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Rusudan Giorgberidze, vice chairwoman of the Free Caucasus resistance movement, said she has little doubt that the Russian government intends to "tighten the screws" on the North Caucasus after top security officials blamed Monday's attacks on Islamist rebels from the region. (So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.) But that move, she added, will likely only spur a cycle of retaliation. "In the face of a regime that rules by increasingly persistent clampdowns and raids, a person who tries to defend himself does not think of himself as an insurgent. Excuse me, but that is simply...
Giorgberidze's perspective as a former resistance fighter and a woman has special relevance in the wake of Monday's attacks, which were carried out by two female suicide bombers who were linked in the Russian media to the notorious "black widows" of the North Caucasus. These are the women who have carried out a string of suicide bombings in Russia in recent years, most notably in 2004, when they struck two passenger planes taking off from Moscow, killing 89 people. They also took part in the Moscow theater siege of 2002 that claimed more than 100 lives. Their motivation...
...Russian security forces] are violent with us, and we have the right to act out in violence against them, to defend ourselves and our relatives. So this idea, this word terrorist, when it is applied to people fighting in the Caucasus, is an artificial word that was made up to discredit the resistance," she said. After describing how she took up arms in 1993 against Russian-backed forces in Abkhazia, a disputed region of Georgia, she added, "We lose our men and we choose to fight back. Does that make us terrorists...
...eyes of the Russian state and the international community, it certainly does if the attacks are of the kind Moscow experienced on Monday. Yet the vendettas that Giorgberidze described are widespread throughout the Caucasus, parts of which have been ruled from Moscow in one way or another for two centuries. That history of subjugation, along with the desperate poverty afflicting most of the region, helps explain the apparent ease with which insurgents have been able to recruit new fighters, both men and women. As a result, violent incidents in the North Caucasus jumped from 281 in the summer...
Perhaps most frustrating for Russia's leaders is that the conflict appeared to have ended last year in Chechnya. In April 2009, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev even abolished the "special security regime" in Chechnya, a move widely seen as marking an end to the prolonged Chechen conflict. Created by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at the start of Russia's second invasion of Chechnya, in 1999, the special regime imposed curfews, roadblocks, spot searches and arbitrary detentions on local residents for 10 years in the name of security. After Medvedev's announcement, the state also withdrew some 20,000 federal troops...