Clash of civilizations: Calling all Chechens - Chaos in the Caucasus
(No, the fighting in the Caucasus is not evidence of a "clash of civilisations" between the Islamic world and other geopolitical blocks
AT LEAST until recently, the main enemy of Islamic terrorism seemed to be the United States. However diverse and quarrelsome its practitioners, they knew what they hated most: the global policeman whom they accused of propping up Israel, starving the Iraqis and undermining the Muslim way of life with an insidiously attractive culture.
Anti-Americanism, after all, has been a common thread in a series of spectacular acts of violence over the past decade. They include the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in February 1993; the explosion that killed 19 American soldiers at a base in Saudi Arabia in June 1996; and the deadly blasts at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.
In many of the more recent attacks it has suffered, the United States has discerned the hand of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born co-ordinator of an international network of militant Muslims. In February last year, he and his sympathisers in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh issued a statement declaring that "to kill the Americans and their allies?civilian and military?is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it." Such blood-curdling talk was inevitably seized on by believers in the "clash of civilisations" described by Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor who said in 1993 that cultural or religious fault-lines were the most likely source of conflict in the post-cold-war world.
Now, it might appear, Russia?s turn has come to do battle on a new front in this many-sided conflict. The Russian government has blamed terrorists from the country?s Muslim south for a series of bomb blasts in Moscow and other cities which have claimed over 300 lives. And it has launched a broadening land and air attack against the mainly Muslim republic of Chechnya, where the terrorists are alleged to originate.
In their more strident moments, officials and newspaper columnists in Moscow say that Russia is in the forefront of a fight between "civilisation and barbarism" and is therefore entitled to western understanding. "We face a common enemy, international terrorism," Russia?s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, told President Bill Clinton last month. As evidence that anti-Russian and anti-American guerrillas have at least one common source, officials in Moscow have pointed to the alleged involvement of Mr bin Laden and his fighters, both in the Caucasus and in the urban bombing campaign.........
economist.com
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