This extract on Tablighi Jamaat’s Activities in the CARs, Chechnya & Dagestan is from an article by B. Raman, Additional Secretary (Retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and at present Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai (former Madras). The article is titled ‘Dagestan: Focus On Pakistan's Tablighi Jamaat’.

Mr. Raman can be reached by e-mail at: corde@vsnl.com. The article was dated 15/9/1999 and published at the website of South Asia Analysis Group (SAAG) at: www.saag.org.

Extract from:
DAGESTAN: FOCUS ON PAKISTAN'S TABLIGHI JAMAAT
B. Raman

 

ACTIVITIES IN THE CARS, CHECHNYA AND DAGESTAN

 

Since Pakistani Government service conduct rules do not prohibit serving Government servants from participating in the activities of the TJ, after his appointment by Mr.Sharif as the DG of the ISI, Lt.Gen.Nasir continued to function simultaneously as Adviser to the TJ and, after his removal from the ISI under US pressure in 1993, he took over as the full-time leader of the TJ. After his rehabilitation by Mr.Sharif last year and appointment as Adviser on Intelligence matters, he continued to function as the head of the TJ. He is recently reported to have been removed from the post of Adviser on Intelligence matters by Mr.Sharif following his public criticism of Mr.Sharif's succumbing to US pressure for the withdrawal of Pakistani troops from Kargil.

 

It was during his tenure as the DG of the ISI that Lt.Gen.Nasir, in his capacity as Adviser to TJ, drew up the plans for the revival of Islam in the CARs, Chechnya and Dagestan in Russia and Xinjiang in China with the help of the TJ workers and funds from Saudi Arabia.

 

A large number of Pakistani, Saudi and Jordanian workers of the TJ were sent on preaching and proselytising missions to these countries and recruits for clerical posts in these countries were brought to Pakistan for training in Islamic religious practices. Simultaneously, they were also given arms training in the camps of the HUM and the Lashkar in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They were also sent on proselytising missions to other countries with Pakistani TJ workers to expose them to Muslim communities in the rest of the Ummah. After his removal from the ISI in 1993, Lt.Gen.Nasir himself frequently went on preaching missions to these countries.

 

An idea of the tremendous headway made by the TJ under the guidance of Lt.Gen.Nasir and with Saudi money in promoting Wahabism in these countries could be had from the fact that whereas in 1991, when the USSR collapsed, there was not a single mosque in Chechnya and Dagestan, today every village has a mosque, already completed or under construction. The TJ also organised visits by selected Muslims from Chechnya and Dagestan to Saudi Arabia on Haj/Umra.

 

It is stated that a majority of the members of the Chechen Cabinet had been trained in Pakistan by the TJ and, during their annual vacation, go on preaching missions for the TJ in Chechnya itself as well as in Dagestan and the CARs.

 

In the last week of June,1995, the Interfax news agency of Moscow quoted Mr. Arkady Volski, the Russian peace negotiator for Chechnya, as claiming that after the incident of kidnapping of 1,500 hostages in the South Russian town of Budennovsk in early June, Shamyl Basayev, the Chechen commando leader, had escaped to Pakistan where he had been given asylum. In a statement issued at Moscow on June 27,1995, Mr. Tanvir Ahmad Khan, the then Pakistani Ambassador to Russia, described the claim as false and warned that such allegations would damage Russia's relations with Pakistan.

 

The Russian authorities refuted the statement of the Pakistani Ambassador and alleged that Basayev had been living in Pakistan since 1991 when he had fled there after his involvement in the hijacking of a Russian plane to Turkey and that from Pakistan he had periodically been visiting Chechnya to organise terrorist incidents. In July,1995, Mr.Sergei Stepashin, who was in charge of counter-terrorist operations in Chechnya, and Gen. Nikol Ayev, chief of the Russian Border Security Service, alleged in separate statements that Basayev was amongst a group of Chechen terrorists trained in Pakistani camps.

