cc >> welcome, everybody. my name is yoshiko herrera. i'm the director of the center for russia, east europe, and central asia and also in the political science department. it's our pleasure today to sponsor via creeca, a faculty
roundtable on boston, chechnya, and terrorism. and we have three faculty members here. to my left, the first, on the far left, is andrew kydd from political science, next is ted gerber from sociology, and next to me here is uli schamiloglu
from languages and cultures of asia who is also the director of the middle east studies program, the middle east studies program and the central asian studies program. so, we're going to go in order of left to right, and our hope is to provide a little bit of
insight into the general context of terrorism and then, more specifically, into the situation in russia, chechnya, and political islam. so let's start first with professor kydd, who's going to speak on the more general question of terrorism.
>> thanks, and thanks everybody, for coming. so, my job is to try to place this in the context of recent terrorist attacks and terrorism as a phenomenon in general. so i'm going to look at the attack, just very briefly, and the perpetrators, then compare
it to recent terrorist attacks and foiled plots and failed terrorist attacks, and think about it in terms of that comparison in terms of the casualties, to some extent the methods and connections to the outside world, and then a few other points of comparison to
keep it in perspective. so, what do we know about the boston bombing? just a basic overview. it's monday, two weeks ago, the 15th of april at the finish line of the boston marathon. a couple of hours after the winners finished but still when
a lot of other people were coming in and around, two bombs detonated, made from pressure cookers as we subsequently discovered, packed with ball bearings and nails and explosives. so, fairly primitive bombs but nonetheless capable of doing a
fair amount of damage. the direct casualties were three killed, and then a subsequent casualty was the police officer at mit who was killed on friday of that week when the suspects sort of went on the rampage that led to their being killed and captured, respectively.
so, three fatalities plus one subsequently, 264 injured, and 14 amputees, and that is somewhat unusual in this context in the sense that it's attributed, in part, to the bombs being placed on the ground. and so people were getting hit
low down rather than higher up in their bodies. if the same injuries had been sustained higher up in their bodies, more people would have died. the perpetrators were two brothers, as we've all learned, tamerlan and dzhokhar tsarnaev.
i'm sure the other panelists can pronounce those names better than i can. immigrated to the united states in 2002. the older brother was married and had a three-year-old child. the younger brother is a naturalized american citizen,
naturalized in september of 2012. so he became a citizen less than a year before he detonated the bomb, which is another interesting point of comparison in the sense that other bombers, one of the uk bombers in july of 2005 was also a naturalized
citizen who had just been naturalized a year before he committed the bombing, which raises questions for a lot of people like why would you become an american citizen if you hate the country so much that you want to perpetrate a terrorist attack of that kind so soon
afterwards. at what point in the process of the naturalization, because it's a long process to become a naturalized citizen, at what point did he decide to become a terrorist, and why would he continue on with that process? so, putting this in the context
of other terrorist attacks, 9/11 of course is the most famous and for justifiable reasons. almost 3,000 people dead. that's off the charts, though, in terms of terrorist casualties. an order of magnitude greater than the nearest competitors.
but nonetheless, of course, very salient. oklahoma city, the next biggest terrorist attack in the united states, killed 164 people, 165 people. but, of course, that was a lone wolf attack. timothy mcveigh was, relatively
speaking, alone. he had one helper, but he wasn't part of an organized group in any sense. it was a pretty lone wolf sort of operation. the '93 world trade center bombing by ramzi yousef killed six, injured 1,000.
so, many more injuries and a few more fatalities than the boston bombing. he was trained in afghanistan and aided by his uncle khalid sheikh mohammed, who was the mastermind for the 9/11 attack as well subsequently. and after that, you're basically
out of successful bombings in terms of inside the united states. there really aren't any more to speak of. another successful attack, in some sense, is the fort hood shooting in 2009 where nidal hasan, who was in the united
states army, a muslim in the united states army, purchased a semiautomatic handgun and shot 13 people, injured 30. he was inspired, in part, by anwar al-awlaki, who was an american radical preacher who subsequently left the united states and spent time in
primarily yemen and was inspirational for a lot of subsequent attackers. he was subsequently killed by an american drone strike. if you go abroad, the prominent points of comparison are the london july 7th bombing, 7/7, in british parliament, 7/7/2005.
subway bombings and bus bombing, 52 people dead there. 700 injured. also inspired by al-qaeda directly and interestingly accompanied by political demands such that the uk get out of iraq, among other things. so, very clearly an act of
terrorism in that case. and the madrid bombing in 2004, the year previously. 191 killed in that bombing and 1,800 injured by a local extremist. inspired by al-qaeda but not clearly linked, not clearly trained by them.
