avari | haroon moghul

Trying to Build a Mosque in the Country They Were Kicked Out of

Today, the Crimea is 13% Muslim, those Muslims being Tatars, its once dominant population, who have slowly returned following Stalin's mass deportation of their population in the 1940's.  Their attempt to build a mosque is being resisted by the local population; the New York Times reports:

Chunks of limestone, by the tens of thousands, are strewn in piles on a waterside lot here where one of Europe’s largest mosques is scheduled to rise. But the only soul around is a wizened caretaker in a tent, watching over what seems like another grandiose project gone bust with the financial crisis.

The trouble with the project, though, has nothing to do with money.

It is hinted at in the pieces of limestone themselves, many of which have been brought to the lot in protest and etched with the names of people who once lived here on the Crimean Peninsula, were deported by Stalin and never returned.

The mosque was supposed to signify the revival of those expelled, the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic ethnic group that suffered as wretched a fate as any under Communism. But with work held up by local authorities, the plan has instead stirred up a dispute involving politics, communal grievances, international tensions and historic traumas.

And so for the Crimean Tatars, the lot has become a site not for construction but for pilgrimages — and another reminder that here, as elsewhere across the former Soviet Union, the sins of the past will not be easily addressed.

“From each Muslim, one stone,” Refat Chubarov, a Tatar leader, said the other day as he offered an impromptu tour of the deserted lot.

Mr. Chubarov explained that for months, Tatars have been asked to deposit pieces of limestone on the lot, each costing less than a dollar, to demonstrate their displeasure. Thousands have done so, with many creating mini-memorials by embellishing the limestone with the names of long-dead relatives. The stones are generally 15 or 20 inches square and 7 inches deep.

The mosque, which is to have space for a few thousand worshipers, was approved in 2004 by local officials. They agreed on a prime location at 22 Yaltinskaya Street in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea that is one of the most celebrated regions of the former Soviet Union.

The mosque project was to cost more than $10 million, most of which was to be paid by Turkish and other foreign donors, Mr. Chubarov said.

But in 2008, the Simferopol city council refused to grant final approval for the project, voicing concerns about its environmental impact because the site is near a reservoir. Officials said that traffic would overwhelm neighborhood streets and that noise from the mosque would bother patients at a nearby cancer hospital.

The city council, which is controlled by ethnic Russians, said its stance was not influenced by ethnic or religious hostility. It suggested other locations for the mosque.

“The mosque will be built, but only after taking into consideration the views of the public,” said Simferopol’s mayor, Gennady Babenko.

But Tatar leaders said they did not believe that the city would follow through on other sites. They said they doubted that the typical not-in-my-backyard complaints were genuine, asserting that local politicians simply did not want a prominent mosque in Simferopol.

“Everyone realizes that their opposition doesn’t make sense, because they had already given us permission,” Mr. Chubarov said. “Behind the scenes, they are saying: ‘Crimea is Russian Orthodox land. If they want to build a mosque, they should build it where no one can see it.’ “

The Tatars, who have inhabited Crimea for centuries, were deported in May 1944 by Stalin, who accused them of collaborating with the Nazis (some did, but most did not). The entire Tatar population, more than 200,000 people, was transported in brutal conditions thousands of miles away to Uzbekistan and other locations. Many died along the way or soon after arriving.

The Soviets confiscated their homes, destroying their mosques or treating them like warehouses. One was converted into a Museum of Atheism.

It was not until perestroika in the late 1980s that most of the Tatars were allowed back, a migration that continued after Ukraine became independent with the Soviet collapse in 1991. More than 250,000 Tatars now live in Crimea, about 13 percent of its population of 2 million people.

The Tatars’ return has repeatedly touched off legal clashes over restitution of land and property, much of which is now owned by ethnic Russians. Some have turned violent.

The situation is complicated by the political status of Crimea, which would generally prefer to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Crimea was transferred by Nikita S. Khrushchev, then the Soviet leader, to Ukraine in 1954, a move then thought to be a formality, since it remained in the Soviet Union and was populated mostly by ethnic Russians.

Tatars have better ties with the Ukrainian government, and are often seen by ethnic Russian nationalists in Crimea as Kiev’s proxies. The three sides jockey for power on the peninsula, and the mosque has been one focal point.

Tatar leaders maintain that the mosque is being blocked in part to stoke anti-Muslim and anti-Ukrainian sentiment, especially in advance of presidential elections in Ukraine, scheduled for January.

“There are many, many political forces that want the strains to remain,” said Mustafa Dzhemilyov, chairman of the Tatar legislative council. “I am referring to the Russian-speaking and Russian separatist organizations, which are supported by and fed by the government of Russia.”

