THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS: THE STATEHOOD ISSUE AS TREATED BY THE NATIONAL, ISLAMIC, AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS
Abstract
In the 1990s, the Northern Caucasus was swept by ideas of setting up different kinds of statehood which to a large extent determined the directions of the national, Islamic, and political movements. The problem of statehood assumed its most complicated form in Chechnia.
In the early 1990s, when Islam had just resumed its former place in the Northern Caucasus, but the Muslim leaders had not yet gained political weight and had no money to speak of, national movements pushed to the fore. Judging by their leaders’ political statements, the statehood issue was one of the priorities. In Kabardino-Balkaria (KBR), for example, the law passed by the R.S.F.S.R. Supreme Soviet, On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples, added impetus to the local and similar movements elsewhere in the region. The law not only stipulated that the formerly repressed peoples should receive privileges—it was a political document. The national movements in the republic developed “within the framework of restoring Kabardinian and Balkar statehood.”1 In the first half of the 1990s, the national movements still thought of the statehood issue as a national-territorial principle of state organization and so-called national-political self-identification. These were two major instruments of political struggle in the Caucasus.
In 1991, the leaders and supporters of the Balkar national movement adopted a Declaration on Setting up the Republic of Balkaria and the National Sovereignty of the Balkar People, the main principles of which were formulated in the Key Provisions of the Conception of the National-State Organization and the Reform of the Political System of Kabardino-Balkaria.2 In 1992, the leaders of the Kabardinian national movement, being convinced that “the statehood of the Kabardinian people was restored in 1921,” responded with a similar decision On the Restoration of the Kabardinian Republic.3 Even though both movements spoke about the peoples’ cultural resurrection and partially implemented corresponding programs,4 they were political movements first and foremost.
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Documents related to the activities of the National Council of the Balkar People, 1994-1998, from the author’s personal archives.
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See: Ibid., pp. 55, 91, 104.
Documents related to the activities of the National…
See: Kabardino-Balkarskaia pravda, No. 220, 1996.
Documents related to the activities of Malk’ar Auzy, 1997-1999, from the author’s personal archives.
Documents related to the activities of Adighe Khase, 1997-2000, from the author’s personal archives.
I.O. Basova, Gosudarstvenno-pravovaia ideologia islama i praktika stroitel’stva musul’manskikh gosudarstv.
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See: I.L. Babich, “Islamskie organizatsii i religioznaia politika vlastey,” in: Islam i pravo v Rossii, Issue 3, Pra-vovoy status islama na Severnom Kavkaze, Compiled by I.L. Babich, 2004, pp. 107-108.
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political aims. At first they tried to gain a foothold in the republic’s Spiritual Administration of the Muslims, then they moved to spreading their influence to the republic-level authorities.44 They use all opportunities to plant the ideas of an Islamic state and Islam as a state religion in the minds of the young mountain people during prayers, at all kinds of courses, in Sunday schools, etc. Some young men have already become imbibed with the idea that the future of Islam and the Islamic state are in-separable.45
Political Movements
In 2001-2005, the authorities and the power-wielding structures raised an offensive against those Islamic movements either preaching the idea of an Islamic state or engaged in corresponding political activities, and undermined their drive to a great extent.
There is a more or less widely accepted, yet fairly debatable, opinion that the North Caucasian mountain societies will not accept democracy; the Islamic leaders are actively exploiting it, while pro-moting the idea of a Muslim state. I have already written that in such a state, power and the Shari‘a are inseparable; Prof. M.-N.O. Osmanov, a well-known translator of the Koran into Russian, suggested the term “Shari‘a statehood.” This power does not rely on democracy in its Western interpretation, but is a highly special form of power—nomocracy, or the power of the law—according to L. Sjukijainen, who is widely known in Russia as an expert on Muslim law. There is a fairly substantiated idea favored by many of the Islamic leaders that the North Caucasian mountain peoples are much closer to the Muslim principles of statehood and that, if implemented, these principles would usher in modernization of all sides of the local peoples’ existence, including the nearly ruined economy. The economic changes launched in the late 1990s-early 2000s in the Russian Federation are stalling in the Northern Caucasus.
It seems that the political leaders of the region’s republics look at the conception of Islamic state-hood as part of the political process unfolding before them rather than as a necessary process and part of the Muslim faith as a whole. L. Sjukijainen has also emphasized the political aspects of the idea of the Shari‘a and an Islamic state. He has pointed out in particular that, as distinct from the Chechen radicals, the Daghestani Islamic radicals “looked at the Shari‘a as a weapon to be used primarily to fight corrupt power rather than crime.”46 At the same time, K. Gajiev has pointed out: “They [the Islamic leaders of Daghestan.—I.B.] are essentially openly preaching the pan-Islamic ideas of bringing to-gether all Muslims of the region to push Russia away from the Northern Caucasus and to set up an Islamic state there ruled by the Shari‘a.”47
It seems, however, that the Russian Muslims could resolve many of their social, economic, polit-ical, national, and cultural problems with the help of the Shari‘a. The specifics of the mountain dwellers mentality more willing to accept the “dictatorship of the Shari‘a” than the “democracy of Russia’s laws”should not only be reckoned with when creating a new legal field in the Northern Caucasus: it should be used to establish (de facto and de jure) law and order in the region to put an end to the era of lawlessness which partly dates back to the Soviet period and which reached its heyday in the 1990s.
The history of Islam in the Northern Caucasus has taught us that, on the one hand, its advance among the local peoples was a torturous process and that, on the other, the efforts of the Russian au-
Talks with the Director of the Islamic Center of the KBR (today the Islamic Institute) Musa Mukozhev in July 2002,from the author’s personal archives.
See: I.L. Babich, A.A. Iarlykapov, Islamskoe vozrozhdenie v Kabardino-Balkarii: perspektivy i posledstvia, p. 57.
L.R. Sjukijainen, “Naydetsia li shariatu mesto v Rossiiskoy pravovoy sisteme?” in: Islam na postsovetskom pros-transtve: vzgliad iznutri, ed. by A. Malashenko and M. Brill Olcott, Moscow, 2001, p. 30.
K.S. Gajiev, Geopolitika Kavkaza, Moscow, 2001, p. 34.
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