The conflict between official Grozny and official Ankara is one of the biggest news this week. And it is specifically the conflict between Grozny and Ankara, not Grozny and Ankara, because the latter probably doesn’t even know that such a conflict is taking place, and if it does, it doesn’t pay much serious attention to it.
The official cause of the conflict was the opening of another monument to Dzhokhar Dudayev (may Allah have mercy on him) in one of the parks in Istanbul, which the current Russian-Chechen authorities presented as a hostile step of the Turkish authorities against them and Russia. This is hardly appropriate — despite all the authoritarian tendencies within Turkey, it remains a country with many independent public associations and autonomous local authorities, unlike Russia, where all levels of power are subordinated to the Kremlin.
Therefore, it is unlikely that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will pay attention to every monument opened in the country — he clearly has more important things to worry about, especially now. However, some claim that the recent angry outbursts of the Russian-Chechen authorities were caused by the Turkish intelligence services’ interruption of their attempt to assassinate one of their opponents on Turkish territory, followed by harsh actions against their supporters. We’ll return to this issue later, but for now let’s focus on something else.
Regardless of the real cause of the conflict between official Grozny and Ankara, we would like to draw attention to the fact that the reputation of Islamic figures, which the Russian-Chechen authorities create for themselves, limits them to certain limits of struggle against political opponents.
This concerns the following statement by Ramzan Kadyrov: «For example, in such a case it would be quite logical and politically ‘mirrored’ from our side to immortalize the name of the founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence in one of the Turkish prisons, in Grozny». But the problem is that Ocalan is no longer just a «Kurdish separatist», as Ramzan Kadyrov probably considers him. Moreover, he is no longer even a Kurdish separatist, but a supporter of a global and Middle Eastern leftist revolution, the vanguard of which is supposed to be the Kurdistan Workers Party and its numerous branches.
To clarify what is being discussed in Turkey and around the world, Ocalan is associated by his supporters with ideas that Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya and Russia supposedly oppose. Namely, feminism and LGBT. It is the militant (in the literal sense of the word) Ocalanists with guns in their hands who oppose the «Islamic patriarchy» that Ramzan Kadyrov supposedly welcomes. For example, Ocalan’s political cover in Turkey, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), actively lobbies for the interests of the LGBT community in Turkish politics. A community that, until recently, Ramzan Kadyrov did not seem to favor.
Could it be that, knowing all this (and we hope someone will inform him), he will unveil a monument to such a person in Grozny? Moreover, the official Mufti of the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation, Salah Mezhiev, declared that from now on the well-known political figure Muhammed Fethullah Gulen can be considered a true patriot of the Turkish people, while Abdullah Ocalan is a prisoner of conscience. We hope that someone will also inform the Mufti about Ocalan.
And perhaps also about the fact that many of Gulen’s works published in Russian have been officially included in the lists of banned extremist literature in Russia. So is it possible for a Russian religious figure to be involved in promoting extremism? That could lead to charges under Russian law. Or perhaps he will succeed in having Gulen’s works removed from the lists of extremist literature in Russia? It would be an interesting precedent.
And now we come closer to what we promised to come back to. Frankly speaking, the possibility of such an expansion by the Russian-Chechen authorities would hardly be very exciting for either Abdullah Ocalan or Fethullah Gulen. Of course, the supporters of both have a pragmatic approach and cooperate with anyone if it suits their interests. The cooperation between the red Kurdish terrorists and the Russian special services and authorities has been going on for a long time, both in Syria and in Russia, where the latter protect the former. However, neither Ocalan nor Gulen, as global players, would be satisfied with such an association.
The first, for the reasons mentioned above, because his supporters in the world are adherents of completely different values than those with which Ramzan Kadyrov associates himself. As for the second, he is betting on an alliance of Muslims with Western liberalism, which is also clearly not what official Grozny policy is associated with.
Another indirectly related news item this week is the announcement by the far-right Austrian Freedom Party that it is withdrawing from the agreement with United Russia. The significance of this news cannot be overstated if one knows the history of the issue. There was a time when United Russia was perceived as a respectable centrist party, similar to Germany’s Christian Democratic Union. And after that, an official alliance with such marginal parties as the Freedom Party became a serious lowering of its level. And now even the fringe parties that once couldn’t dream of an alliance with such a party don’t want to have anything to do with it.
Why did this happen? The answer is obvious — after all the political assassinations, territorial seizures, weapons rattling and so on, the Kremlin and all the elements of the Kremlin system have become, as they say today, «poisonous». Moreover, given everything that has come to light since Navalny’s poisoning, this toxicity is no longer just a metaphor.
Therefore, despite the fact that many leaders or their opponents cooperate with the Kremlin to solve their political tasks, the general trend in the world is that the further away one is from Putin’s Russia, all its elements and agents of influence, the better.
It seems that the Kremlin has come to realize that they have hit an invisible wall. Therefore, it seems that they want to break through this wall in the form of an ultimatum to the West and force it to make peace on their terms against the backdrop of a buildup of troops near Ukraine.
However, we dare to assume that none of this will work, and in the end it will not be the wall that breaks, but those who try to break it with their foreheads.