c. 1999 Religion News Service

MOSCOW _ In the first hazy moments after a massive midnight bomb recently destroyed her nine-story apartment building, Yelena Obukhova jolted up in bed, certain that Armageddon had arrived. She called for help.”I cried out, `O Jehovah, save us!'”said Obukhova, a 35-year-old Jehovah’s Witness, explaining,”In the Bible it is written that those who confess the name of the Jehovah will be saved.” As Obukhova heard her neighbors’ cries for help, breathed in a mixture of acrid smoke and dust and took note of her husband next to her in bed, she realized the world was not ending. But she knew, all the same, that something quite terrible had happened.

When explosives at the base of her building blew up Sept. 9, a portion of the building, from the ninth floor on down, collapsed in a pile of rubble, killing at least 94 people. Half of the two-room, fifth-floor apartment Obukhova shared with her husband and daughter was destroyed. The rest _ including both bedrooms _ remained intact, allowing the family to escape from the balcony.

Safely on the ground, gazing at the jagged gap left by the explosion and listening to the moans of those trapped beneath the rubble, Obukhova said she began to see the disaster as a clear message from God.”If he allowed me to live, it means I must work harder and harder for him,”said Obukhova, a round-faced woman with an earnest manner, during an interview at a crisis center near her destroyed home.”I am so grateful,”said Obukhova, adding that she planned to improve on the average of 11 hours a month she devotes to proselytizing on the street.”I will preach more and more.” On Monday (Sept. 13), a similar explosion in another Moscow apartment complex claimed the lives of at least 118 people. It brought to four the number of bomb attacks on Russian territory in the last two weeks.

A car bomb outside a housing complex for officers and their families in the southern Russian province of Dagestan killed 64 people earlier this month. And on Aug. 31, in an underground shopping mall just outside the Moscow Kremlin walls, a bomb planted in a video arcade killed one person and injured 41.

No one has made a credible claim of responsibility for the attacks. Nor have Russian officials announced any definitive progress in their investigations. Speculation in the press and among politicians runs rampant. There are fingers pointed at the Russian security forces or even powerful oligarchs and elected officials keen on delaying upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections through the declaration of a state of emergency.

Most often, though, people blame the ongoing conflict between Russian military forces and thousands of Islamic militants based in the breakaway Russian Muslim republic of Chechnya. In the last month, fighters seized several villages in neighboring Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim province that the rebels pledge to turn into an Islamic state like Chechnya.

One of the Chechen leaders of the attack on Dagestan, Shamil Basayev, has denied any connection with the Moscow bomb attacks.

In ordering police, who have a reputation for brutality and venality, to blanket this city of 10 million searching for terrorists and explosives, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov urged them to take special note of those from Chechnya. Three men have been detained in connection with the bombings, but police have produced no evidence linking them with an Islamic terror campaign.

Media commentators and some politicians frequently blame Islamic terrorists for the bombings, calling it a religious-based campaign of terror. Late Tuesday night on a popular talk show, viewers were asked to choose from a range of options of how best to halt the bombing. By far the most popular option, garnering over 1,000 phone-in votes, was to demand that Moscow police evict all those people from Russia’s mostly Muslim Caucasus region.

With little hard evidence, radical Saudi-born millionaire Osama bin Laden is frequently implicated in the Russian media. In a dispatch from Cairo, TASS reported that Abu Hamza al Masri, leader of the radical Ansar ash Sharia Islamic group, had voiced his support for the recent bombings.

About 10 million of Russia’s 146 million citizens are nominally Muslims. The dominant Russian Orthodox Church claims 80 million adherents.

Especially in the war-torn and impoverished north Caucasus region that includes Chechnya, Russia’s top leaders are extremely wary of fanning existing religious and ethnic tensions. President Boris Yeltsin, for example, declared in a nationally televised address that,”This enemy has no conscience, mercy or honor. No face, nationality or religion. I repeat, no nationality or religion.” Religious leaders, including Russian Orthodoxy’s powerful Patriarch Alexii II, have called repeatedly for calm and peace while denouncing the attacks.

In an interview in Moscow’s respected Nezavisimaya (Independent) newspaper,Mufti Ravil Gainutdin, who heads Russia’s Union of Muftis, said that he recently took Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to task for speaking of the”battle with Islamicists and Islamic extremists.” In a Wednesday address to a group of defense ministers from the Commonwealth of Independent States, Putin said,”We are not fighting Muslims, we are fighting terrorists.” (OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Middle Eastern members of the ultraconservative, puritanical Wahhabi movement are said to be fighting alongside the rebels in Dagestan and helping spread the Wahhabi brand of Islam throughout Russia’s north Caucasus. While Wahhabis may form the backbone of the Chechen-based insurgency, the Mufti Gainutdin said the movement owed its rapid spread primarily to Russia’s economic and social problems.

Father Dmitry Medvedev, a Russian Orthodox priest who buried four victims from Thursday’s blast, said he was reluctant to link the bombings with the fighting in Dagestan and loathe to make a connection with Islam.”A real Muslim would never do this. These are crazy people who have no hearts, no honor, no conscience,”said Medvedev, 54, a former lawyer whose Church of the Birth of the Holy Mother of God is near the site of Thursday’s explosion. He said he has been trying to soothe his parishioners and explain the tragedy to them.”Those who suffered and those who died, they sacrificed themselves for the salvation of us all,”Medvedev said in an interview.”They laid down to sleep and, as a wolf in the night, death came to them, like an individual apocalypse. Every one of us must remember that it could be our last breath when we lay down to sleep.”DEA END BROWN