I'm about to do something really irresponsible, improper, and generally out of line. But unlike others who have been doing the same thing this week, I'm doing it against the stereotype blaming of an ethnic or religious group. Also it's my blog.
Remember the apartment house bombings in Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing 293 people and injuring 651? The Russian authorities blamed it on Chechen separatists (though none of the alleged leaders of the plot were brought to trial), and this was one of the two major pretexts for the Second Chechen War.
Not everybody agreed with the hypothesis, though. Two famous writers, Aleksandr Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya, believed the bombings were a wag-the-dog operation carried out by the FSB (successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and Litvinenko [jump]
in particular claimed (along with his billionaire friend Boris Berezovsky and the secessionist Chechen government) that they were meant specifically to produce the war and assure the election to the Russian presidency of then prime minister Vladimir Putin. Of course Politkovskaya was killed in October 2006, in an assassination that remains unsolved; Litvinenko blamed Putin for ordering the murder (he also claimed the FSB had tried to assassinate Berezovsky; the legal repercussions over this drove drove him into exile in England), but then he was bizarrely murdered by polonium poisoning the following month in London, in another as yet unsolved crime; Berezovsky killed himself in England last month (suspicions of murder in this case seem not to be sustainable).
Of course conspiracy theories about horrible terrorist outrages being false-flag incidents are a dime a dozen, but not many of them are predicted in advance, as this one was in June 1999, by Jan Blomgren in Svenska Dagbladet (admittedly the prediction was far less specific than suggested in Patrick Cockburn's article in the Independent, 29 January 2000).
Oh, and the other thing is, the FSB really did do it, and Putin must have known about it.
Now, it's a long way from a 1999 bombing in Moscow to a 2013 bombing in Boston, but it's a road with lots of things to look at, such as the six not very credible or corroborated Chechen plots to assassinate Putin reported by the Russian media from 2000 to 2012 (mostly just before elections). Or the fact that most of these murders of people who criticize Putin, like Politkovskaya's, are regularly chalked up in Russian media to Chechen assassins as well. Chechen terrorists are to Russian journimalists what the aether was to 17th-century physicists, a universal explanation for more or less anything.
But not for everything. When Dina Temple-Raston began to explain on NPR this morning how Chechen Islamists might feel that bombing the Boston Marathon was a good thing to do, it was pretty embarrassing (and her own lack of knowledge of the Chechnya situation was evident—no offense meant, it's not her beat), there just isn't any good explanation along those lines. And when personal details about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev began to emerge, it became pretty clear that they weren't exactly Salafists (Tamerlan was pious, but not crazy; he was a20 26-year-old boxer; Dzhokhar thinks of himself as a Russian, not a Chechen; they'd lived in the US for about five years; they were relatively well off; and they intended to get away).
Meanwhile relations between Russia and the US are at a very low point, and Putin is using the idea of a "Chechen threat" to explain his backing of the state terrorists in Syria.
Also, yesterday, before any Chechen connection in the Boston case had been imagined, Putin was offering to help the investigation. What sort of help did he have in mind? Or was he thinking of Chechens already? did he just sort of suspect on the basis of his experience that there were bound to be some Chechens in there somewhere?
If I'm saying what I think I'm saying it's making me kind of uncomfortable. If anybody else starts talking about this I'll get back to it...
Updates:
Tamerlan was not pro-Russian according to his YouTube account. He was married to a Christian woman and they had a 3-year-old kid.
They never lived in Chechnya: the family belongs to the Chechen community transplanted to Kyrgyzstan by Stalin in World War II.
A fascinating detail extrapolated by Juan Cole from the published family interviews: the boys' father has lived in Chechnya; he is said to have been an active collaborator in Chechnya with the Russians and/or the pro-Russian Kadyrov regime.
A pro-independence organization called Chechen Center explicitly claims that the Russian FSB is behind the bombings. That in itself obviously proves nothing; nor do they offer any very convincing case, or any case at all really, as to how and why it would have been done.
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| Georgia near the Chechen border. Photo by cinto2. |
Not everybody agreed with the hypothesis, though. Two famous writers, Aleksandr Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya, believed the bombings were a wag-the-dog operation carried out by the FSB (successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and Litvinenko [jump]
in particular claimed (along with his billionaire friend Boris Berezovsky and the secessionist Chechen government) that they were meant specifically to produce the war and assure the election to the Russian presidency of then prime minister Vladimir Putin. Of course Politkovskaya was killed in October 2006, in an assassination that remains unsolved; Litvinenko blamed Putin for ordering the murder (he also claimed the FSB had tried to assassinate Berezovsky; the legal repercussions over this drove drove him into exile in England), but then he was bizarrely murdered by polonium poisoning the following month in London, in another as yet unsolved crime; Berezovsky killed himself in England last month (suspicions of murder in this case seem not to be sustainable).
Of course conspiracy theories about horrible terrorist outrages being false-flag incidents are a dime a dozen, but not many of them are predicted in advance, as this one was in June 1999, by Jan Blomgren in Svenska Dagbladet (admittedly the prediction was far less specific than suggested in Patrick Cockburn's article in the Independent, 29 January 2000).
Oh, and the other thing is, the FSB really did do it, and Putin must have known about it.
Now, it's a long way from a 1999 bombing in Moscow to a 2013 bombing in Boston, but it's a road with lots of things to look at, such as the six not very credible or corroborated Chechen plots to assassinate Putin reported by the Russian media from 2000 to 2012 (mostly just before elections). Or the fact that most of these murders of people who criticize Putin, like Politkovskaya's, are regularly chalked up in Russian media to Chechen assassins as well. Chechen terrorists are to Russian journimalists what the aether was to 17th-century physicists, a universal explanation for more or less anything.
But not for everything. When Dina Temple-Raston began to explain on NPR this morning how Chechen Islamists might feel that bombing the Boston Marathon was a good thing to do, it was pretty embarrassing (and her own lack of knowledge of the Chechnya situation was evident—no offense meant, it's not her beat), there just isn't any good explanation along those lines. And when personal details about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev began to emerge, it became pretty clear that they weren't exactly Salafists (Tamerlan was pious, but not crazy; he was a
Meanwhile relations between Russia and the US are at a very low point, and Putin is using the idea of a "Chechen threat" to explain his backing of the state terrorists in Syria.
Also, yesterday, before any Chechen connection in the Boston case had been imagined, Putin was offering to help the investigation. What sort of help did he have in mind? Or was he thinking of Chechens already? did he just sort of suspect on the basis of his experience that there were bound to be some Chechens in there somewhere?
If I'm saying what I think I'm saying it's making me kind of uncomfortable. If anybody else starts talking about this I'll get back to it...
 |
| Grim Islamofascists celebrating the end of counterterrorism operations in Grozny, April 2009. Photo by Musa Sadalyadev/AP. |
Tamerlan was not pro-Russian according to his YouTube account. He was married to a Christian woman and they had a 3-year-old kid.
They never lived in Chechnya: the family belongs to the Chechen community transplanted to Kyrgyzstan by Stalin in World War II.
A fascinating detail extrapolated by Juan Cole from the published family interviews: the boys' father has lived in Chechnya; he is said to have been an active collaborator in Chechnya with the Russians and/or the pro-Russian Kadyrov regime.
A pro-independence organization called Chechen Center explicitly claims that the Russian FSB is behind the bombings. That in itself obviously proves nothing; nor do they offer any very convincing case, or any case at all really, as to how and why it would have been done.
