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Nov 28 / 2:08pm

A Caucasus Wedding

by Kerkko Paananen

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Weddings are elaborate in Dagestan, the largest autonomy in the North Caucasus. On 22 August 2006, we attended a wedding in Makhachkala, Dagestan's capital: Duma member and Dagestan Oil Company chief Gadzhi Makhachev's son married a classmate. The lavish display and heavy drinking concealed the deadly serious North Caucasus politics of land, ethnicity, clan, and alliance. The guest list spanned the Caucasus power structure -- guest starring Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov -- and underlined just how personal the region's politics can be.

Dagestani weddings are serious business: a forum for showing respect, fealty and alliance among families; the bride and groom themselves are little more than showpieces. Weddings take place in discrete parts over three days. On the first day the groom's family and the bride's family simultaneously hold separate receptions. During the receptions the groom leads a delegation to the bride's reception and escorts her back to his own reception, at which point she formally becomes a member of the groom's family, forsaking her old family and clan. The next day, the groom's parents hold another reception, this time for the bride's family and friends, who can "inspect" the family they have given their daughter to. On the third day, the bride's family holds a reception for the groom's parents and family.

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Filed under  //  CableGate   Caucasus   Dagestan   Kadyrov   Russia   StateLogs   WikiLeaks  
 
May 16 / 6:56am

Black Widows: Russia's Bitter Harvest

by Kerkko Paananen

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As the Moscow bombings remind, the simmering insurgency and brutal crackdown in the Caucasus have left a landscape of damaged women, some all too ready to spread their pain to Russia's heartland.

The last time Patimat Magomedova saw her daughter, she was puttering around the house, manicuring her nails and using henna to dye her hair bright red. Maryam Sharipova, 27, had traveled a thousand miles to Moscow and climbed onto a crowded subway train at rush hour with an explosives-packed belt strapped around her waist. She was accompanied by a 17-year-old girl, also from Dagestan, who blew herself up at another station.

In the Russian news media, the women were immediately dubbed "black widows." Their assault on the subway was taken as proof that the country had been shuttled back to the fearsome days when hollow-eyed female militants stalked Moscow and other cities far from the wars where their men fought Russian forces. The subway bombings also sent ripples of unease across the turbulent, mostly Muslim republics strung along Russia's southern edge.

But it came as slim surprise that women were ready to die. This is a landscape of damaged women, grieving losses they dare not dwell upon. The closer you get to the fighting in the Caucasus, the murkier it appears. The violence in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia is not easy to classify -- it is a mix of rebels who want independence, Islamist extremists bent on waging jihad, local clan and gang warfare and sectarian strife.

And as the fighting intensifies, it is the men who disappear. Masked agents pound on the door and cart them off for questioning. They come back beaten, or not at all. Sometimes the men are rebels; other times, their affiliations are bafflingly vague. It is the women who are left behind, their status and material comforts tangled up in the choices of their fathers, sons and husbands.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/13/world/la-fg-women-bombers13-2010apr13

Filed under  //  Caucasus   Chechnya   Dagestan   Ingushetia   Moscow   Russia   Terrorism  
 
Jan 20 / 1:39am

"Dagestan is permanently on the brink of civil war"

by Kerkko Paananen

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The incidence of terrorist attacks in Dagestan has spiked in the new year, with only a month to go until the term of Dagestan’s incumbent president Mukhu Aliyev expires. On 8 January 2010, Russia’s leadership demanded tangible results in the counter-terrorism operation in the North Caucasus. Since then, five militants have been killed, including one said to be an important leader in the Dagestan insurgency. But is this really likely to slow the Islamist insurgency? And will the appointment of a new president further fan the flames in the republic?

http://russiaprofile.com/page.php?pageid=Politics&articleid=a1263322702

Filed under  //  Caucasus   Dagestan   North Caucasus   Russia  
 
Jan 19 / 11:16pm

Russia establishes North-Caucasian Federal District

by Kerkko Paananen

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has established a new federal district in Muslim-dominated North Caucasus. The President appointed Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Khloponin, governor of the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk and former board chairman of Norilsk Nickel, to head the North-Caucasian Federal District. The new federal district comprises Russia's volatile republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachay-Cherkessia, as well as the Stavropol region, with the administrative centre in Pyatigorsk.

http://rt.com/Politics/2010-01-19/north-caucasus-federal-district.html

Filed under  //  Caucasus   Chechnya   Dagestan   Ingushetia   Kabardino-Balkaria   Karachay-Cherkessia   Medvedev   North Caucasus   North Ossetia   Russia