so, an indication of how very deadly even local extremists without direct external support can be. if you compare it to recent terrorists plots, recent terrorist plots that didn't go all the way and didn't succeed, we've all heard of richard reid,
the so-called shoe bomber, the reason why we all have to take off our shoes in airports these days unless you're 12 years or younger nowadays. that was in 2001. umar abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber of 2009, tried to bring down a plane, also
linked to anwar al-awlaki in yemen. those attacks being on aircraft, if they would have succeeded, would have downed the aircraft killing in the neighborhood of 300 people. and then, of course, the times square bomber very kind of
directly comparable recently. 2010, the times square bomber, big car bomb placed in an suv in times square. faisal shahzad was pakistani born, a us citizen as of 2009, the year before he committed the attack. traveled to pakistan and also
linked and aspired to al-awlaki. so there are many points of comparison as well. it's a serious terrorist attack. it could have been much worse with actually fairly minor tactical adjustments on the part of the bombers. if they had placed the bombs
higher up so the injuries had been sustained in people's mid-regions, they would have died rather than had amputations. perhaps if they had gone inside somewhere in a crowded place. if you put a bomb outside in an open area, it's fairly easy to
just dissipate the explosive force. and these guys were sort of inspired, at least in a vague way, by muslim extremism and the plight of chechnya, which we'll hear a lot more about in a second. however, some interesting
aspects of this bombing are, number one, it's not clearly linked to any external organization. there's not al-qaeda there. there's not even an inspirational figure like al-awlaki, as far as we can tell so far anyway.
we may be wrong about that. but certainly no organization provided them with training, with funds, with the kind of help that were instrumental, in fact essential, for the 9/11 plot, for the attack on the world trade center in '93, and for some of the other bombing
plots as well. so, we seem to have a very sort of if not lone wolf at least doable attack here. not linked to any external organization and not accompanied by any political demands, which leaves some people to question whether it should actually be
called terrorism at all given that there's no organization behind it and there's not demands being made. it sort of seems like expressive violence in some sense rather than actually politically motivated instrumental violence, violence that's designed to get
somebody to do something otherwise than they're already doing. and it's relatively unsuccessful in that comparison. in terms of the number killed and the number injured, relatively unsuccessful. it's kind of illustrative, i
think, of a trend towards less well-organized attacks, less effective plots with the degrading of al-qaeda's central command, less well-supported from abroad, less well-funded, more spontaneous, almost casual, kind of expressive in their nature.
almost sort of part of the cultural repertoire now, like school shootings and things like that. it's not as if it's part of a strategy of an organization, a set of tactics that have been well-conceived to achieve a certain goal.
and just to put it, also, into a broader context to finish up, in terms of the reaction, it's, of course, a devastating event. i don't want to take anything away from that or from the families of the victims who died, from the people who were injured and their families, etc,
and the city of boston was very resilient and responded in a great way. but in terms of how aggressively we should react and how we should think about muslims or think about other issues, i think it's important not to think of this as an apocalyptic
event. it's not an apocalyptic event at all when you place it in the context of what's happened in the united states that very week. the west, texas, fertilizer plant blew up and killed 15 people and injured 160.
that was two days after this shooting. on april 15th, according to a database that keeps track of these things, 14 people were killed in gun violence in the united states, homicides and various gun violent events. in 2004, the year for which i
found data on this, nine people per day on average drowned in this country. so, if you place terrorism on the scale of bad things that happen to people in the united states, it's actually fairly low down on the scale. the chance of dying of a
states, if you consider from 1970 to 2007, that's included 9/11 of course, '70 to 2007 is one in 3.5 million on an annual basis, which is way behind traffic accidents at one in 8,200, homicide, and drowning in bathtubs. so, in terms of the level of
catastrophe, it's not on the scale of other things, and we should, perhaps, temper our reactions accordingly. >> okay, great. thank you very much, professor kydd, and next we have professor ted gerber from the sociology department, also a former
director of creeca, and generally an expert on demography as well as on russian sociology and politics. >> thank you. so, i do have some visual aids. let me just see if i can operate this. okay, good.
