This is such a terrible story that I just want to note it now -- even though I can't do justice to the article now and take the time to translate and explain it.
It's one of the many horror stories coming out of Dagestan -- you know, Dagestan, that autonomous republic of the Russian Federation where Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent his summer vacation in 2012 -- before he went on to commit the Boston bombing and then die in a police shoot-out. I'm a believer in the narrative that Tsarnaev's story is not explained by him merely being a "home-grown Youtube jihadist" who is made radical by "America's wars" and not fitting in as an immigrant. I think he had lots of help, training, financing and planning and that either it is a North Caucasus-generated jihad that represents some new stage of internationalization of a war that has hitherto been limited to Russia and the region or -- and I think this more likely -- something which Russian intelligence had a hand in, either as tightly scripted from the beginning, or as "letting nature take its course. More on that some day later, but for now:
Officers of the Interior Ministry of Dagestan Demand Widescale Inspection of Their Agency
This is definitely a "man-bites-dog" story, because here you have police complaining about the police themselves, and police complaining about torture -- and all with members of Memorial Society Human Rights Center, the leading human rights organization in Russia, particularly knowledgeable about the Caucasus.
I read Caucasian Knot regularly but had missed this -- like so many of us, I didn't pay enough attention to the awfulness of Dagestan.
And had our own intelligence analysts paid more attention, maybe the Boston bombing wouldn't have happened and maybe 16 people would still have their legs, others wouldn't have suffered injuries and of course, families would have their 3 members who died. But I don't blame the American agencies for this, I blame Russia. They knew better, and they were definitely tracking Tamerlan, they in fact assassinated one if not three people he was in touch with directly that summer, and they never told the FBI that. They could have; they didn't.
This story -- in March, more than a month before the bombing in Boston -- is a cry for help.
This group of policemen -- at huge risk to themselves, are there to get the help of their union and the human rights community to do something about the fact that not only are they themselves being killed by criminals in large numbers, but their own fellow policemen are arresting and torturing and killing people in large numbers and this isn't working to stop crime or terrorism, which are connected.
It's quite extraordinary, and the numbers from Dagestan boggle -- in a world where human rights lefties tend to obsess hysterically about the relatively few killings in the Israel/Palestine conflict, or screech wildely about the US reportedly rendering someone to be tortured, these figures of hundreds and hundreds of people tortured and murdered and disappeared in the Caucasus every year just never capture the imagination.
I came across this story tracking Col. Lobarev, head of the law-enforcement veterans' union who is the self-same official who offered help to Edward Snowden recently in the Russian press and in a TV interview. That was indeed an odd story, and especially odd in Lobarev's Twitter time-line (sure, everybody's on Twitter now, even the Minsk police) was a picture of himself in the TV studio green room arm and arm with the former manager of Anzhi Makhachkala. How did he know him? He must have been to Dagestan? How or why? I haven't gotten to the bottom of all that yet, but he did in fact get involved in the policemen's complaint from Dagestan.
According to Caucasian Knot, in 2012 in Dagestan, 110 law-enforcers were killed in shoot-outs, explosions and armed clashes and 205 were wounded. In 2011, these figures were 111 and 281, respectively.
The main violators of human rights in Dagesta are law-enforcement officers and officials of various ranks, said acting head of the republic Ramazan Abdulatipov in the republic's parliament. In his estimate, there are dozens of organizations in Dagestan now connected to the siloviki which are not capable of guaranteeing the security of ordinary citizens.
There is a semblance of well-being in the republic but the preventive work against terrorism and extremism among youth has been reduced to zero. Positions in the Interior Ministry are for sale, said Gadzhiev. "We have come here to be heard, so that the public and the media would help us reach the Interior Minister of Russia," the officer noted.
The whistle-blowing police had a lot of horror stories to tell -- positions in the police, used to terrorize and extort money from citizens in bribes, were for sale for tens of thousands of dollars in equivalent rubles; under the noses of police leadership, 200 train cars of vodka would arrive and be sold at lower prices duty-free by black marketeers who pocketed the proceeds and used them to aid extremist movements; vacancies can't be filled, like in Mexico, because nobody wants to die doing their job; widows and orphans are demonstrating because of all the men killed, and so on.
