Pakistan mourns its children, and executes prisoners

On December 16, Taliban gunmen from a notorious Pakistan militant group - the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP - stormed a military run school, murdering 141 people, including 132 children. The massacre of children sent shock waves through Pakistani society and the whole world.


The slaughter occurred in the major northern city of Peshawar, population over 3 million, hosting numerous military camps and strategic forces. Graphic from http://news.antiwar.com

The event was a grim reminder of the Islamic separatist movement in Chechnya, Russia attacked and held over 1000 students and teachers hostage for three days. In that case, over 385 hostages died (156 children) in a flareup of violence that sparked an assault by Russian security forces.

But in the Chechen tragedy, there was violence from all corners, including a major fire that caused the fatalities of over 100 of those killed. In the case of Pakistan, it was cold blooded killing by adults of the school body, ordered to send a message to the Pakistan government and military that attacking the TTP in its tribal strongholds was to attract vengeance. Finally after more than eight hours of intense fighting, security forces secured the school saving 960 pupils and staff.

Parents escort their children away from the school ... One Reuters article described the attack thus, "Wounded children taken to nearby hospitals told Reuters most victims died when gunmen, suicide vests strapped to their bodies, entered the compound and opened fire indiscriminately on boys, girls and their teachers." Photo from www.ndtv.com

Pakistan ready to pull together?

There were immediate cries of outrage from all levels of Pakistani leaders - politicians, military - and even some major Pakistani-based Islamic militant groups such as the The Afghan Taliban (who fight in Afghanistan but leave Pakistan alone). Pakistan's Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, told reporters in Peshawar “This is a decisive moment in the fight against terrorism. The people of Pakistan should unite in this fight. Our resolve will not be weakened by these attacks.”

But the bloodshed is a reminder of the long and deadly game the Pakistan military and the country's intelligence agency (ISI) have played. There are several Sunni militant groups operating in Pakistan with the tolerance of the Pakistan military and ISI which created a militia network over thirty years ago to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and to dominate Afghanistan itself. Besides the Afghan Taliban already mentioned, another major Islamic group, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, operates freely in the nation, even though it is officially outlawed, because it focuses on fighting India. This group in 2008 assaulted the Indian city of Mumbai over four days and killed over 170 people. As one article from Bloomberg News notes, "One of its founders, Hafiz Saeed, lives openly in Lahore and has been a frequent user of social media."


Hafiz Aseed, founder of the outlawed militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, lives openly in Lahore. This group is tolerated as it rages against Pakistan's neighbor India. Photo from www.dailymail.co.uk

Moreover, besides the extremists themselves, the stream of trouble runs much deeper. Extremist mosques remain open and thrive in major cities, while a large network of Islamic madrassas (religious schools) indoctrinate young Pakistanis by the tens of thousands.


Islamic fundamentalist schools at work. Photo from www.quazoo.com

For now the Pakistan military has flailed angrily into some tribal strongholds killing scores of extremist fighters in the past few days. More chillingly, the government lifted a moratorium on the death penalty for convicted terrorists and just two days after the school attack, hung two who were on death row. As a BBC article reported, "The home minister for Punjab province, Shuja Khanzada, told Associated Press: "Today's executions of terrorists will boost the morale of the nation, and we are planning to hang more terrorists next week." Indeed, four more were hung within a week of the attack, and the government boasts that up to 500 terrorists in its custody could be executed in the coming weeks.


Anger at terrorists is opening up the likelihood of repeated executions. Photo from www.thenews.com.pk

So it looks like a lot of angry reaction - military operations and hangings. But a serious attempt to change the uneven treatment of militant factions, shut down the incendiary rhetoric even today at some of Pakistan's mosques, and disband the widespread indoctrination labeled as teaching at fundamental Islamic schools (ie. work at building a civil society) has yet to surface.

Sigh.

And so, even as Christmas is celebrated by Christians around the world, there seems even less peace than ever before. Once again, Teatree posts a song that speaks of faith and hope, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the dark days of the civil war in America 149 years ago. One must admit that the powerful lyrics seem to speak with an even lonelier voice than in the past.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,

and wild and sweet
The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom

Had rolled along
The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,

A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,

And with the sound
The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,

And made forlorn
The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;

"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men."

.

The "boys" from Chechnya

The two young men (brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) who detonated bombs at the Boston, Massachusetts marathon last week hail from a troubled southern state of Russia - Chechnya. From an article run in the Salt Lake City Tribune, "Chechnya’s President Ramzan Kadyrov said Friday that the Boston bombings had nothing to do with his nation because the "boys" suspected of the acts were raised in the United States. Their attitudes and beliefs, however twisted, he said, were formed in America."

With that somewhat confrontive description of the perpetrators, what is worth knowing about Chechnya and Southern Russia, and the Islamic extremist-oriented views that had in particular captivated the older of the two brothers?

Chechnya in Southern Russia

Chechnya, in Southern Russia, has a population of somewhere over 1.1 million people. It is one of five Islamic republics of Russia (Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and North Ossetia), known as the Northern Caucasus region

Again, from the Salt Lake City Tribune article, "The Tsarnaev family, as tens of thousands of their compatriots, lost their homeland in 1944, when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin punished the entire Chechen population’s perceived (and actual) disloyalty to Moscow during World War II by shipping them from the northern Caucasus to Central Asia and the Siberian wastes. As many as half died on the way. The Tsarnaev brothers began their lives in exile, in Kyrgyzstan.

The family lived there for a long time but never assimilated. Chechens rarely do, at least that’s a common perception in Russia. Here’s the stereotype: dark complexion; speaking Russian with a thick accent; brave and aggressive, always picking fights; proud and loyal to friends and family but also treacherous and sneaky to outsiders; religious; fiercely independent.

