013. And even Ukraine, a country many Russians are inclined to look down on is currently spending a billion US dollars a year on this task, despite its much smaller budget and territory.
The comparative absence of roads in Russia’s rural areas, Mezentsev says, not only means that what these places produce often rots before it gets to market but also leads to a situation in which the part of Russia from which so many urban dwellers come is dying, a situation that bodes anything but well for the future of the country.
To illustrate his argument about the importance of roads, the commentator tells the story of one village near Moscow located only a few kilometers from the highways but not linked by road to them. “For all the years of socialism, a rural road was not extended to it.” And consequently, the little village died.
But then, a local farmer, using federal credits, arranged to build an asphalt road. And a miracle happened. The village revived, and “now there is one of the best dairy farms in the entire Moscow oblast with production and quality and the level of the Netherlands,” something that benefits people in the cities as well.
The main thing, however, is that with the revival of the village, “the daughters, sons, grandsons and relatives who had been living in the capital and surrounding cities suddenly remembered their village relatives.” Many of them have returned and build modern homes with all conveniences and “a bright new church.”
Moreover, Mezentsev says, “one could cite many not a few other such cases.” And consequently, he concludes, “if the government seriously wants Russia to have an advanced agriculture, then it must devote to the construction and support of rural infrastructure the most serious attention.”
Instead, he notes sadly, it seems to be following the path of the man in the old anecdote who looked for a 1000 ruble note he had lost not where he thought he had lost it but rather under a street light for the simple and entirely irrelevant reason that under the street light, it was easier to see what he was doing.
Staunton, December 4 – Moscow media have devoted a great deal of attention to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan for a massive road building effort in rural areas, but a “Krestyanskiye vedomosti” writer says that this program will do little to help the more than 10 percent of the population still living in places not connected to the outside by roads.
In a commentary posted on that newspaper’s website yesterday, Konstantin Mezentsev says that in order to understand what this program will actually do, one must look beyond the big numbers Putin announced to the specific plan the ministries of transportation and agriculture have agreed to (www.agronews.ru/newsshow.php?NId=63183).
On Wednesday, the Russian prime minister announced that the federal budget would spend 18 billion rubles (600 million US dollars) over the next three years for the construction of rural roads, five billion rubles in 2011, six in 2012, and seven in 2013, figures that are large or small depending on how one looks at them.
According the agreement the transportation and agriculture ministries have reached, Mezentsev continues, the money is intended to help in the first instance residents of settlements with at least 125 people in them and which are situated no more than five kilometers from existing highways.
So far, so good, Mezentsev continues, but “as always,” the devil is in the details. The Russian government plans to spend 630 billion rubles on roads in 2011. That makes the 18 billion for rural roads look quite small, and it is smaller yet because about half will be spent not on building new highways but on repairing old ones.
Obviously, in tough budgetary times, everyone must make sacrifices, the commentator continues, but any fair assessment of the situation would suggest that the government should be devoting six to seven times more to rural roads, given both the way in which they are financed and the needs of integrating the country.
“According to official statistics,” Mezentsev says, “15 million people exist in conditions of complete roadlessness” – that is, they live in places not connected to the country’s road network – and this figure is “more than a tenth of [all] Russian citizens,” a shocking figure for any country with pretensions to modernity.
If one looks at the rest of the world, one sees a far greater attention to the need for rural roads. US President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s helped get his country out of the depression “thanks to the construction of roads in rural areas.” Moreover, French law requires that any population point with at least five persons in it be connected by modern highways.
The Chinese, on the basis of a program adopted in 2008, are building roads in rural areas at a rate that will link into the national grid “all rural regions of the country” by 2013. And even Ukraine, a country many Russians are inclined to look down on is currently spending a billion US dollars a year on this task, despite its much smaller budget and territory.
The comparative absence of roads in Russia’s rural areas, Mezentsev says, not only means that what these places produce often rots before it gets to market but also leads to a situation in which the part of Russia from which so many urban dwellers come is dying, a situation that bodes anything but well for the future of the country.
To illustrate his argument about the importance of roads, the commentator tells the story of one village near Moscow located only a few kilometers from the highways but not linked by road to them. “For all the years of socialism, a rural road was not extended to it.” And consequently, the little village died.
But then, a local farmer, using federal credits, arranged to build an asphalt road. And a miracle happened. The village revived, and “now there is one of the best dairy farms in the entire Moscow oblast with production and quality and the level of the Netherlands,” something that benefits people in the cities as well.
The main thing, however, is that with the revival of the village, “the daughters, sons, grandsons and relatives who had been living in the capital and surrounding cities suddenly remembered their village relatives.” Many of them have returned and build modern homes with all conveniences and “a bright new church.”
Moreover, Mezentsev says, “one could cite many not a few other such cases.” And consequently, he concludes, “if the government seriously wants Russia to have an advanced agriculture, then it must devote to the construction and support of rural infrastructure the most serious attention.”
Instead, he notes sadly, it seems to be following the path of the man in the old anecdote who looked for a 1000 ruble note he had lost not where he thought he had lost it but rather under a street light for the simple and entirely irrelevant reason that under the street light, it was easier to see what he was doing.
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