so, i'm going to talk about chechnya and give some of the background about recent developments in the last two decades in chechnya, an overview, but also talk some about the problem of terrorism within russia in particular that has been associated with
conflicts in chechnya. so, chechnya is a very tiny little region. it's sort of equivalent to an american state in terms of its political status within the russian federation. as you can see there, if you look at the scale, it's barely a
hundred kilometers across and width-wise. it's found in the larger region of the north caucasus. so the caucasus region refers to a mountain range in that area. it's an isthmus between the black sea and the caspian sea in the southern edge of russia's
borders. and the northern regions there, karachay-cherkessia, kabardino-balkaria, north ossetia, ingushetia and so forth, dagestan, those are all part of the russian federation today, and those are typically referred to as the north
caucasus in distinction to the south caucasus which consist of the countries of georgia and azerbaijan, both of which border russia, and then armenia, which is just to the north of those two countries. so, chechnya, this whole region has typically been a very
conflict ridden region. it was very difficult for the russian empire to subdue this territory. chechnya in particular, by and large you could say came under russian control in the early 19th century. although, like other of these
sorts of regions in this larger area of the north caucasus, the chechens were always rebellious and resisted russian control, violently at times. so, whenever the russian government has gone through periods of weakness there has typically been a period of
insurrection or insurgency centered in chechnya but also in some of the neighboring areas. so, most recently then, moving ahead, whoops, i was never good at these things. okay, so i wanted to give a brief timeline of key events in chechnya since the early 1990s.
so, the soviet union collapsed in 1992, and this, of course, was one of those periods of weakness of the russian federal states because there was a lot of turmoil, a lot of uncertainty about what would transpire within the russian governments after the soviet union
collapsed. and there was, at the time, a series of protests, street protests, within the chechen republic in its capital of grozny demanding independence and freedom. they established sort of a movement for independence with
its parliament and its representative bodies. and ultimately they elected or they chose a fellow named dzhokhar dudayev, who had been a colonel in the russian air force, as their leader. and he claimed independence from russia in 1992, and then the
republic adopted a constitution establishing itself as a secular state. so, in terms of islam, so the chechens historically had been an islamic people. they've never been known for being especially devout in terms of their practice of islam.
and it's noteworthy that initially they established quite explicitly as a secular state. well, the russian government eventually decided it didn't want to put up with having one of its republics secede, effectively, from the russian federation, and boris yeltsin,
the president of russia, was concerned about the precedent that would set for other republics. so at the end of 1994, the russian government sent in military troops to essentially bring the republic to a heel resulting in the first chechen
war which lasted until 1996. this was a very brutal campaign, very unpopular in russia. at the time, there was widespread coverage of aerial bombings, for example, of the capital of grozny. on news reports you can see imagery of very harsh military
actions, casualties, civilians. there was much criticism of the campaign in the russian press and, as a result, it became a real thorn in president yeltsin's side. he sought an end to the conflict, and so a ceasefire was brokered by an individual named,
a general in the russian army named lebedev, who then subsequently died in a mysterious helicopter accident as his popularity was soaring. so, in 1996, there was a ceasefire, but there was never really a settlement to the conflict between chechnya and
russia. so, chechnya became a de facto independent state and rapidly descended into lawlessness without the power of the russian state to sort of keep things under control. you had roving bands of warlords and so forth.
also, at the same time, the chechen cause became something of a minor -- within the islam jihadist world. because they were muslim people, because they had been attacked brutally by the force of the russian military, al-qaeda and other islamic, international
islamic extremist groups begin to take up the chechen cause as one of the jihadist causes, and you had the influx of muslim extremists into the country. so, many argue that this was actually the time that islam came to be a factor in sort of what had up to that point
been largely secessionist movement pitting insurgents against the russian government. so, there was an influx of a number of individuals from places like saudi arabia and jordan and so forth into chechnya. there were attempts to impose
sharia law, sometimes at local levels, sometimes more broadly. there was widespread chaos. there were a lot of kidnappings of various diplomats and human rights activists, journalists, russian government representatives, and then there were some incursions into
neighboring territories by chechen radicals during this intervening period of de facto independence. then, in 1999, there were a series of bombings that took place in moscow apartment buildings, and these were blamed on the chechens by the russian
government. although, there has been some controversy that there are those who see actually that this was a conspiracy on the part of the fsb, which is the russian successor to the kgb, in order to whip up anti-chechen frenzy. at any rate, all the public
discussion of these apartment bombings, they were laid at the hands of the chechens, and, as a result, russia then sent in troops once again in a campaign spearheaded by, at the time, prime minister vladimir putin. now, this time the campaign was very different.
it was similar in that it was remarkably harsh and brutal and ruthless in terms of all out war, destructive, bringing to bear the whole destructive force of the russian military into it consisted of sort of mop up operations or cleansing operations where they would
seize entire villages and take the men away and put them into camps. there many allegations of torture and rape, brutality. i can go into some of the episodes, but basically it was an all out very brutal military campaign.
