Query response on the Russian Federation, Chechnya: Situation of non-Sufi Muslims and those who are identified as “Wahhabis” [a-9858-2 (9859)]

7 October 2016

This response was prepared after researching publicly accessible information currently available to ACCORD as well as information provided by experts within time constraints and in accordance with ACCORD’s methodological standards and the Common EU Guidelines for processing Country of Origin Information (COI).

This response is not, and does not purport to be, conclusive as to the merit of any particular claim to refugee status, asylum or other form of international protection.

Please read in full all documents referred to.

Non-English language information is summarised in English. Original language quotations are provided for reference.

 

A March 2016 report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a transnational non-profit, non-governmental organization that carries out field research on violent conflict and seeks to advance policies to prevent, mitigate or resolve conflict, provides an overview of policies toward members of Salafi communities in the North Caucasus and, specifically, in Chechnya:

“The security threat associated with the North Caucasus insurgency’s radicalisation and the emergence of IS cells throughout Russia is acute and requires a calibrated, sophisticated response. Since the second half of 2014, the authorities have successfully reduced the outflow and contained recruitment and potential terrorist cells. But heavy-handed methods and grave human rights violations, including enforced disappearances, summary executions and widespread application of torture, especially in Dagestan and Chechnya, continue to radicalise parts of Salafi communities and feed jihadism.

For over a decade, a key control method across the region has been профучет (profuchet, preventive registration of extremists). Those suspected of adherence to fundamentalist strands of Islam are put on special lists, with details of personal lives, habits and family nicknames. After incidents, such as clashes between security and insurgents or terrorist acts, local police detain them; interrogations reportedly often involve violent or degrading methods. Many have gone on the lists due to their appearance, a visit to the wrong mosque, contact with other Salafis or renting a flat or giving a ride to suspicious persons.” (ICG, 16 March 2016, p. 19)

“Policy toward Salafis is traditionally harshest in Chechnya, where fundamentalist Salafism, pejoratively called ‘Wahhabism’, is banned. Authorities have repeatedly and openly declared that Wahhabis would not be allowed to live in Chechnya and should be killed. Traditional Sufi Islam is declared the true path and state ideology. Until recently the security services did not keep formal Salafi registration lists, but every municipality closely monitors its young people. In mid-February, however, the press service of the Chechen parliament announced mandatory ‘moral-spiritual passportisation’ of all Chechens aged fourteen to 35. Such ‘passports’ would inter alia register a young person’s ethnicity, clan and Islamic sect and should have the signature of the father or clan leader, who should agree in turn to share responsibility for the young person’s behaviour. This outraged independent federal media, and Kadyrov denied the plan.

However, according to Crisis Group sources, the term ‘passport’ was replaced by ‘questionnaire’, and the mandatory registration was launched on 25 February. According to a Crisis Group source, the imam of his village mosque announced that ‘the Padishah’ (a term the Chechen elite use to refer to Ramzan Kadyrov) had given three days to complete the process, and all fathers had to bring offspring aged fourteen to 35 to the local school to fill out and sign the form. The interior ministry conducts routine campaigns against hijabs, which must cover the chin, and beards without moustaches – visual symbols of Salafi followers. At the end of October 2015, suspected Salafis were detained en masse, and at year’s end the security services reportedly again carried out detentions throughout the republic, with many disappearances. Since March 2014, imams of mosques in Grozny have been obliged to control the appearance of their congregation members and submit weekly reports about their progress in combatting fundamentalism. There are no Salafi mosques or open Salafi activities in Chechnya.” (ICG, 16 March 2016, pp. 22-23)

A June 2015 report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) describes Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s views on Islam and religious policies in Chechnya:

“The Kadyrov family, like 75 per cent of Chechens, belongs to the Sufi brotherhood of the Chechen religious philosopher Kunta-Hajji Kishiev and the Quadiri tariqa, whose leaders the czars and Soviets persecuted. Ramzan is the first Chechen leader to make the dominant Qadiri Sufism a state ideology and enforce Sufi Islam. He personally instructs Muslim leaders and believers on how they should interpret and implement religion and has invested much in public displays of religiosity. […]

