Roots of Islamic Terrorism: How Communists Helped Fundamentalists
This article traces the roots of Islamic terrorism, with special focus on Afghanistan. Notes are added on practical and philosophical problems of world media in finding the right track. From systematic errors in revealing little details, to serious misconceptions about basic facts and principles, we can relatively easily learn how much of "common knowledge" rests actually on superficial research and popular myths. Instead of becoming critical and aware of the traps laid around the issue, both Islamists and Islamophobes fail to recognize how they are manipulated.
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While Niyazov and Chernomyrdin had personal financial interests to support the Taliban, US Vice President Al Gore signed the infamous 1995 US-Russian weapons agreement, which exempted Russia from sanctions, although Russia would sell arms to Iran. This secret agreement violated the rules of 1992, by the US Congress. Gore's excuse was that Russia agreed upon not selling nuclear technology, and to stop all arms exports to Iran by the end of 1999.
This, of course, never happened, and when the failed agreement was leaked to The New York Times in October 2000, Russia declared its intention not to keep it anyway. (Reuters 31.10. and 22.11.2000)
The case illustrates how deeply Chernomyrdin was involved in businesses with Islamic extremists, and how Russia succeeded in having Bill Clinton's administration participate in shady deals against American public interests. There were also rumours of promised concessions in the pipeline projects, or in financial support to Gore's presidential campaign. Gore's loss at the November 2000 elections was a devastating surprise for Russian political establishment.
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Soviet Islamists in Russia
Islamists in modern Russia are KGB-trained provocateurs, who fight traditions and nationalism, and dream about a re-established Soviet Union. Their perception of Islam resembles more a Communist caricature than the historical roots of ethnically mainly Caucasian and Tatar Muslims. To understand the development to this better, KGB's activities in the Middle East can be divided in five-year periods:
1968-1972 the KGB puts great hopes on international terrorism in general, and
particularly on Palestinians, and other Arab Socialists. Focus on Egypt.
1973-1977 the KGB is disappointed and Arabs are frustrated, but Saudi-sponsored
Islamism provides an alternative political ideology for promoting
anti-American and pro-Russian sentiments. Focus on Iraq.
1978-1982 the KGB puts great hopes on the "Islamic revolution" of Iran, and its
expansion to Arab countries, while exporting communism into Afghanistan.
Focus on Iran. End of Andropov's era (1967-1982) in the KGB.
1983-1987 the KGB is disappointed, but accommodated by the dominance of Islamism
over orthodox Communism in Iran. Focus on Syria and Afghanistan. End of
GRU chief Pyotr Ivashutin's era (1963-1987).
1988-1992 the KGB withdraws its "active measures" inside the Soviet borders, and
concentrates in provoking "ethnic conflicts" to divide and rule
separatists in the Caucasus and elsewhere in the disintegrating empire.
The KGB is split (1991), and the GRU has chiefs with no intelligence
background (1987-1991) but establishes huge post-Soviet military bases
in Karabakh, Abkhazia, and Transdnestria.
1993-1997 the KGB (FSB and SVR) re-establishes communist power in former Soviet
Republics (except the Baltic countries) but fails to do it in Chechnya.
Afghanistan remains divided as a new group of provocateurs, the Taliban,
emerges to challenge the freedom fighters. The GRU under Fyodor Ladygin
(1992-1997), has more resources at its disposal than the SVR under
Primakov (1991-1996).