eventually, the chechen insurgency was really brought to heel, was really defeated. there were still isolated groups in the mountains but they did inflict guerillas type casualties on the russian forces. so, putin, by the mid-2000s, at
that point he was president, he wanted to bring the conflict to an end. there were concerns in the russian public about the levels of russian casualties. so, basically, he adopted a strategy of chechenizing the conflict.
so he identified some former rebels, a father and son team actually. so the father was akhmad kadyrov, and he was elected president of chechnya in 2004 or in 2003. then he was assassinated by an explosion in 2004, and then his
son actually became prime minister in 2006. ramzan kadyrov, who remains in charge of chechnya today. oops, i keep going back. okay, so, under kadyrov the military conflict has been completely chechenized. that is, russia as a formal
military presence was quickly brought down to near zero. and kadyrov has ruled the country really with an iron hand with his group of loyal soldiers who are called the -- because they really have loyalty to him. there was an involvement of islamic radicals in the course
of the second war in particular. most of them have been either captured or for the most part instead killed. so, for example, aslan maskhadov who was the nominal head of the resistance movement was killed in 2005. shamil basayev, a well-known
terrorist who was behind a number of terrorist acts in russia, was killed in 2006. these groups really have been defeated, and there's really no insurgency to speak of in chechnya today. it's, instead, ruled by a brutal dictator, this kadyrov, who,
with russian support, has persecuted his opponents using extremely violent means. he's been wildly criticized for human rights violations. so any criticism, any sign of opposition has been ruthlessly suppressed. he's adopted some very
conservative social policies and so forth. some of his opponents have been famous journalists, russian human rights journalists, who've reported on some of these abuses have been killed. anna politkovskaya was murdered in her moscow apartment building
in 2006. more recently, natalya estemirova was abducted and then shot to death in chechnya. part of kadyrov's success has come from the backing of the russian government, which has pumped millions and millions of rubles into the republic in
order to rebuild it. by all accounts, i've never actually been to chechnya, but by all accounts, there are many sort of fancy new buildings in grozny. the city was completely raised during the military campaign, but now it has lots of sparkly,
shiny new buildings, water parks, zoos. kadyrov has a bit of a cult of personality thing going on. he does things like hire professional soccer teams for him to play against with his chechen team, and of course he scores five goals and defeats
them. he's famous for having these big parties. he brings in, for example, he's had, at his recent birthday party, he paid a lot of money to bring in hillary swank as one of his guests, and when human rights watch found out about
this they were very critical of hillary swank, and she had to apologize and say, oh, my gosh, i had no idea that this was such a bad guy who tortured people personally and so forth. she gave the money back. but, nonetheless, there has been sort of stability with respect
to the insurgency in chechnya itself. in the meantime, however, the violence has spread from chechnya to the neighboring republics, especially ingushetia and dagestan where there recently have been a real surge, a wave of low level sorts of
terrorists attacks. it's not really clear how much of it is islamic terrorism and how much of it is just criminal activity, how much of it is people angry because the russian troops have detained their relatives. but there is sort of low level
smoldering violence, particularly in dagestan and ingushetia. also, in russia itself, there's a growing backlash among the russian people who are angry about the government spending money. so, alexei navalny, who rose to
prominence in the protest following the duma and presidential elections of just over a year ago, he helped promote this phrase "stop feeding the caucasus" as one of the sort of slogans to rally russian nationalists, saying it's enough of giving money to
the caucasus region. and then finally, most of recently of all, just a few weeks ago the famous magnitsky list came out. this is a list of russian politicians who have been deemed guilty of human rights violations and therefore banned
from traveling to the united states or for holding bank accounts in the united states. there were two lists. one of them was a public list, and there was a secret list. and it turned out that kadyrov himself was named on the secret magnitsky list.
he gave a public press conference where he said this is ridiculous, the united states can go to hell, i don't belong on this list. but the timing of this particular incident is particularly interesting perhaps from that perspective.
okay, so, then what is the role, i want to make it clear... oops, once again i've managed to go the wrong way. there we go. so, there's no question that chechen insurgents, rebels, terrorists, whatever you want to call them, in fact, putin, just
last weekend in one of these sort of telephone call-in shows he does once a year, he went to great lengths to say that this boston bombing shows once again no one would listen to us. everybody tells us these are insurgents or these are secessionists or these are
rebels. they're not. they're terrorists. i've been trying to say all along that there are islamic terrorists who are trying to destroy us, and once again we see proof of this. well, this is sort of the line
he took after 9/11 as well. but the reality is that there have been a large number of terrorist acts perpetrated within russia, some with which substantial casualties that various chechen rebel groups have claimed responsibility for. so, i've listed some of the key
signature events up there. so, i put the apartments bombings, as i said, first of all, those killed 300 people. they weren't trivial by any means. there are some claims this was actually a conspiracy by the fsb.