 

Another Chechen insurgent leader reportedly trained in the camps of the HUM in Pakistan and Afghanistan is Salman Raduyev, who led a group of Chechen extremists on a raid into the Dagestan town of Kizlyar in January,1996, and took 2,000 Russian hostages. After this incident, President Yeltsin alleged that the raiding party under Raduyev included Pakistani mercenaries.

 

The Russian press thereafter carried a number of reports emanating from official sources in Moscow that the extremist elements behind the Islamic revolt in Chechnya had been trained in Pakistan. Strongly refuting these reports, the Pakistani Foreign Office said: " These reports do not serve to promote good ties between Pakistan and Russia which we desire. We hope Russia will also reciprocate our wishes. "

 

In a statement on January 17,1996, the Pakistani Foreign Office strongly denied Russian allegations that Pakistani mercenaries were helping Chechen rebels indulging in acts of terrorism in Dagestan.

 

In a statement on January 13, 1998, the Russian Foreign Office described as inadmissible a statement of Mr.Zafarul Haq, Pakistan's Minister For Religious Affairs, expressing Pakistan's support for "the noble cause of the Chechen Muslims". He reportedly made this statement while welcoming a delegation of Chechen Government officials in his office in Islamabad.

 

In November, 1998, a high level delegation of the Government of Chechnya led by Mr.Abdul Wahid Ibrahim in charge of Central Asian and Afghan Affairs in the Chechen Foreign Office, visited Afghanistan for the first time and reached an agreement on the establishment of formal relations between the Taliban-led Government of Kabul and the Government of Chechnya.

 

During the same month, the Russian authorities expelled from the Bashkortostan region a delegation of six preachers of the TJ for making anti-Moscow statements during their preachings. A statement of the Federal Security Service said that their statements were "aimed at fuelling ethnic and religious hostility and offending the dignity of other religious groups." The preachers were to go to Chechnya and Dagestan in January, 1999, but their visas were cancelled and they were expelled.

 

After the outbreak of terrorist incidents in Dagestan from August 7,1999, the Russian authorities have been repeatedly alleging that the incidents were organised by a raiding party of about 2,000 Chechens from Chechnya jointly led by Basayev and a former Colonel of the Jordanian Army called Khattab, that the Chechens were assisted by a multi-national group of 200 foreign mercenaries led by a Pakistani called Abu Abdulla Jafar, who is in charge of a training camp in Chechnya, that before the raids the raiders participated in a special prayer service in Chechnya conducted by three Pakistani Wahabi preachers called Sheikh Abdul Azim, Junaid Bagadadi and Abdul Omar and that Abdul Omar also read out to the raiders a fatwa received from a group of Saudi muftis calling upon them to establish an Islamic state in Dagestan.

 

Following a denial of these allegations by Mr.Mansur Alam, the Pakistani Ambassador, who wrote a letter on the subject to "Izvestia", the paper quoted Gen.Vladimir Rushailo, the Russian Interior Minister, as saying that "mercenaries from a number of foreign countries, above all Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE, have been taking part in the fighting in Dagestan" and that the Russian security services had concrete information about the involvement of the secret services of some Muslim countries in the Dagestan violence.

 

"Izvestia" also identified Abu Abdulla Jafar as a Pakhtun who had been residing in Chechnya for some years and running a training camp at a place called Serzhenyurt. The paper also alleged that the activities of the mercenaries in Chechnya and Dagestan were being funded by Osama bin Laden.

 

Since President Rafique Tarar, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his father and Lt.Gen, Nasir have been associated with the TJ which has been instigating and assisting the extremist elements indulging in acts of terrorism in Chechnya, Dagestan and, possibly even Moscow, which has been rocked by explosions suspected to have been organised by Pakistani-backed fundamentalist groups, it is time the international financial institutions took notice of this and suspended all further assistance to Pakistan till it stopped assisting these terrorist groups