After the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, few Russians were surprised when Chechen leader and the younger Tsarnaev’s namesake Dzhokhar Dudayev unilaterally declared his country’s secession from Russia. Moscow refused, and the act was followed by two horrific wars with the Russian Army.

Grozny, the capital of this federal subject (republic) of Russia, had a population at the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 of nearly 400,000. During the two attempts to break away from Russia, the second Chechen war virtually leveled the city. Even 10 years later, the population in 2002 had grown to only 210 thousand, and the latest census in 2010 shows 271,000.

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From Wikipedia, "For the period from 1994 to 2003, ... the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society set the conservative estimate of death toll in this time period at about 150,000 - 200,000 civilians, 20,000 to 40,000 Russian soldiers, and possibly the same amount of Chechen rebels."

The movement that began as a pro-independence one gradually turned into radically Islamist. It also became international: there were Arab fighters and commanders helping the Chechens fight against the Russians, and there are hundreds of Chechen fighters around the world helping the likes of al-Qaida in hot spots, such as Syria and Libya.

In the end, the Chechen rebels were defeated. Chechnya remains part of Russian Federation and is ruled by a Moscow puppet regime led by Kadyrov," says the SLC Tribune article.

Current "statesman" in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, one of Putin's boys.

In a recent National Public Radio interview concerning Chechnya, a regional expert, Alexey Malashenko of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was asked "what is at the heart of the conflict between the Chechens and the Russians?

MALASHENKO: Well, look, at the moment ... there is no conflict ... between the federal center in Russia [and] Chechnya. ... Because after two Chechen wars, a lot of money was sent to Chechnya for reconstruction and now Chechnya is one of the well-organized and one of the richest republics in Caucasus. .... and even I don't believe that there are big friction and problems between Moscow and Chechnya at the moment.

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Indeed, modern Grozny in 2013 has been nearly completely rebuilt - money poured in from Moscow, and "orders" given to the Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov, to keep a lid on things, which he has, by all accounts, with a vengeance.

Back to the NPR interview,
MALASHENKO, "So when they speak about why it (the Boston bombings by the Tsarnaev brothers) was done by Chechens, they don't understand [that] the situation in neighboring republic to Chechnya, Dagestan, [is] much more difficult, much more problematic because, in Dagestan, as we call it, a heart of Caucasus, there is a feel of war, and there in Dagestan, indeed, we have so-called radical Islamic extremist movement and practically every day - and precise, every day, somebody is killed in Dagestan.


Appointed by the President of the Russian Federation (Putin), as of January 28, 2013, the acting President of the Republic of Dagestan is Ramazan Gadzhimuradovich Abdulatipov.

NPR: What are the causes of the unrest there?

MALASHENKO: It's very simple. It's a civil war ... every week or every couple of weeks, we had, in Dagestan, a terrorist act.

NPR: But what is the source of the grievance there? Is there a sense that the resources are not fairly shared? Is it a desire for self-governance?

MALASHENKO: ... the big ground of this conflict is the frustration of the society in Caucasus, in general, and in particular in Dagestan, and they continue to search for so-called Islamic alternative, by all means, because they are totally unsatisfied with what Moscow is doing in Caucasus, in particular in Dagestan. So it is a reaction. ... It is a desire to organize and end the government and the society on the principle of Islam, on the principle of Sharia.

Dagestan - called in a 2011 BBC article, the most dangerous place in Europe - is a federal subject (republic) of Russia with a population of 2.9 million people. It is the largest of the five Islamic Russian Republics, known as the Northern Caucasus of Russia. A summary of this region can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amb-marc-ginsberg/a-field-guide-to-jihadi-d_b_3134852.html

According to a BBC article in November 2011, "Islamic fighters punishing shops that sell alcohol have become routine events in Dagestan's capital, Makhachkala. The owners typically get a warning first, often delivered by text message, or on a USB memory stick thrown through car windows, or into a letterbox. If they ignore it, there may be a bomb or a shootout or the owners may agree to pay protection money. "The fighters like to portray themselves as so devout," says a lieutenant colonel in the anti-terrorism police, "But many are just cynical criminals running protection rackets."

US FBI agents traveled to Dagestan to interview the parents of the two American bombers. Zubeidat Tsarnaev, the mother is apparently so traumatized and caught up in her world, that she believes her sons are innocent, and being framed by Russian authorities.

Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, is apparently the new epicenter of conflict between Moscow, and nationalism in the Northern Caucasus of Russia, in turn fueled by hardened Islamic extremists. Last year, 378 insurgency-related deaths were recorded in Dagestan, compared with 134 in Ingushetia and 127 in Chechnya. And as a teenager in Dagestan noted, when asked about the Boston bombing, ""What do I think about the Boston bombings?" he asked. Then he shrugged his shoulders. "Here in Dagestan, we have our own Boston every day."

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To be fair, another panoramic view of Dagestan's capital.

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And to make it complex, here is another picture (and apparently well known one by Russian photographer Sergey Maximishin) of students in 2008 at a Theological college, in Dagestan. The republic is one of the most diverse regions of the world, home to approximately 30 languages, according to a BBC regional profile.

So, there we have it. Thousands of mile away from Boston, a decades long conflict overlaid with a virulent religious doctrine finds its way to a marathon. The perpetrators are aimlessly caught up in striking out for some cause, and among the many lives altered or lost, a 32-year old dance teacher whose husband has just returned from Afghanistan loses her left foot ...

Adrianne Haslet-Davis