this has never been demonstrated. i'm reluctant to come out and say that i think there is strong evidence in favor of it, but i can say a little bit more about the anecdotal evidence that suggests it might be the case in the q&a.
but, aside from that one, there's really not much controversy. all the rest of these clearly have been perpetrated by groups associated with radicals in so, for example, there was a seizure of a theater in moscow, a production of the play
nord-ost in 2002 in which 129 hostages died when the federal troops gassed the theater in order to demobilize the terrorists and went in. there was a moscow metro bombing which killed 40 people in 2004. the well-known and infamous siege of a school in beslan, a
small town in north ossetia, on the first day of school in september 2004. resulted in 330 deaths. at the same time, roughly, two airplanes were downed by bombs, bombing attacks, killing 89 there was an attack in nalchik, the capital of the neighboring
republic of kabardino-balkaria, in which dozens were killed in firefights throughout the downtown in 2005. more recently in the last four or five years, there was a train bombing of a train between moscow and st. petersburg that killed 39.
there were suicide bombings in the moscow metro in 2010, killing 40. and then in domodedovo airport, which i'm sure yoi and uli have been to. i don't know about andy. i've certainly been to it many times.
there was a bombing that killed 35 people in 2011. all these attacks were claimed by the chechens, some of them by basayev and others. so there doesn't seem to be much dispute that there really was terrorist activity within russia that originated in chechnya.
so it was not the case, as some expected, that the chechens have only been victimized in this scenario. they have perpetrated terrorist acts in which innocent civilians have been killed in russia, including schoolchildren. okay, so, i want to raise sort
of three questions which i don't necessarily have the answer to. so, one question that scholars have debated is, to what extent, within in chechnya and within the region more generally, have these conflicts been based on islamic radicalism versus pure secessionist aspirations?
that is, to what extent is it just a case of minority, small minority ethnic groups aspiring to be independent from russia, being unhappy with russian rule, and fighting for their independence versus islamists who are seeking to establish a sort of khalifat spanning the
region of salafist-oriented islam? and there are american policy wonks and advisers and prominent scholars in washington, dc, think-tanks who argue that russia really does face a major islamist threat. that this is a case of jihadists
moving into russia, going into russia's soft southern underbelly and trying to foment in violence and create and independent islamic republic. there are those who are skeptical of this view and argue that actually this is really driven by sort of long-term
historical grievances and secessionist impulses. and yes, the islamists have seen this as an opportunity, they have sent people in, there has been some attempt, but that the role of islam in all of this has been really overblown and overstated.
then what about anti-americanism in chechnya and north caucasus? well, in fact there's really very little evidence that anti-americanism, even among the islamists who've been active there, has played a big role. if anything, the united states has generally been perceived as
a potential, not so much an ally of the secessionists, insurgents, whatever you want to call them, but at least a force has been critical of the russian government, that has stood up for human rights, and that might be seen as a source of positive public opinion in the cause for
chechen liberation. the united states historically is viewed as an enemy of russia and the russian government, and i do have a little bit of data which i'll put up there. so, i did a survey, not in chechnya but in the neighboring republics of dagestan,
kabardino-balkaria, and north ossetia, in 2006, and this is a survey exclusively of young men. so, we did ask how they feel about different ethnic, religious, and national groups. and looking at this, you can see this is the percentage of people who say they view this group
either with dislike or with fear. and so in dagestan, the most heavily islamic of these three regions, there is somewhat over 20% say they view americans with dislike or fear. interestingly enough, that's not really too different from the
percentage who view chechens in the same way. and moreover, the difference between muslims and non-muslims within these republics tend to be very scant. so the punchline is, yes, there is some anti-americanism in these republics, but actually,
there's a lot of anti-americanism in russia more generally. and the levels of anti-americanism you see from the survey data in these republics don't differ at all, nor do they vary along religious and secretarian lines.