Ethnic Russians in Crimea noted that Ukraine’s president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, has supported the mosque, accusing him of meddling in local affairs.

In the neighborhood around the project site, residents said the local government had the right to insist that the mosque be erected elsewhere — or not at all.

“Let’s remember that this is not Tatar land here, that the Russian people have always lived here,” said Larisa Tsybulskaya, 45, a beautician.

“My father built that house,” she said, gesturing to a nearby cluster of homes. “They are squatting on our land. Why do they have to cut all this land off and give it to one nationality for a mosque? It’s just shameful.”

But Mr. Chubarov, who is 52 and was born in exile in Uzbekistan, said Tatars would not relent.

He said the conflict had so united his community that more pieces of limestone had been brought to the lot than were needed for the mosque.

And so the extra material is to be used for homes for Tatars, in an effort to restore what was lost in Crimea 65 years ago.

Leaving Afghanistan

Sharing a number of links with you for the weekend.  

I am pretty convinced that there is no military solution to this conflict, and that we will have to engage the Taliban; as distasteful as it is, we must distinguish between al Qaeda and the Taliban's ambitions.  But more than matters of morality and even issues of legacy, there are two deeper national security questions at work: We are not the global power some neocons thought (or think) we are.  We cannot sustain this war, financially or politically, without massive infusions from allied forces, and those will not be forthcoming, which is the lead-in to the second question: Why fight a war that could destroy NATO, when the chances of "winning" are so slim?  

Some people ask how it is a power declines and another power rises.  It's because of bad decisions at extremely crucial moments.  There are transitional periods in world history, and often time those transitional moments are made still more crucial because one power made a very bad choice and found itself paying the consequences of that choice for years down the road, while the other power(s) made smarter choices.  (Note: Intention doesn't have to count.)  You cannot always go back and change a choice, and pretend nothing happened.  When we embarked on our two most recent wars in the last eight years, we were not given a clear strategy, nor did we bother to realize that we are no longer in the colonial era.  As we went on into two wars that, although they did not cost the number of lives Vietnam did, ended up costing us probably $1 trillion, future competitors of the United States were putting massive sums of money into more relevant causes.  

Space Station Putin

Maududism-Leninism: Peter Hitchens and Communism is a Theme Park

Sometimes some articles are just funny, not in a silly way, but amusing, diverting, fantastic in a good way, travel journalism or travel essays that make you -- in a way -- want to go somewhere or at least feel happy to know that that somewhere exists, that there is palpable difference in our flat world.  (Unfortunately, not if you actually lived in that far-off there, and only if you could leave, to jog the senses and jolt the philosophies and no more.)  Such is the American Conservative essay on Belarus by Peter Hitchens, out of the most recent issue.  I used to subscribe -- paper always beats photons -- but dollars decline before free(dom).  Here are bits... but read the whole...

I have often half-seriously thought that the Western powers should have clubbed together to maintain the old East Germany as a theme park so that future generations could see what real socialism was truly like, right down to the soup, the beer, and the plumbing. Many East Germans, as is now clear, would have been surprisingly happy to live in such a place—another undoubted problem that we in the rich world have never bothered to try to understand. We are afraid of examining it because we know too well that our new united planet isn’t as good as it could have been.

Clever movies such as “Good Bye Lenin” and “The Lives of Others” make the former East Germany out to have been better than it really was. But then, that is the way it seems to many former East Germans disappointed and disturbed by the triumphant West. [...]

Travel a few hundred miles further east, though, passing through the latest version of Poland, and you come to the curious, accidental country of Belarus, which might have been invented for educational purposes. Such a place never existed before and probably will not for much longer. It is independent of Russia only as an unintended side effect of the break-up of the USSR at the end of the Gorbachev era. They broke it off and forgot to stick it back on again. Its independence from Moscow lacks conviction. There is in reality no proper border with Russia, whose citizens can slip in and out at will.

But there is certainly still a border with “The West,” a phrase that still means something here. And what a border it is. After nearly a thousand miles of passport-free travel, from the English Channel to Warsaw, the voyager is abruptly required to produce his documents, visa and all, properly stamped, just as in the old days. Trains cannot even cross without having their wheels removed, for long ago the Russian empire adopted a wider gauge to prevent a rail-borne invasion.

Here at Brest on the river Bug—travelers who wish to rest overnight may stay in the Hotel Bug—stands the final frontier of the European Union, an abrupt and total stop to that strange, postmodern empire of deliberately forgotten history, bureaucracy, and subsidy. The EU may dream of one day incorporating Ukraine and even Turkey. But Belarus? I don’t think so. The place is too troublesome and unpredictable. An inhabitant of Brest—provided he was on nobody’s death list and was generally lucky—might have lived in five different countries in one century without so much as moving house.

