Хаос на Кавказе

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It is the existence of the Afghanis (of whom the most notorious is Mr bin Laden himself) which helps to explain why Russia regards its own Islamic adversaries as Frankensteinian monsters created by western governments and their friends in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Afghani connection also helps to explain why Russia and Iran see eye-to-eye on the question of Islamist violence. As well as loathing the West and all its works, some of the Afghanis — as zealous practitioners of Sunni Islam — are sworn enemies of the Shia Muslim faith, of which Iran is the main bastion.

Iran has always been resentful of America's connections with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, even though its own relations with those two countries have been improving. Russia sympathises, to put it mildly, with that resentment. America, for its part, is highly suspicious of Russia's friendship with Iran.

Chapter 4. Geopolicy.

If there is a geopolitical stand-off involving Russia, America and the Islamic world, it is not a simple triangle. If anything, Russia and America have each identified different bits of the Islamic world as friends, and each is suspicious of the other's partnerships.

Although Russian diplomacy has been quite adept at manipulating the geopolitical divisions within the Muslim world, there is a real possibility that its own clumsiness and brutality could create a Muslim enemy with­in its borders, as well as alienating Muslims farther afield. Already, the Kremlin's heavy-handedness has galvanised the Chechens to mobilise for a new war against Russia. The neighbouring Ingush people, related to the Chechens but hitherto willing to accept Russian authority, may now be drawn into the conflict—along with at least four or five other north Caucasian peoples who have until now been content to let Russia run their affairs.

If Russia found itself at war with half a dozen Muslim peoples in the Caucasus, the effects would certainly be felt in places farther north, such as Tatarstan.

But if some sort of common Muslim front ever emerges in Russia, resentment of Moscow will be the only factor that holds it together. In the Caucasus and elsewhere, Muslims are fragmented; there is not even a united or coherent Wahhabi movement.

Nor is there any natural unity between Chechnya and Dagestan. The two also differ over their relations with Russia. The Chechens still feel the scars of their last war with the Russians, and so the secessionist impulse is much stronger than in Dagestan, which has little sense of a common national identity and is economically heavily dependent on Russia.

Nor is it inevitable that Islamic militancy in the northern Caucasus and in other parts of the Muslim world will reinforce one another. Rather than being proof that political Islam is spreading, the fighting in the Caucasus is a reminder that Islam exists in many different forms. In the heartland of the Muslim world, the Middle East, the wave of Islamic militancy appears to be receding. In the early i98os, the years immediately after the Iranian revolution, the Arab countries and Turkey felt themselves most vulnerable to political Islam.

Those expectations are now subsiding. Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia — all countries that experienced serious Islamic opposition — have survived, bruised but intact. Even Algeria, where Islamism took the most violent form and was suppressed with particular harshness, seems to have entered a more hopeful phase.

In the Caucasus and Central Asia, as in former Yugoslavia, the moment of opportunity for political Islam came a decade or so later, with the collapse of communism, and so the new Islamic movements are younger and still developing. They are a powerful and potentially destabilising force, but they are no more destined to win power than their equivalents elsewhere.

Реферат опубликован: 24/05/2008