Then there's this -- just appalling
"In one month in police precinct no. 1 in the city of Makhachkala, 1,290 people were brought in. 1,121 people were released without a police report of their detention made. And there are four or five of such precincts. Each month the plan is fulfilled -- they bring in both guilty and not guilty. We believe that such an approach to detention does not contribute to the increase in the level of trust to law-enforcement officers," said one of the policeman at the press conference.
147 officers of the police signed a document with a demand to cease using force regarding citizens of the republic. "On ten pages here we have written what tortures are being suffered by those detained in the police. The soul shudders. These are the people who are making up the Interior Ministry of Dagestan," said Shamilov.
Of course the way things work in Russia, it could always be one faction of the abusive police trying to play the human rights card on another faction -- that is ALL too common. But Memorial Society and Caucasian Knot are very knowledgeable and used to this setting and they made the judgement to go with publicizing these policemen's appalling report. They have been following it closely for awhile; this article from November 2012 recounts how the head of the republic admits that work on trying to investigate disappearances and murders just wasn't effective.
The head of Dagestan Magmedsalam Magomedov subjected to criticism the work of the power ministries of the region in investigating murders and kidnappings. Out of 55 kidnappings committed since January 2011 through September 2012, only 18 were solved, indicated Magomedov.
According to the information of Dagestani law-enforcement agencies, in 2012 more than 170 murders were registered in the republic; in 2011 there were 237. About half the crimes have not been solved to date, including 13 murders of prominent religious figures in the republic and two of the four murders of journalists.
Those religious figures were moderate Muslims or officially-approved Muslim clergy who were targeted by Salafists or other related jihadists who deemed them collaborationists. But recently a rabbi was shot and seriously wounded as well.
I don't know what kind of follow up has been made since March, and whether they got the attention of Vladimir Kolokoltsov or not.
As we know, Putin is neuralgic about the Caucasus, wanting to flush the people there down the toilet. He believes strongly that if he lets in observers, the UN, the OSCE, etc. that soon they will get independence from Russia -- just as Kosovo did. So he keeps out the outside world.
The FBI tried to get more cooperation with Russia after the Boston bombing and we could see graphically how the Kremlin's failure to inform us of the basics (and our failure to pay attention to this region enough) led to the tragedy of the bombing. BTW, I wonder if there are people with Russian in the State Department and the intelligence agencies as there were 30 years ago -- it seems to me that there have been less and less interest in having Russian-language staff and you wonder if they have anybody who even does the basics like read Caucasian Knot every day...
That neuralgia of theirs led only to the Russians expelling our CIA agent who had gone with the FBI on a trip to Dagestan to try to get more insight into the situation. So much for close cooperation. I find it funny that the colonel heading the veterans' union associated with ostensibly helping his colleagues bring complaints to the Interior Minister -- Lobarev -- is also the one reaching out to Snowden, who is like the tit-for-tat of our CIA guy in the funny wig with the cash and crudely-written notes...
This infographic shows 199 people killed in armed clashes in the Caucasus in the first quarter this year.
A good blog post from Paul Goble on the situation in the Caucasus and the theory that people create Cossacks stanitsa and mountain jamaat because they are trying to cope with the chaos that the corrupt law-enforcers add to:
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2013/03/window-on-eurasia-arbitrariness-and.html
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | July 28, 2013 at 03:38 AM
>>I wonder if there are people with Russian in the State Department and the intelligence agencies as there were 30 years ago --<<
It sometimes seems that after the fall of Communism - which was just a name for a drastic version of the same state oppression that preceded it and has also followed it - U.S. governments more or less lost interest in Russia, except as a potential "partner" that could be taken over and then ignored. The results of that oversight are now making themselves plain.
Posted by: David McDuff | July 28, 2013 at 04:18 AM