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Middle East Times
Commentary: Moscow lauds Musharraf for mosque siege
By Abdul Ruff Colachal
Middle East Times
Published July 22, 2007

Comparing, perhaps, the recent tragic events at Pakistan's Lal Masjid or Red Mosque with those in Russia, where hundreds of innocent civilians, including children, were killed in military operations at the Moscow Theater in 2002, and a school in Beslan, North Ossetia in 2004 to "obtain peace" at any cost, Moscow has appreciated the recent Lal Masjid "Operation Silence" in Islamabad, where several people were murdered in a similar military push. By looking to what just happened in Pakistan, therefore, Russia probably thinks its military operations against Chechen and pro-Chechen militants were fully justified.
    
    Indeed, the RIA Novosti press agency was all praise July 13 for Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's timely action to avert further disaster. However, the Russian press agency statement did not examine the specific circumstances that led to the Lal Masjid killings.
    
    The hostage crisis in Beslan, in which a group of armed pro-Chechen fighters took more than 1,200 school children and adults hostage, and the earlier Moscow Theater incident in which about 40 armed Chechen militants took 850 theatergoers hostage, demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya, and an end to the Second Chechen War, were different from the Islamabad Red Mosque crisis. Additionally, it was not terrorism that was suppressed by force at the Lal Masjid compound, but a situation of anarchy.
    
    In Islamabad, the Pakistani army began withdrawing July 12 after completing a 36-hour operation to retake the mosque, seized and held by Islamic radicals for a week. About 1,000 Taliban-inspired students had barricaded themselves July 3 in the sanctuary, a hotbed of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan's capital, following clashes with government troops. The students had been demanding that Pakistani authorities promote stricter Islamic values in the country.
    
    "Russia resolutely condemns terror in all forms and practices," RIA Novosti reported Russian foreign ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin as saying, adding that he had argued the use of troops against the Red Mosque's Islamic militants was a measure taken under duress, and designed to save innocent lives. "We expect Pakistan's political and religious leaders to display solidarity in the face of the challenge issued by terrorists," the press agency quoted from a statement by Kamynin posted on the foreign ministry's official Web site. According to RIA Novosti, the official had also stressed: "Russia [now] hopes that Pakistan's political and religious groups will pool their efforts in the fight against terrorism."
    
    A few days after Muslim seminary students barricaded themselves in the shrine compound, Pakistani officials said they were holding women and children inside the mosque. About 1,200 people left the building July 5, and several more, including two female students, surrendered at dawn the following day. Officially, 73 Islamic radicals and 10 servicemen died during the army assault that began July 3.
    
    Nonetheless, The Frontier Post newspaper cited anonymous sources as saying that over 500 students died, including many women. The authorities denied the figure, and also dismissed a statement by Abdul Rashid Ghazi - the mosque protestors' spiritual leader, who was killed during the fighting - that extremists had buried dozens of people during the siege.
    
    Moscow's praise for Pakistan's handling of the mosque standoff cannot, however, justify the Kremlin's military operation to kill all the school children at Beslan, aimed mainly at discrediting the freedom-fighting Chechens internationally. Additionally, the Russian government arranged a series of bomb blasts in Moscow and elsewhere, during the Moscow Theater crisis, and killed audience members after the theater's reported takeover by Chechen" rebels" demanding Chechnya's independence.
    
    But in the case of the Red Mosque siege, one is confused as to know for sure if it was genuinely an act of terrorism that the Pakistani military forces ruthlessly put down, and the true sentiments suppressed in Islamabad.
    
    Terrorism means different things to different people, but it looks, today, as if terrorism can be ascribed to any group's struggle for a cause that a state's forces would be prepared to stop by mercilessly killing its proponents. Worse, it seems as if whenever Muslims are involved in such protests, they are automatically dubbed terrorists.
    
    The world can, in this way, justify the killings of any Muslims by branding them as violent extremists, which is unfair, indeed! Nonetheless, the United States could reverse this cruelly dangerous trend affecting humanity at large.
    
     Abdul Ruff Colachal is a Freelance Writer and a Research Scholar at the School of International Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He submitted this commentary to the Middle East Times.

http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070722-072356-3048r