MOSCOW, October 17, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News
Agencies) – The new leader of a Russian province
rocked by recent bloody attacks warned Monday, October
17, that religious repression was partly to blame for
the crisis in the country, promising that he will
reach out to Muslims.
"You can't solve these problems just through
prohibition," Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Arsen
Kanokov as telling the Kommersant daily in an
interview.
The recently-appointed president of the
Kabardino-Balkaria province was speaking a week after
more than 60 people were killed in simultaneous
attacks claimed by Chechen fighters on government
buildings in the southern Russian city of Nalchik.
Kanokov also highlighted that the closure of mosques
and abuses by law-enforcement bodies as reasons for
the ‘radicalization’ of local Muslims in the lead up
to last week's violence.
"Law-enforcement bodies did indeed commit certain
excesses. I consider that closing mosques was not
right. You cannot close mosques and push people into
one place," he said, referring to the sole,
government-controlled mosque left in Nalchik.
"Banning them from praying, forcing them into cellars
and hiding places, where it is harder to control them,
will only be worse. There has been, in my view, a
certain deviation which we will correct."
Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered sealing
off the city and issued shoot-to-kill orders for any
person who puts up armed resistance to security
forces.
Nalchik is located some 150km west of the Chechen
capital Grozny.
Closer
Kanokov, whom the Kremlin named in September to roll
back endemic corruption, economic collapse and a
growing Islamic insurgency in the province, said the
government must be closer to the people if it is to
win their trust.
"If people see that (the authorities) feel their
concerns, worry about them, then they will look
differently on the authorities. If we shut ourselves
from the population, from its problems, then people
feel this at once."
He said economic development would be the key to
keeping unemployed youths from falling under the
influence of ‘well-financed radical groups’.
"There is very high unemployment and a very low living
standard. The economy practically has not functioned,
people had nothing to do, and that means the mass of
young people.
"Of course it is very easy to bring them under the
wrong influence, especially with finances," he said.
Kanokov said he would discuss in Moscow the
possibility of allowing the relatives of gunmen killed
during the fighting in Nalchik to retrieve their
bodies.
Under anti-terrorism laws, the bodies of fighters and
others killed in armed clashes are buried secretly on
prison territory.
Kanokov said he would probably be against making an
exception in this case, but "on the other hand, it
would certainly be a tension-reducing act."
A statement posted on an Internet Web site used
regularly by Chechen fighters said the Nalchik attack
was mounted by a unit of the Caucasus Front of the
Armed Forces of the Chechen Ishkeria Republic.
Interfax quoted an official as saying that the attacks
were in reprisal for the recent arrest in Nalchik of a
group of Islamists, whom the gunmen were attempting to
free.
The Yarmak unit was the target of a swoop by security
forces in January.
The Nalchik attack was the latest in a series by
Chechen fighters on Russian federal security
installations in the volatile North Caucasus region.
The small mountainous Caucasus republic has been
ravaged by conflict since 1994, with just three years
of relative peace after the first Russian invasion of
the region ended in August 1996 and the second began
in October 1999.
It was on December 11, 1994 that former Russian
president Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian troops into
Chechnya to subdue an increasingly powerful separatist
movement.
After two years of horrific fighting, Russian troops
pulled out in 1996.
In 1999, then-prime minister Vladimir Putin pushed
some 80,000 Russian troops into Chechnya in what
Moscow called a lightning-strike “anti-terror
operation” but which has since degenerated into a
grinding war with Chechen fighters.
At least 100,000 Chechen civilians and 10,000 Russian
troops are estimated to have been killed in both
invasions, but human rights groups have said the real
numbers could be much higher.
Thousands of refugees from war-torn Chechnya live in
battered tent camps in neighboring Ingushetia and
refuse to return home because of continuing
insecurity.
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