Creepy, like I always imagined Communism to be.  Politically, yes, but moreover, aesthetically; it was a depressing thing, a dark idea, a bland, stale and, most of all, inhuman coldness that brought a Siberian rigidity and lifelessness to anywhere it unfortunately went, and while I can understand what attracted the third world to its rhetoric (democracy and free markets don't preach liberation, or social justice, or global justice, or acknowledge colonization, empire and racism), I pity how traumatized and hollowed Islam has become by the uncritical absorption of an anti-spirituality, producing an Islam that is incoherent and so triply dangerous: it is immoral; it is impractical and it is spiritually imperialist without any meaningful spirituality, kind of like running the world on free markets in order to make it Communist.  Communism!  How it feels in my head to be dirty, a bit old, tired, like it had jumped from hot-headed, red-flagged revolutionary fervor straight into a pathetic old age of a cynical, bitter, failed old man.  Thank God at least the system is practically done.  Minus the tens of millions it had to kill before it extinguished itself, an economic victim of its own literal inhumanity.

But, with all that, there is something that seeded Communism which is itself worthy of consideration, remembrance, reflection and purposeful utilization - and that is Marxism.  How can something helpful produce something so hurtful?  That is, on balance, a product of application by revolutionaries who imagined God, goodness and sinfulness were illusions, and that a basic human mode of living was purely and only oppressive.  Here in fact we have the roots of a Sayyid Qutbian, or Maududian, or Khomeinian bifurcation of the world into radically pagan and suffocatingly Islamist; the roots are economic, but masked, and when reproduced in an Islamic framework, spiritually and socially and even economically devastating.  Muslims have lost a lot, and lost themselves a lot, too: The faith was rushed into modernity in fear it was incapable of a measured reaction, as if the finality of the faith was not so final, and the haste was expectedly disastrous.  We are still paying for it in Pakistan, in Iraq, in Afghanistan...

But the economic analysis is tremendously worthwhile for continued consideration, and all for the worse that we have in America generally lost its point (if ever we had seen it.)  That is to say that capitalism itself is often rapacious and often violent: Wars are started for resources, and that because of the tremendous imbalance in their consumption, and the concurrent elevation of consumption as the end-all, be-all of humanity.  To be is to buy; to be bought is to have value; we are made into products, and it is not our citizenship, our humanity, our souls or our constitution that make us valuable, but our ability to be priced that brings us value.  Marxian analyses show us how this happens, why it happens, and often, quite helpfully, where it might happen next; how can we forget those kinds of insightful tools?  Capitalism become consumerism is not mere free markets, rather it flattens and harshens and stiffens the world, and makes it often into an ugly and cold place, which we must take increasing amounts of drugs (medically or not) to be comfortable with.  We have made ourselves a world we are not happy with and we have made ourselves a world we cannot sustain.  That too is a great tragedy.

Do not sneer too much at those who do this. Not everyone can be protected by oceans and friendly neighbors from the ancient, abiding horrors of human strife. Those who are not so safe are keener on security than on liberty. Nor can we in the free world, who have lazily and thoughtlessly been cajoled into giving away so much of our own liberty since Sept. 11, 2001, look down on others who never had much liberty to give—especially in light of the near-suicidal bravery of those who dare to oppose Alexander Lukashenko.

how Russia shocked Russia

Last month, we all remember how the Russian army, claiming to be aiding its citizens, invaded Georgia, a sovereign country, in order to assist separatist causes in S Ossetia and Abkhazia which, Russia claims, demanded its interference. 

Recently, the Russian government recognized the independence of the two breakaway regions of Georgia which Russia has an interest in assisting, and in no small part because such assistance will allow Russia to maintain footholds in its "near abroad."  A recent New York Times article however suggests that the strategy may have backfired internally: echoing the fact that even China, a close ally of Russia in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, declined to recognize Russia's new pseudo-countries, the article points out how Muslim territories within Russia, with their own ethnic, cultural and even economic histories over the past few centuries, have been somewhat emboldened by Russia's own claim to aiding separatists. 

Of course the logic is absurd, and there is no reason to expect that Russia will be in any mood to recognize further claims of autonomy from its Muslim populations, now forming over 15% of the population of Russia and rising proportionately faster, especially since the Russian birthrate is quite literally emptying the country (of non-Muslim, non-Turkic Russians) at the rate of about 800,000 persons a year.  Can you believe the country now has less than 50 percent the population of the U.S., and is dwarfed by an E.U. economically much larger (on the order of ten times or so) and demographically three times its size?

