The Boston Marathon bombings: Links to the Caucasus

The Boston Marathon bombings on April 15 sparked a massive media interest in the North Caucasus, the homeland of the two suspects, Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev. Combing through the publicly accessible details of the brothers' online activity prior to the attack, the US media has explored links between their Chechen ethnicity and Islamic beliefs. As always, the quality of these analyses varies, and in such a highly charged context it can be hard to identify the most accurate reporting, which risks getting lost in a cycle of repeated myths and unverified assumptions from media outlets around the world. The unexpectedness of this tragic narrative puts new and intense pressures on traditional political perceptions. The Caucasus region as a whole has long hoped for increased political interest from the US -- but for reasons very different than these, with the North Caucasus described as the basement of the jihadist movement. Media accounts of the historical and geographical identity of the Chechen separatist movement have attracted both conspiracy theories and assumptions about the motivations for this appalling act of terrorism: 1. The so-called Caucasus Emirate ordered the attack This assumption is based on Tamerlan Tsarnaev's visit to Russia a year ago; the claim is that he made contact with the leader of the Caucasus Emirate, Doku Umarov, who ordered Tsarnaev to orchestrate the attack on the enemy of Islam. Another perspective is that Umarov ordered the bombing as a way to draw the US's attention to the Chechen problem. Both interpretations seem problematic. First of all, the Chechen movement has changed its face, especially since the death of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the first president of the Chechen Republic, and after him Aslan Mashadov, who opposed the Islamization of the conflict. Under the influence of Arab mujahedeen, the Chechen movement has metamorphosed gradually from a nationalist to a Chechen Muslim identity. Since the mid-2000s, the Wahhabis have expanded their influence and the Chechen conception of independence has shifted, now envisioning this so-called Islamic emirate. The motives, then, are different to those of the al-Qaeda terrorists already on the US agenda. Second, it has been said that because Umarov had been put on a US terrorist blacklist, he wanted to punish the country. But while Doka Umarov certainly describes the US as the enemy of Islam, his main enemy is Moscow and its allies. Furthermore, in his speeches, Umarov does not pay any special attention to the US. For him, whoever is helping the Russian authorities is the enemy of the Chechens. Third, in February of 2012, Umarov ordered the movement not to target any civilians, and since then the insurgents have not been involved in indiscriminate violence, although there have been some attacks against civilians. Additionally, the Daghestani wing of the North Caucasus insurgency has formally denied any involvement in the Boston attack. 2. The Tsarnaev brothers planned the terrorist act to attract Western interest to the Chechen issue Over the past decade, Chechen terrorism has vastly reduced sympathy to the Chechen rebels. The movement changed its face in 2004, with the notorious Beslan school hostage attack, the brutality of which shocked and appalled the international community. Following this act of terror, the Chechen movement became paralyzed -- the president of the Chechen Republic and one of the leaders of the Chechen movement, Aslan Mashadov, rejected the position of Shamil Basayev, who justified Beslan terror as acceptable in the context of the struggle for independence. Later both Mashadov and Basayev were eliminated by Russia. On the other hand, after this terror act the international community's condemnation of Russia's human rights abuses and war crimes in Chechnya decreased. After 2004, there was the second and largest wave of emigration in the history of the Chechen people. One cannot forget that, generally, Caucasians are well known for their particular sense of family honor, and Chechens very much fit this label; this is the reason the uncle of Tamerlan Tsarnaev told US broadcasters that his nephews p ut shame on the entire Chechen nation. 3. The Boston terror act was a pretext for the US to increase its military presence in the Caucasus Russian experts have suggested that the US wants to build its military presence in the South Caucasus, namely in Azerbaijan

for its post-2014 Afghanistan strategy, or to deploy Georgian secret services among American-trained North Caucasus militants as part of a plan to increase instability and extremist attitudes in Russia's southern regions. These suspicions are groundless. The reason Russia is trying to deflect attention from the North Caucasus link is fear that tensions will damage the success of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games. Russia has warned about jihadists or mujahedeen targeting the Olympics. Is it in Russia's interests to see more attention on the affairs of the North Caucasus? Where Moscow is brutally repressing any developments? Where no one speaks about human rights abuses? Or does the US need Moscow's cooperation for an anti-terror strategy for the North Caucasus -- which Moscow sees as a purely domestic issue? Beyond this, it could not be in Russian interests to use the Boston bombings as a pretext to use more hard power in the North Caucasus, where anti-Chechen and anti-Muslim sentiment in Russia could increase. Last but not least, the Boston bombings and the North Caucasus connection puts into question the security of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Increased Western media attention could also expose the human rights abuses and economic struggles of the region's population, but if Moscow refuses to open the region to Western media and observers, then it could jeopardize its ambitions to showcase its might through the Sochi Olympics.