The religious policy in the republic is strict. Any movement or ideology that digresses from the declared ‘path’ of Akhmat-Hajji Kadyrov [i.e. the first President of the Chechen Republic and late father of current Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, annotation by ACCORD] is unacceptable. According to Ramzan, ‘if they are incapable of understanding the gist of our true path – [they] will not live a second in Chechnya. [They] are more dangerous than those vermin who walk in the forests’ [i.e. rebels, annotation by ACCORD]. Fundamentalist Salafism, referred to pejoratively as ‘Wahhabism’, is banned; the republic authorities have repeatedly and openly said, particularly in Chechen-language media, that Wahhabis are not to be allowed to live in Chechnya and indeed should be killed.” (ICG, 26 June 2015, pp. 18-19)

An April 2016 commentary of the Centre for Eastern Studies (Ośrodek Studiów Wschodnich, OSW), an independent public research institution analysing socio-political and economic processes in Central and Eastern Europe, describes Chechen leader Kadyrov’s stance towards Salafists:

“One factor that is stoking the present phase of the conflict between the various branches of Islam in Dagestan and Ingushetia is the interference from Kadyrov, who wants to be seen as the one who protects ‘real’ (i.e. Sufi) Islam in the Caucasus from Salafism/terrorism. An unprecedented meeting (majlis) of representatives of twenty-four factions of Sufi brotherhoods (representing both Naqshbandiyya and Qadiriyya) from Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia was held on 2 February 2016 in Grozny. Its participants passed an ‘anti-Wahhabi’ declaration in which they undertook to refrain from maintaining contacts with representatives of Salafism. During the congress, Kadyrov announced he would combat ‘Wahhabism’ across the Caucasus and even across Russia, thus expressing his readiness to help out the governments of the neighbouring republics, which was in fact a threat that the conflict would be escalated. Both he and his milieu (including the mufti of Chechnya, Salakh Mezhiev and the parliamentary speaker, Magomed Daudov) have issued numerous threats to Salafi leaders (mainly from Ingushetia).” (OSW, 4 April 2016)

An August 2016 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) provides an overview of the treatment of local Salafi Muslims by the Kadyrov government:

“For the past decade, there have been persistent, credible allegations that while aiming to root out and destroy an aggressive Islamist insurgency in the region, law enforcement and security agencies under Kadyrov’s control have been involved in abductions, enforced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial executions, and collective punishment. The main targets have been alleged insurgents, their relatives, and suspected collaborators.

Kadyrov also largely equates local Salafi Muslims with insurgents or their collaborators. Calling them Wahhabis, a term widely employed with pejorative connotations to designate dissident Islamist movements and militants inspired by radical Islam, he has been publicly asserting that they have no place in Chechnya. Kadyrov has specifically instructed police and local communities to closely monitor how people pray and dress and to punish those who stray from the Sufi Islam, traditional for the region. In recent years, police raids against Salafis–or suspected ones–have become widespread. According to Memorial Human Rights Center (Memorial), a leading Russian rights group that has worked on the North Caucasus since the early 1990s, in the last three months of 2015 alone, local law enforcement and security agencies detained several hundred men in the course of these raids. The detentions however are not officially registered, and the detainees’ families are not informed about the detainees’ whereabouts or well-being. The detentions typically last from one to several days, but despite their unlawful nature, when detainees are released they do not file complaints or like to discuss what happened to them due to acute fear of reprisals.” (HRW, 30 August 2016, pp. 10-11)

A September 2016 article published by Forum 18, a Norwegian human rights organization that promotes religious freedom, states with regard to both Chechnya and Dagestan:

In the republics of Chechnya and Dagestan in particular, those dubbed ‘Wahhabis’ [Muslims adhering to a purist form of Islam critical of Sufism] - and sometimes men merely with a devout Muslim appearance - may be detained as ‘extremists’ by the law enforcement agencies. Local residents report that they are frequently tortured, and in some cases disappear, allegations very occasionally confirmed by state officials.“ (Forum 18, 13 September 2016)

Clifford Bennett, an international fellow at the Caucasus Research Resource Centers in Tbilisi (Republic of Georgia), writes in a September 2016 journal article:

“In the Chechen Republic, there have been numerous attacks by the official Sufi institutions against Salafi adherents and vice versa. Kadyrov’s personal militia (referred to as the Kadyrovtsy) is mainly made up of Qadiri adherents, many of whom were former warlords and insurgents during the Chechen Wars. The Kadyrovtsy, with help from the Russian FSB (the Federal’naja Sluzhba Bezopasnosti – the main security agency in the Russian Federation, and the primary successor to the USSR’s KGB), were largely successful in eliminating organized insurgent activity in the mountainous wooded areas of the Chechen Republic, and the overall rate of terrorist attacks in the Republic has dropped off considerably since Kadyrov’s installation in 2007.

