NEWS FEATURE: Fighting takes toll on Chechnya’s religious groups

c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ Mikhail Ivanov, a retired Baptist truck driver, talks proudly about how he lived in the Chechen capital of Grozny for 49 of his 73 years, working as a truck driver,”helping to build the city that they are destroying now.” Ivanov, an ethnic Russian who helped lead Grozny’s beleaguered […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

MOSCOW _ Mikhail Ivanov, a retired Baptist truck driver, talks proudly about how he lived in the Chechen capital of Grozny for 49 of his 73 years, working as a truck driver,”helping to build the city that they are destroying now.” Ivanov, an ethnic Russian who helped lead Grozny’s beleaguered Baptist congregation, stuck it out earlier this decade through months of intense aerial bombings, artillery shellings and house-to-house fighting as the Russian military battled Chechen fighters for control of the breakaway republic.

Until earlier this month, Ivanov thought he would make it through the latest round of Russian bombing and shelling. In the end, he said in a recent interview, it was not Russian attacks but the threat of kidnapping by Chechnya’s gangster warlords that drove him to join more than 100,000 refugees fleeing the war-torn republic.”On Friday (Oct. 1) we had a service in our prayer house. I led it. Then I went home. Just a few minutes after I left, a group of men came there looking for me. God protected me,”Ivanov said by telephone from the southern Russian city of Vladikavkaz.”The next day, Saturday, they came back. Ten men in cars with automatic weapons and grenade launchers. I wasn’t there so they kidnapped a girl instead,”said the pensioner, adding that the girl, 13, had been living in the church with her mother, a member of the congregation.


Over the last year, the 100-member Baptist congregation has lost three of its leaders to kidnappers.”They took Sasha Kulakov during a service. Later we found his head in a garbage can,”said Ivanov, referring to Pastor Alexander Kulakov’s abduction in March.

Kulakov’s predecessor, Alexei Sitnikov, was kidnapped in October 1998 and in September Vitaly Korotun, 24, was snatched.”At first they wanted $100,000, then $10,000 and now $5,000,”said Ivanov of the kidnappers’ demands.

Like other religious leaders in the region, Ivanov took pains to emphasize the renewed fighting in the breakaway republic has little to do with faith despite the growing role played in Chechnya by Wahhabis, members of an ultra-conservative, puritanical Muslim movement.

Without providing concrete proof, Russian leaders have consistently blamed Muslim extremists based in Chechnya for a series of apartment building bombings that killed more than 300 people.

Skeptics in the media and among the political opposition argue frequently that the bombings were staged by Russian government security forces to sow fear prior to parliamentary elections set for December. These allegations, too, go unproven.

Whoever is responsible, the result is entirely negative for religious groups slowly finding their feet after decades of Soviet repression. In Dagestan, for example, the local legislature recently passed a highly restrictive law banning certain kinds of religious expression in order to curtail the feared spread of the Wahhabi movement.

Dagestan alone has 34 indigenous ethnic groups with distinct languages and beliefs ranging from animism to Islam to Judaism. Local Jews, called Mountain Jews, first settled in the Caucasus mountains on the west side of the Caspian Sea in the eighth century. Because of the ongoing fighting, they are leaving in record numbers for Israel under that country’s Law of Return.


Lev Shogolev, local head of the Jerusalem-based Jewish Agency which facilitates emigration to Israel, said 150 local Jews have left in the last month and 100 others decided to make aliyah.”The people are worried,”said Shogolev in a telephone interview from Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala.”To live in the Caucasus is getting more and more difficult. They are beginning to understand that.” Shogolev estimated between 5,000 and 6,000 Jews eligible to move to Israel are living in the troubled North Caucasus region. Despite the sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric of Chechen warlords, Shogolev said he has observed no increase in anti-Semitic activity.

On an official level, Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders profess peace and understanding for each other. Among Muslims, who dominate in the area, there is a growing gap between the Soviet-era religious groups’ pronouncements and the reality in the impoverished, rural villages of the region.

Damir Izatulin, deputy chairman of the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims for European Russia, alluded to this in explaining the rise in popularity of the Wahhabi movement, which operates outside traditional Russian Muslim structures.”When desperate people don’t get adequate support from the local government, when they don’t have food or shelter, then they look for social justice elsewhere,”said Izatulin.

Earlier this month, Russia’s Council of Muftis condemned the Chechen rebels for using Islam as a cover for their hostilities and supported the Russian military’s forceful crackdown. All the same, Izatulin said the role of official Muslim structures, like his Spiritual Directorate, in helping the mostly Muslim refugees from Chechnya will be tiny because Russian Muslims are not in a position to donate resources.”Our believers, for the most part, are not wealthy,”Izatulin said.”They are pensioners and students.” Russia’s dominant, 80 million-member Russian Orthodox Church has no plans to launch programs for the thousands of refugees living in tents. In Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s program for refugee assistance and emergencies said at this point it is up to local parishes to cope with the crisis.

Yevgeny Bronsky, a spokesman for the diocese that covers the area into which the vast majority of refugees have fled, said there are no programs in the works, adding the Russian Orthodox presence in predominantly Muslim republics like Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia is steadily shrinking, mostly due to kidnappings.

Ingushetia, for example, had three priests one year ago. Now it has one.”The last priest in Chechnya was kidnapped on July 17th by a group of armed men,”said Bronsky in a telephone interview from the diocesan seat in Stavropol.”He had been there just three months. They took the church warden and another church worker, too.” One of the few religious charitable organizations with concrete plans to assist the refugees is Caritas, the international Roman Catholic organization. According to Antonio Santi, director of Caritas in European Russia, once an ongoing assessment is complete, the charity’s leaders should have a decision on aid by the end of October.”We are seeing a lot of refugees, mostly Russians and other ethnicities like Armenians and Georgians,”said project organizer Evita Basiyeva during a recent visit to Moscow.”Most of the Chechen refugees stay in Ingushetia.” Relations between different ethnic groups in Vladikavkaz are stable, Basiyeva said, but members of the small Roman Catholic congregation are ready for the worst.”If relations with the Muslims get bad enough, we are ready to take the cross off the building we use as a church,”she said.


DEA END BROWN

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