What Russia has certainly lost however is moral capital, something that we might also call "soft power" -- We Americans lost a lot of this when Iraq was invaded, and we see how our status in the world and ability to affect treaties and alliances of benefit to ourselves has been dramatically curtailed by the loss of face experienced in and over the conflict of Iraq.  While the Russians took advantage of this in order to invade Georgia, it is intriguing that the Russians themselves have perhaps to some extent hurt their own national stability.  People who have serious national liberation movements within their own countries should be careful not to to openly aid national liberation movements right on their own borders.  This is a small political wisdom, from someone who has never run a country, but nevertheless might be capable of being vice president; all that and I've never even been to Russia or lived in a state that bordered it.  What a world.

george friedman's helpful summary of the conflict

An excellent essay summarizing why and what now, by George Friedman at Stratfor.

A Truce, Broken?

GORI, Georgia — A Russian tank battalion occupied this strategic Georgian crossroads town on Wednesday and was controlling access roads into and out of the city, in what Georgia said was flagrant defiance of a peace agreement struck only hours earlier.

In addition, hundreds of Russian soldiers poured over the border from Russia into South Ossetia on Wednesday afternoon. Attack helicopters and fuel trucks accompanied a long convoy of dozens of trucks.

Bitterly criticizing the United States and other Western countries for letting his country down, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia said Russia had flagrantly defied the peace accord and effectively severed the country in two. [NYT]

georgia without a shoulder to cry on, or a lap to flee towards

Pity Georgia, having put all its hopes in the West and finding itself expendable (not the leadership, mind you, which can be faulted for overreaching, but a people once again threatened by Russian expansionist designs.)  What does it say that a small country -- a member of the coalition of the willing! -- sends soldiers to fight for an American cause, and when that ally is under actual attack, the coalition becomes unwilling... what does this mean for the framework of international law, if after America mocks it (and great power mocking means, really, negating), Russia does, too? It is not the end of history. But it is a dent in American prestige.

Where do you think it will stop? 
1) "Independence" for Abkhazia and S Ossetia?
2) Russia swallows Abkhazia and S Ossetia?
3) Russia swallows Georgia?
4) Russia makes Georgia into a client state with a new government?

I'd say 3 & 4 are "too far" ... but not 2 or 3.

unlike john edwards, russia's not messing around

The Russians are serious about attacking Georgia and, according to al Jazeera, are expanding the theatre of operations to Abkhazia. I'm certain Ukraine, Central Asia and the Baltics are watching. If Russia is willing to go to war to help South Ossetia against an apparent Georgian attack (then again, it is Georgian territory), NATO expansion (and thereafter EU expansion) will likely stop, for the foreseeable future, before Ukraine or Georgia. A positive foreign policy goal for the United States lost because we have short-term, unvisionary leadership, incapable of balancing objectives, realities and desirable outcomes. (A strong EU and a strong North Atlantic partnership good; a war to wreck Iraq and bankrupt the budget equals big claims with little sticks. Without the Iraq War, Russia wouldn't have dared.)

democracy under attack!

This is, in part, why the Iraq War was such a bad idea. (The same reason I was, and remain, so hesitant about Kosovar independence: When will our administration[s] realize you cannot claim to defend all nations all over the world and get away with it forever?) Pick your battles. How about Russia against what is, for all intents and purposes, South Carolina with Georgia's name fighting over South Ossetia? All over South Ossetia and its citrus flag. (The wiki link has live updates.) Of course, it matters who provoked whom, but still, this is a bit absurd. We are more concerned about phantom conflicts than actual new powers throwing their weight around. (Not to mention what's up with all this Orthodox Christian on Orthodox Christian violence.)

When we fight wars we don't need to, we leave ourselves unable to face challenges and crises far more serious in consequence, for our European alliances (for the worldwide need for the development of Euro-American relations in a more assertive but also more truly democratic direction), for the progress of democracy and for the wherewithal to stand up to badly reformed former superpowers. Not hard to guess where my allegiances lie: Certainly not with the nation-state that pursued a policy of carpet bombing Chechnya into pacification after getting upset when a formerly conquered, recently ethnically cleansed and brutalized territory demanded independence.

Now we'll be exposed, I fear, for impotence: What, really, can America do to Russia in this egregious situation? Sorry, Georgia. Being America's ally, with the third-highest number of troops in Iraq, pays you... well, not much, really. Except withdrawing them and hoping their combat experience helps.