MAKHACHKALA, Russia — The latest episode in Moscow’s struggle with rebellious Muslims is unfolding here in Dagestan, a forbidding North Caucasian realm where peaks as high as 13,000 feet descend sharply to running rivers.
Suicide bombers have emerged. Each week, an average of three policemen are killed and numerous civilians become casualties. Tanks and helicopters, weapons blazing, pursue guerrillas in the woods.
Until recently, it was the insurgency in neighboring Chechnya that had posed the biggest challenge to Russian leaders. But now, it is the traditionally independent and Muslim Dagestanis whose resentments are turning violent, finding expression in a conservative form of Islam taking root in the beautiful severity of the mountain landscape.
Authorities blame Muslim extremists for the unrest. Conservative Muslims blame government repression. The fighting sometimes appears dangerously close to civil war, with imams attacked and killed, liquor stores blown up, and angry young men taking up arms and going into hiding — which in the North Caucasus is called going to the forest.
“They terrorized the people,” a 30-year-old religious leader known as Abu Umar said of regional authorities. “And now, the people terrorize them.”
When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, Russia emerged independent, its new president, Boris Yeltsin, promising democracy and prosperity in a multiethnic nation. Twenty years into statehood, a minority has accumulated great wealth while the average citizen has been disappointed by lack of opportunity and an increasingly authoritarian government run on corruption and disregard for law. Ethnic tension has grown.
Few protest. Chechnya has been subdued. But Dagestan roils with religious disputes and anger at Moscow, mixed, almost indistinguishably, with vicious commercial and political struggles.
“Russia will never make Dagestan prosperous,” Abu Umar said. “We are a third-class people for them. They want us humiliated, and we feel it.”
On a late-summer afternoon, only the mosquitoes look bloodthirsty in a muddy field where Abu Umar politely offers insect repellant and a tour of a self-sufficient Islamic community about 70 miles northwest of Makhachkala, the Dagestani capital. He is a Salafi, what Russians call a Wahhabi and consider synonymous with extremism.
The walls are already up on the three-story madrassa, or religious school, where Salafis say they intend to provide social services , sports, education and opportunities untainted by corruption. As a bulldozer rumbled, Abu Umar pointed out the spot reserved for an orphanage to care for children he says the government neglects.
He imagines citizens obeying the law of Allah, making police and other accouterments of the state unneeded, allowing Muslims to live in peace and prosperity. The government considers such talk a dangerous cover for subversion and terrorism. Abu Umar says the authorities have lost their moral bearings and are wrong about the Salafis.
“We are building,” he said, “not destroying.”
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