The Ethnic Russian as an Enemy of Islam: Frame Analysis of the Kavkaz Center News Agency (2001–2004)

Abstract

Typically, when analysing contemporary Russian–Chechen conflicts, the relegation of the nationalist struggle to a secondary role by the religious battle waged by the North Caucasus insurgency is pinpointed as one of the fundamental differences between the First and Second War in Chechnya. This article discusses how it was reflected in one of the most important media of the Chechen Islamist insurgency: the Kavkaz Center. To this end, 2859 English language news items posted on the website during 2001–04 were reviewed using media frame analysis.

Notes

1. In Russia, the term russkie is used to refer to the country’s majority ethnic group of Eastern Slavic extraction. To refer to Russian citizens, regardless of their ethnicity, the term used is rossiyane.

2. It’s important to stress that despite the generic use of the term ‘Islam’, it acknowledges a plurality of forms, trends, jurisprudence and communities embraced by the religion, and that the insurgency in the North Caucasus did not try to conceptualize the ethnic Russian as an enemy of all Muslims, but only as a given interpretation that for them was the ‘true one’.

3. As held further on, to belittle other forms of Islamic interpretation, such as Sufism, the jihadist guerrillas branded them as allies of Russia (the enemy of Islam), rather than attempting to gain legitimacy through theological and doctrinal debate.

4. In this regard, it should be taken into account that this is a study on external, rather than internal, propaganda. In view of the target audience, the aim was not to build a discourse geared to internal mobilization, not even to enlist new recruits, but to transmit a specific imaginary to the diaspora and the Western Muslim community, thus allowing them to share a new common sense. As Campana and Ducol (2015) explain, ‘[Chechen Islamist’s websites] share the same objectives: increasing the Emirate’s legitimacy as part of a local competition for power, enhancing a sense of local community based on religion, justifying the use of violence, and mobilizing supporters’ (p. 15). The first two are particularly compatible with the thesis defended in this article.

5. This does not mean to say that all these identities were mutually exclusive, since in secular nationalists and ‘pro-Russian’ circles there were also those who, furthermore, saw themselves as pious Sufi Muslims.

6. Hereinafter, CRI.

7. This process, called ‘Chechenization’, led to the Constitution of 2003 – which sparked a wave of terrorist attacks carried out both by the militias of the CRI and by the jihadist insurgencies – and to the successive governments of the Kadyrov clan. It is especially important to bear in mind that, in the multi-faceted dispute between the different factions, a sector of Chechen society began to occupy spaces of power in a parallel administration (called the ‘Republic of Chechnya), which ended up being officially recognized as the only legitimate state, marginalizing the CRI in exile and the Caucasus Emirate on the virtual space. These ‘pro-Russians’, subject to Chechenization, were also branded as ‘national traitors’ by the KC.

8. The exception was perhaps Dagestan, where Salafism had a longer tradition. In point of fact, it was from there – it is held – that this doctrine was introduced into Chechnya and into other neighboring republics (Kirsiev and Ware 2002; McGregor 2012; Roshchin 2012). To go deeper into this issue, see (Yemelianova 2002, Ibragimov and Matsuzato 2014).

9. Not all the Islamic factions were Salafi or imported from abroad. Traditional Sufism, a majority current in the region, also experienced a timid revival at the time.

10. Besides taking advantage of the situation, both factions played an important role in provoking that chaos. To give only a couple of examples, in July 1998 a Salafi paramilitary group whose members acted as a self-styled Islamic police force harassed the local (Sufi) population in order to force them to adopt the – alleged – rules of conduct established in the Islamic holy books. The security forces of the CRI reacted by repressing the Salafis and provoking a pitched battle in which at least 50 people died (Izmailov 2006, June 22). Moreover, despite the fact that the Khasavyurt Accord, which had brought the First Russian-Chechen War to an end, established a series of financial obligations to be fulfilled by Russia, Moscow gave no signs of being willing to honor its commitments (Said 2007, Shedd 2008).

11. It should be noted that during Maskhadov’s government, Islam was also rhetorically and legislatively exploited in an attempt to satisfy the demands of the Islamic factions (Henkin 2006).

12. The KC was founded by Movladi Udugov, minister of information during the presidential tenure of Dudayev (Smith 2005) and attached to the CRI during part of Maskhadov’s term of office. The jihadist stance of the KC was a progressive phenomenon which gathered steam at the same pace as the gradual ideological evolution of its founder and the Islamization of Chechen society (Wilhelmsen 2005). As of 2007, when the Caucasus Emirate was proclaimed, it began to flaunt its jihadist stance openly (Harding 2012).

13. These were not the only disagreements that the Jihadist guerrillas had with Maskhadov during the war. As a matter of fact, on most occasions the CRI condemned the deaths of Russian civilians caused by the Islamist factions, as well as publically offering, at certain times, a more conciliatory tone than that of its rivals, even declaring its intention to begin peace talks, an idea that was ignored both by Russia and sometimes by the Jihadist insurgency (Rivas Otero and Tarín Sanz 2017). As will be seen further on, in specific situations, both the guerrillas and the KC seconded Maskhadov’s calls for peace.

14. The use of contradictory and volatile frames is very commonplace in jihadist propaganda, as Holbrook (2016) has demonstrated in his study of Al-Qaeda.

15. This discourse was yet again repeated later on, when Doku Umarov, the founder and first emir of the Caucasus Emirate, signed a civilian truce during the mobilizations against Vladimir Putin in 2011–2012. Likewise, his successor, Aliaskhab Kebekov, showed a preference for military objectives vs. civilian ones. Therefore, it can be said that the discourse of the KC was dynamic and coherent with the different political and military decisions made by the jihadist leaders. The above words, attributed to Shamil Basayev, were pronounced in January 2004, a critical moment at which it seemed that the proposals for peace talks repeatedly put forward by Aslan Maskhadov were more likely to fall on deaf ears in the Kremlin (Fuller 2005).