Boston bombings ‘present Muslims as second-class’

Violence and fighting have been going on in the Caucasus for nearly 20 years now. The full-scale war in Chechnya may have ceased, but the armed struggle across the region seems now to be seen in a global sense, much more than has ever been the case.

Certainly, that is the view of several young Muslims I spoke to in the Dagestan capital over the past two days, writes film-maker and journalist Nick Sturdee.

On the street by the family flat of the parents of Boston Marathon suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a group of young men tell me they planning to go and watch tonight’s Russian premier league football game.

When I ask them about the Boston bombings, one of them, in a beard, says: “I don’t understand. Every day Muslims are being attacked and killed in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in the Caucasus. And all of a sudden three Americans die and there’s a huge fuss.”

‘Every day Muslims are being attacked and killed in Iraq, in Syria, in the Caucasus. All of a sudden three Americans die and there’s a huge fuss.’

Outside the mosque that Tamerlan Tsarnaev visited during his stay here last year, most of the young men I speak to echo that view. They say that instead of being worried about the three Americans who died, I should go and have a look in their villages, and in Syria, where young men are constantly being tortured and where they disappear at the hands of the security forces.

They tell me about one village, Gimri, in Daghestan, a small town that has become famous because sharia law rules there and where the inhabitants appear to have turned their back on Russian law. They say that in the last week, some 3,000 people have been displaced from their homes in order for security forces to conduct searches for weapons. They say innocent people are being thrown onto the street.

One man claims he was tortured by the police in Makhachkala for three days. He claims people have nails put through their knees and have objects hung from their private parts. “It’s real hell in there,” he says.

‘We feel that the way it’s been presented is that Americans are first-class citizens and we Muslims are second-class citizens.’

None of these young men wants to go on camera or give his name. But I speak to someone called Ziavudin Vaissov, a lawyer and human rights activist who represents those who are detained and accused of involvement in what the state calls “the insurgency”.

He tells me that moves towards reconciliation following the assassination last year of Muslim cleric Said Atsayev went nowhere, and that there is no dialogue at present between the state and those who want to a lead a true Muslim way of life. He says arrests, detention and abuse have become even more commonplace.

When I ask about the Boston bombings, he replies: “Of course it’s bad when people die. But we feel that the way it’s been presented is that Americans are first-class citizens and we Muslims are second-class citizens. Three people died in Boston, yet yesterday dozens were killed in Syria, and Muslims were killed all over the world.”