so, basically, i don't think there's much evidence at all that anti-americanism is a particularly pronounced or especially widespread phenomena in these areas. finally, then, the question of course arises. so, given that the violence has
spread outside of chechnya, that there's currently a very vicious and brutal regime in chechnya, itself, and perhaps there are signs, i certainly don't think that this, i don't know, i'm not an fbi investigator, but i don't think that the tsarnaev brothers received instructions
or were trained for this act in the region. i think the evidence is coming out that suggests that that's not the case. but why does this even come up as a question? well, they happen to be ethnic chechens, although they don't
seem to have spent any time in chechnya to speak of. but why do we associate terrorism with this area? well, of course, there have been terrorist acts, as i've noted, but the question rises, to what extent russia government policies itself in the extremely
harsh policies that russia has really been implementing in the regions since the early '90s in its successive wars and in support for a very brutal dictator, to what extent have they contributed to the problem by fomenting more extremism, more violence in a continuing
cycle of retribution? okay, so that's really what i have to say, and i'll pass the floor on then to uli. >> great. thanks very much, ted. and next we have professor uli schamiloglu from languages and cultures of asia and one of the
leading experts on campus on central asia. >> thank you very much, yoi, and i'd like to thank creeca for organizing this event. and that was a very, very thorough treatment of chechnya by my colleague and friend, ted gerber.
and i'll step back a bit and ask, is this really about chechnya and is this really about islam? and he alluded to some of that as well. so the first thing that i'd like to do is start with a quote that my friend paul goble says that
dzhokhar dudayev actually said, he said, apparently, and this is quotes, "i'm a good muslim; i pray three times a day." and so, i'm not sure about the authenticity of this, but it's just kind of an opening to the whole question about who were the chechens, what is chechen
islam about, and what is soviet islam about. so the first thing then is let's just say a couple of words about traditional chechen society and traditional chechen religion, not because that's going to explain who the chechens are and why these bombing attacks took
place because i don't want to follow religious determinism in this case, but i do want to contrast the differences about what chechen society used to be, what's it's become, what chechen religion has become about, what the influences are, and to what extent does that have anything
to do with the tsarnaev brothers. so, first of all, in the pre-soviet era, so in the 19th century, chechen society was very heavily organized on clans and clan unions, and chechen islam is very, very heavily influenced by sufism or islamic
mysticism. so, you had the prominence of the kulderekorder order, which is an offshoot of the --, also the --, and so, this is not the place to go into a long discourse of what islamic mysticism is about, but in general, mysticism is about a
closer, personal relationship with god. in the case of islam, there's the cult of the prophet muhammad, for example, through poems celebrating the birth of the prophet muhammad. and, at the same time in various societies like in north africa
or in the caucasus, these orders can also serve as informal or underground networks. and in the case of the north caucasus, this was very important in the anti-colonial resistance in the 19th century. and one of the famous individuals connected to that
was sheikh shamil, i'm not related to him by the way. and so, he was captured by the russians in 1859, and he was, at the same time, a religious leader and an anti-colonial resistance leader, one might say. so, in soviet times, chechens
became very secularized just like most muslims in the ussr. so, basically, to what extent was knowledge, esoteric knowledge that the sufi orders through their leaders would preserve, to what extent was that one generation away from dying out completely.
it's not clear to me how much continuity there is in terms of pre-soviet times knowledge about esoteric islam and these mystical traditions and whether what we have today to the extent that we have it is a direct continuation or is it sometimes the kind of invention of
traditions trying to revive earlier practices? and so, this strong secularization of muslims in the ussr is reflected in the background of the tsarnaev family. so, this is a very complex case. there's lots of new developments
and news reports that come out every day, but, certainly in the case of the father of the tsarnaev brothers, it doesn't sound like he's a devout muslim necessarily at all, and there have been hints that he may have been involved even in security forces and so on which might
have been, in fact, fighting islamic forces and insurgencies. and if you've seen the uncle on television when he was interviewed from his home in maryland, he looks very much like a homo sovieticus, one of these very non-religious persons who, in fact, even felt the
radicalization or islamization of the tsarnaev brothers, of the older brother, tamerlan tsarnaev, to be something that he found as cause for concern, and even complained to the family about this. now, whether there was somebody in cambridge who radicalized
that brother or not, that's a whole other issue. and there's many conflicting reports, and if i remember, i'll get back to that later on. so, the thing is that there is this deep secularization, and that's a tradition that this family comes out of.
there's several other aspects to history, and i'll just touch upon it very, very briefly. it's also worth keeping in mind that in 1944 at the height of world war ii, stalin instituted the deportation of many peoples from the north caucasus. so, crimean tatars and chechens,
ingush, --, crimean tatars, volga germans, and so on, and they were put in internal exile in cattle cars to central asia and whatever, 30% died in route to central asia. so that is an important fact that's relevant here too because the tsarnaev brothers spent a
good part of their childhood in kurdistan. and if you go to the website of radio free europe radio liberty, so rferl.org, you can find interviews with people from that village in kurdistan where they are with english subtitles and so on.