In urban areas, the Chechen police and the Interior Ministry also enforce the religious norms and rulings of the Muftiate. For example, they ensure that dress codes are followed and citizens attend mosque during prayer times, and are also tasked with cracking down on adherents of alternative or non-normative faiths, especially Salafi Islam. Dress code rules are indicative of the amalgamation of Islam that Kadyrov has created: the police enforce conservative rules such as female modest dress and the wearing of hijab, but also profile, harass, and sometimes arrest men for wearing their beards ‘Salafi-style’ (long and unshaven, without a mustache). The Chechen police and Interior Ministry are highly successful in countering terrorism when looking at the numbers alone; yet they often use extreme methods, including torture, scapegoating, forced ‘disappearances’, and the targeting of family members to accomplish their aims. Their violent tactics are, without a doubt, a major push factor for Chechen adherents of Salafi Islam.” (Clifford, 21 September 2016)

A November 2015 article by Caucasian Knot, an independent online news site that covers politics and human rights issues in the Caucasus region, quotes human rights activists Oleg Orlov and Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya as noting that increasing pressure on the Salafi community is leading to a radicalization of supporters of a radical concept of Islam:

“At night of October 10, at the cemetery in Shali, unidentified persons set on fire the ziyart (mausoleum) of Durdi-Sheikh, one of the followers of Kunta-Khadji Kishiev, the founder of Sufism in Chechnya. On November 16, in the village of Kurchaloi, the ziyart (mausoleum) of Saint Yangulbi-Sheikh was set on fire. Shamil Ergiev, Djabrail Usumov, Islam Yunusov, and Khamzat Uspaev, residents of the village of Mairtup, were detained on suspicion of committing the arson.

The arsons of the ziyarts could result from the persecution in Chechnya of members of the Salafi community. This opinion was expressed by Oleg Orlov, a member of the Board of the Human Rights Centre (HRC) ‘Memorial’. According to him, in general, in 2013, the pressure on members of the Salafi community in Northern Caucasus was renewed. In Chechnya, members of the Salafi concept of Islam are called ‘Wahhabis’.

According to Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, the head of the Russian Representative Office of the International Crisis Group, the Chechen authorities are trying to eradicate all forms of religious dissent. The human rights defender believes that the longer and stronger pressure is put, the more dangerous answer the oppressed side will give.” (Caucasian Knot, 20 November 2015)

image001.gif 


References: (all links accessed 7 October 2016)

·      Caucasian Knot: Human rights defenders associate arsons of ziyarts in Chechnya with pressure on Salafis, 20 November 2015
http://www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/33708/

·      Clifford, Bennett: Sufi-Salafi Institutional Competition and Conflict in the Chechen Republic, autumn 2016. In: Vestnik - The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies, issue 20, 21 September 2016 (available on the website of the School of Russian and Asian Studies (SRAS))
http://www.sras.org/sufi_salafi_conflict_chechnya

·      Forum 18: Russia: "Extremism" religious freedom survey, September 2016, 13 September 2016 (available at ecoi.net)
http://www.ecoi.net/local_link/329706/457267_en.html

·      HRW - Human Rights Watch: "Like Walking a Minefield"; Vicious Crackdown on Critics in Russia’s Chechen Republic, 30 August 2016 (available at ecoi.net)
http://www.ecoi.net/file_upload/1226_1472803628_chechnya0816-1.pdf

·      ICG - International Crisis Group: The North Caucasus Insurgency and Syria: An Exported Jihad?, 16 March 2016 (available at ecoi.net)
https://www.ecoi.net/file_upload/1226_1458642687_238-the-north-caucasus-insurgency-and-syria-an-exported-jihad.pdf

·      ICG - International Crisis Group: Chechnya: The Inner Abroad, 26 June 2015 (available at ecoi.net)
http://www.ecoi.net/file_upload/1226_1435827871_236-chechnya-the-inner-abroad.pdf

·      ICG - International Crisis Group: The North Caucasus Insurgency and Syria: An Exported Jihad?, 14 March 2016 (available at ecoi.net)
http://www.ecoi.net/file_upload/1226_1458642687_238-the-north-caucasus-insurgency-and-syria-an-exported-jihad.pdf

·      OSW - Centre for Eastern Studies: Russia’s ‘Middle East’: the escalation of religious conflicts in the Northern Caucasus, 4 April 2016
http://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2016-04-04/russias-middle-east-escalation-religious-conflicts-northern