Putin: Bombing masterminds will be caught

MOSCOW — Russia's strategy toward its mostly Muslim southern republics has varied little over the past decade of turbulence: Meet force with force. Attacks on trains, apartment blocks and schools are met with crushing military campaigns, disappearances and death.

But Tuesday, the day after 39 people were killed in Moscow during their morning commute by female suicide bombers, the government's handling of the Caucasus region came under criticism — even from within.

The idea that Russia would suffer the wrath of people radicalized by violence in the republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan is not new. But this week's attack seemed to dredge it from the margins of discourse. The subway carnage has engendered not so much shock as despair at the return of a nightmare.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, widely regarded as the most powerful man in Russia, may well choose to continue the hard-hitting policy that he engineered.

But elsewhere, there is an undertone of failure.

President Dmitry Medvedev invited Ella Pamfilova, head of the presidential commission on human rights, to meet with him at the Kremlin on Tuesday. Afterward, he called for redoubled efforts to improve the quality of life in the republics.

"We destroy terrorists and will continue to destroy them," Medvedev said. "But it is much more difficult to create correct, modern conditions for education, for conducting business, for overcoming the clan system."

Meanwhile, the deputy chair of the State Duma's security committee acknowledged law-enforcement officials had helped to radicalize people living in the Caucasus by abusing their rights.

"It's not tough actions against terrorism that fuels tensions, but the violations of human rights which happen because of the incorrect actions of law-enforcement organs and power structures," Gennady Gudkov said. "The population today often suffers from lawlessness coming from the law-enforcement organs."

Since coming to office two years ago as Putin's hand-picked successor, Medvedev has often expressed himself in softer, more liberal terms. But few policies have changed; Putin's approach still appears to hold sway.

Putin, a former KGB agent, has been bellicose in response to the bombing.

"We know that they are lying low," Putin said of the insurgents. "But it is a matter of honor for the security services to drag them out of the bottom of the sewers into the light of God."

Putin has good reason to defend the use of crushing force. After a humiliating Russian defeat in the 1990s, he launched the second Chechen war to regain control of the rebel region, cementing his political career in popular enthusiasm for vengeance.

It was also Putin who installed the Kadyrov clan, once mountain-dwelling rebels who fought Russian troops, to run Chechnya. They were given tacit permission to abuse human rights in the name of security and seemingly bottomless funds to rebuild the bombed-out capital.

Like Putin, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov appeared to interpret Monday's attack as a catalyst for more violence. He called for terrorists to be "callously destroyed."

Critics in Russia have long griped that installing the Kadyrov family, the so-called "Chechenization" of the fight against extremists, was a quick solution that would eventually turn disastrous. When Kadyrov's father was first installed as Chechen president by the Kremlin, the public was weary of war and Russian troops were being criticized for human-rights abuses.

The younger Kadyrov took over after his father was assassinated. He has indulged in torture, secret prisons, extrajudicial killings and the burning of homes belonging to relatives of suspected fighters, human-rights workers say.

At the same time, he stirred religious sentiment, calling on women to cover their heads and encouraging the return of polygamy.

The result has been a radicalized population and a fervor that is now focused less on breaking away from Moscow's grip — and more on waging jihad, analysts say.

Meanwhile, extremists squeezed out of Chechnya have nested in Ingushetia and Dagestan, where Islamist philosophies have mingled with clan rivalries and organized crime.

"I think it's important for federal officials to try to win back public opinion, because a lot of people support the jihadis," said Gregory Shvedov, editor of the Caucasian Knot Web site. "Not in a financial or a material way, but they support them in an ideological way. I think there are thousands of people in the north Caucasus who are not participating in jihad, but who support it."

Shvedov described Russia's approach to the Caucasus as a sort of neo-feudalism, with almost total authority given to proxy leaders.

"People in the northern Caucasus feel like they don't belong to the nation, but to a local leader, and those local leaders will make decisions about their lives," he said. "You want people to be citizens, to pay taxes, to belong to a federal army. Really, Moscow wants this. But it's not happening."

Less than a year ago, Russia declared an end to its counterterrorism operation in Chechnya. At the time, Kadyrov declared he presided over a "peaceful and budding territory."

But one bloody event after the next followed: A suicide bombing nearly killed the president of Ingushetia in June. In July, respected human-rights worker Natalia Estemirova was abducted from her home in Chechnya and killed. Aid workers who worked with children wounded by war were killed weeks later.

And then there were the sheer numbers: Kidnappings, violent deaths and suicide attacks, the ghosts of a war that was supposed to have been won, all on the rise.

It took Monday's bombings in the subways that run like veins binding Moscow's neighborhoods to turn a creeping sense of despair into a more firm notion that, somehow, the status quo is not working.

Lawmakers pondered imposing the death penalty for terrorist attacks. Medvedev asked judicial officials to review legal responses to terrorism.

A poll released Tuesday night by Moscow's respected Levada Center found that 70 percent of Russians considered the situation in the northern Caucasus "critical" and "explosive." Nearly half thought the region was mostly — or completely — beyond the control of the federal government.