so, they didn't grow up in kurdistan, and if it was up to ramzan kadyrov, the president of chechnya, they grew up in the united states, a us phenomenon. so there's that aspect too. so, from 1957 on, some chechens and north caucasians and others returned to their homelands.
that's also led to a conflicted situation because people, other ethnicities were now occupying their homes and so on. so, you had a generation which either grew up in dislocation or then returned and had another kind of dislocation. so that's kind of some
background that's relevant. i'll tie that into a couple of things later on. so, we had, in the 1980s there was a really important phenomenon, and that was, of course, the soviet invasion of afghanistan in late 1979, and that was a real major
phenomenon, historical phenomenon of the 1980s. and that's relevant, in part, because ahmed rashid reports, for example, in his book on the taliban that in 1989 he saw all kinds of citizens of what was then the ussr on the border between pakistan and kabul.
so there were lots of people who were representing central asian nationalities, maybe caucasian nationalities that were muslim and so on, fighting in afghanistan among the mujahideen. and, of course, after 9/11 the word mujahideen, or struggler
for jihad, has a bad connotation, but of course, in ronald reagan's day, those were the freedom fighters that we supported, that the united states, saudi arabia, and pakistan supported. so those people who became radicalized in the struggle
against the atheist communists were radicalized through the support of your, or your parents taxpayer dollars, including stinger missiles of course. so, one of the things that afghanistan attracted were, in addition to osama bin laden, various citizens of
arabic-speaking countries, of arab countries, who became known as the arab afghans. and as ted said, once you had the chechen war of '94-'96, this became, he says a minor cause celebre, i think it's more than minor. i think it became a major cause
celebre for the jihadists. and so, you had, i don't know the numbers, but there was some kind of trickle or stream of jihadists from afghanistan or wherever they were, some of them arab, some of them returning soviet citizens and so on or former soviet citizens who now
saw the struggle or the war in chechnya as an important struggle that was their own in terms of global jihad. so, in the past, chechnya had this kind of more mysticism inspired islam. in soviet times it was secular. and when we talk about radical
islam or we talk about salafi islam, muslims who were trying to live like in the times of the prophet muhammad as companions, or wahhabis, which is kind of related, but that's the official creed in saudi arabia that came into being in the 18th century as a reaction to popular islam
and as a rejection of sufism, so of islamic mysticism. and it's the stern kind of islam where women aren't driving and you're not going to hear music and so on, and it's really not representative of the muslim world as a whole. it's very much at one of the
spectrum. so it was people with those kinds of beliefs because the mujahideen were supported by saudi arabia in part and they were supporting the most conservative elements of the mujahideen or of the resistance, and they were not popular with
the northern alliance of -- or general dostum and others. so this was the first time you had the beginning, historically maybe not the first time, but early 20th century there were things too, but let's say in terms of a major infusion of what you might call orthodox
islam or bare bones wahhabi or salafist islam and this jihad tradition, this really came during the time of the chechen war. but that's not where these tsarnaev brothers grew up either. and there's one additional
footnote to that first chechen if you look at maps of oil pipeline routes, it's very striking how so many of those were crossing through grozny. that's very, very interesting. so, let me just try to kind of move on and go to kind of a close.
so, chechnya is important. these guys are ethnic chechens or half ethnic chechen as yoi might say. and so, but chechnya was not where they grew up. it's kurdistan. they've had the united states and other stops.
and so, what we see in the chechnya of ramzan kadyrov, who's receiving strong support from moscow to impose order, he's kind of representing a new fusion of chechen nationalism and in a way kind of his own specific and special brand of this kind of new age mystical
islam. but next door to chechnya is dagestan, and dagestan was mentioned by ted. and dagestan is a really other important focus that we need to kind of say a few words about, and then i'll conclude or i'll stop.
so next door. so there you have this kind of very islamic part of the russian federation, and probably in the whole territory of the former ussr, it's the most heavily re-islamized place with lots of islamic universities and so on. half of the russia quota for the
haj goes to people from dagestan, and they think it's not enough. there you see a struggle, an ongoing struggle. civil society is in danger in dagestan, and you have the salafists there who may be leading some kind of insurgency.
and they're in conflict with those people who are representing the more traditional sufi inspired islam there. and so, dagestan is important in part because the older brother, tamerlan tsarnaev, spent much of 2012 in dagestan.