Through these phases, Russian secret services gained a tight hold on international terrorism, and specially on Islamism. It was nothing new. During the 1920s, Soviet intelligence had succeeded in thoroughly infiltrating fiercely anti-Soviet monarchist emigrant organizations. Furthermore, "dozens of mythical organizations came into being. One of these, the 'Trust', has become well known in both Western and Soviet writings. For many years the Soviet leaders claimed to have cunningly infiltrated a monarchist resistance organization, but in the 1970s they admitted that they themselves had created it. … Similar ones attacked… the church hierarchy of every denomination; and 'nationalists' inside and outside the country, with a 'line' of provocation covering each political tendency within each major ethnic subdivision - Ukrainians, Cossacks, Armenians, Georgians, Central Asians. Fragmentary information on at least two dozen 'lines' has become known in the West through the years." (Deriabin & Bagley, p. 262 and 263)
Unfortunately, "Soviet provocation… remains little understood in the West. People safe in a democratic system may find it difficult to conceive that rulers would systematically use such hostile techniques against their own subjects." (Deriabin & Bagley, p. 252)
Back in the 1920s, anti-Soviet emigrants were compromised in front of western governments to reduce their credibility, and they were used in domestic propaganda to stage sabotage actions, to scare the populace, and to provoke dissidents into revealing themselves. This excellent experience was certainly in the minds of post-Andropov and post-Ivashutin intelligence officers, who "may in fact have launched a new golden era of provocation. … A blatant example was the work of the far-right anti-Semitic organization called Pamyat (Memory)." (Deriabin & Bagley, p. 251 and 261)
For the development of Soviet Islamism, the years 1988-1992 were crucial. The KGB fought for its very existence, and the GRU too was called to fight internal enemies within Soviet borders, instead of its traditional foreign military intelligence work. Although the GRU had fewer agents abroad than the KGB (in relation 7 to 10), it was claimed to possess more financial resources by the mid-1980s. (Kuzichkin, p. 274)
Where was the money spent when the "Cold War" was declared ended, traditional military intelligence lost motivation, and left-wing terrorist organizations of the 1970s vanished from sight?
Obviously, GRU resources were concentrated to activities within Soviet borders, to arm and train provocateurs. It is known, that special forces were called from Afghanistan to crush Crimean Tatar demonstrations in Moscow, in July 1987. They appeared soon in the bloody incidents of Tbilisi (1989) and Baku (1990), and in Baltic capitals (1991).
GRU's Afghan experience was, how to manipulate Islamists and to make Communists (of the Khalq faction) to grow beards and join their declared enemies. This "Khalq strategy" provided a successful alternative to the more orthodox "Parcham strategy" that relied on ideologically less unholy alliances. When Soviet property was privatized, the GRU naturally made money out of sale of air craft and arms.
As Finnish researcher Anssi Kullberg has recently pointed out in his well documented master's thesis on Russian geopolitics, the Islamic Renaissance Party was founded in Astrakhan, in June 1990, under KGB surveillance, to argue for a Soviet and global Islam against separatist movements among Muslim nations.
The Islamic Party of Azerbaijan was founded in 1991 by a philologist, "a typical representative of the post-Soviet lumpen-intelligentsia", who was both anti-Turkic and anti-Semitic. Its members organized the burning of an Israeli flag and training of "Islamic brigades". The party fought an international Masonic (!) conspiracy to spread the American model of civilization, until its leadership was arrested in 1996, and accused of spying for Iran. (Igor Rotar: Islamic Fundamentalism in Azerbaijan - Myth or Reality? Prism 8/2000)
Soviet sponsorship for Islamism has been exposed by a Chechen nationalist leader, Ahmad Zakayev, in a revealing booklet on "Wahhabism - Kremlin's drugs against national liberation organizations". (Dziennik Polski 30.9.2001)
Finnish Polish researcher Zofia Grodzinska-Klemetti, who visited Chechnya during and between the war years, has also stressed how both Russian and Saudi intelligence were regarded by Chechens as parallel forces undermining the peace and liberty of Chechen society. She noticed in her lecture in Helsinki on October 23rd, 2001, that anti-Semitic propaganda was always in Russian language, and that God was always addressed in Arabic, as Allah, instead of using more popular appellations in local languages. It has been very typical for western Islamists to insist on the use of God's Arabic name. Obviously, anti-Semitism did not emerge from Caucasian or Russian Turkic (Tatar) cultures, but was imported in the name of Arab-centered Islam.
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http://www.globalpolitician.com/default.asp?23436-terror-russia/
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