and i'm basing this on news reports. it's not just things like the boston globe and new york times, but there are english translations of various kinds of accounts from the russian press, moscow times, muckraking and lies from -- and other kinds of
sources that are doing a lot of interesting reporting, and a lot of it conflicts so you don't really know what's right. but the thing is that the older brother, tamerlan, spent much of we don't know quite what he did there, but there are fresh allegations in the press from
the last several days and in the us analytical science, like the jamestown foundation and so on, questioning, wondering whether he contacted a one mahmud mansur nidal. i don't know what his ethnicity is. it could be an arab name.
it could be something else. who is considered to be a recruiter for the dagestani insurgency and who was killed in a shootout on may 19, 2012. there's also speculation that he may have met with a canadian convert to islam, william plotnikov, who was killed in a
shootout on july 14, 2012. and tamerlan tsarnaev apparently left makhachkala, the capital of dagestan, about two days later. he had extensively gone to makhachkala, to dagestan, to see family and to get a russian passport, but he left, apparently, without picking up
his russian passport. now, according to the french scholar of political islam, olivier roy, or olivier roy if you're looking for it, r-o-y. so, for islamists in al-qaeda and others, it was never really about the core territories of the middle east, but rather
places like bosnia and afghanistan and, in the '90s, chechnya, and today it's more like mali, mauritania, and and so, as is the case with some lone islamist bombers and murderers in europe, these individuals discovered islam in europe, or in the case of the
tsarnaev brothers in cambridge, massachusetts. and one of the issues about these kinds of loners is that they're not necessarily integrated into muslims communities, and even tamerlan had a falling out with the local mosque.
i believe it was with regard to martin luther king. i think it was about that. so, it's not clear in the end whether the tsarnaev brothers were really motivated by and just today i read on one blog, american blog, a posting pointing out that based upon
media reports, the younger brother, dzhokhar, had become and american citizen, but the older brother, tamerlan, was denied citizenship. and so, after that, i think after that, so he had this dream of trying to gain naturalization as an american citizen by
gaining a spot on the us olympic boxing team, and he had competed in the regional golden gloves competition. he was not successful and he was hoping to compete again in the following year, but the next year the rules were changed, disqualifying permanent
residents who were not citizens from participating. so, is it possible, and i'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but that's a picture of somebody who really, really wants very, very hard to become an american, or a us citizen, and then his dreams are
taken away from him. so, is it, in the end, possible that he became disillusioned because he wanted to be an american too much? otherwise there's little evidence for a cell in boston that would have radicalized him, statements by his uncle about a
supposed misha to the contrary. so, in the end, did he self-radicalize in a western environment, which is a phenomenon that olivier roy describes for europe? and if so, perhaps we can follow roy in saying that in the end this is less about religion and
perhaps more similar to columbine. thank you. >> well, thank you very much to all of our panelists. i just want to reiterate a couple of questions before opening it up to the audience that came out of some of the
presentations. the first was that in political science we would typically define terrorism as some kind of act of violence that has a specific political message or appeal. as andy mentioned, we haven't, so far, uncovered evidence of a
so i think it is actually, even though we sort of talk about it assuredly as if it is an act of terror, i think it's actually a question to say, is it an act, it's an act of violence for sure, but is it terrorism per se? just as the same way with
columbine or sandy hook or some of these other acts of violence we wouldn't necessarily classify those as terrorist. i think the chechen connection is another question to ask given what we've just learned about chechnya and the chechen there's lots of evidence that
there's been terrorist acts by chechens, especially within russia, but what is the chechen connection here? so, the father is chechen. the mother is avar. that's one of the 20 major, let's say, ethnic groups in this neighboring region of dagestan.
so, dagestan is a much harder phenomenon, i think, for americans to understand because it doesn't have one group of dagestanis. there's a lot of different people that live there. and i just think it's interesting if we said these two
brothers are dagestani, their mother is avar, she's from dagestan, what would we make of it would be harder for us to say what that means because we don't have a narrative of dagestan much less avar or what it means to be avar. but that's where he spent time
was in makhachkala there on the caspian sea. so, i just think that's an interesting question to ask about the chechen connection. and then, as uli brought up, the connection to islam also. is there a connection to islam maybe that's different from the
connection, if there is one, to chechnya or even to dagestan or russia? and how would we evaluate that? and then, finally, as uli brought up, there's also potentially personal factors, mental illness, there could be other things on the table.
so, thank you to the panelists. [applause]
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