Mr. Speaker, the U.S. State Department announced today that for the first time Saudi Arabia has been placed on a list of countries who have engaged in ``particularly severe violations'' of religious freedom, and faces possible sanctions by…
Mr. Speaker, the U.S. State Department announced today that for the first time Saudi Arabia has been placed on a list of countries who have engaged in ``particularly severe violations'' of religious freedom, and faces possible sanctions by the United States as a result. Today's action simply underscores a point that I have made time and time again, namely, that the Saudis have been funding for many, many years madrassas where Wahhabism is taught, and Wahhabism is a radical fundamentalist Muslim religion that teaches children to hate Christians and Jews, and to perpetrate violent acts against them.
Wahhabism is also the philosophical and religious underpinning of Saudi-born Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network. The simple fact is, wherever you find Wahhabis you will find fertile ground for al-Qaida and its supporters.
The Russian people learned this painful lesson when 30 Chechen rebels took control of a schoolhouse on the first day of school, and killed at least 338 people, half of them children who were going to school for their first day. According to the reports, 10 of those people who were terrorists were Arabs, and we believe that they were probably from Saudi Arabia. In addition, the attacks were reportly planned by Shamil Basayev, a Chechen rebel commander, and financed by Abu Omar as-Seyf, a radical Islamic Wahhabite, who is not surprisingly believed to be associated with al-Qaida.
Mr. Speaker, I commend to my colleagues an article published in the September 20, 2004, edition of the Weekly Standard and written by Stephen Schwartz, entitled ``The Road from Riyadh to Beslan.'' The article lays out quite clearly how the Chechen separatist movement has been hijacked by the Islamist radical Jihadist movement, and makes a compelling case that we must compel Saudi Arabia to cut off funding for global Wahhabism if we are to avoid more 9/11s and Beslans. I urge my colleagues to read this article and I would like to have the text of this article placed into the Congressional Record following my statement.
[From the Weekly Standard, Sept. 20, 2004]
The Road from Riyadh to Beslan
(By Stephen Schwartz)
Three roads led to the horror at Beslan in the Russian
republic of North Ossetia in which at least 330 people, most
of them children, died: one road beginning in Grozny, the
capital of neighboring Chechnya; one road beginning in
Moscow, to the north; and one road beginning in Riyadh, the
capital of Saudi Arabia, far to the south. Americans need to
know how such frightful events are connected to the global
war on terror, and the degree to which they must threaten our
own peace of mind.
The main culprits in Beslan were Islamic extremists. Since
at least 1999, these violent fanatics, with backing from the
Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia and financial support from
radicals throughout the global Muslim community, have
assiduously agitated to take over the Chechen national
movement (about which more in a moment).
The participation of ``Arabs''--meaning Saudis and other
Wahhabi influenced Muslim foreigners--is a constant in
reportage and comment on Beslan and earlier terrorist
incidents in Chechnya, as well as in neighboring Ingushetia,
in Georgia, and in Russia itself. The majority of Chechens,
most of whom want only to be left alone, are not avid for the
Wahhabi offensive, which is one reason most attacks now take
place outside Chechnya.
Meanwhile, the Islamists hope to exploit old rivalries
between the Chechens, Ingushes, and other Muslim peoples of
the Caucasus
mountains and their Christian neighbors, including the
majority of Ossetians. In Russian and Soviet history,
Chechens were always the arch opponents of Russian
penetration into the mountains, and the Ossetians the most
enthusiastic Russian supporters.
Al Qaeda-promoting websites accessible almost anywhere are
replete with propaganda extolling terrorism against innocents
in Russia, exalting suicide bombers, and seeking to
intoxicate Muslim youth with the glamour of dying in the
Chechen campaign (see, for example, www.islamicawakening.com/ viewarticle.php? artic1eID=1059&). In mosques across the
globe, from New York to Nairobi, Wahhabi extremists collect
money and recruits for combat in Chechnya, which at times
overshadows Iraq as a symbol of so-called martyrdom.
To cite an example on American soil, the 25th National
Convention of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a
front for the radical Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan, was held
in 2000 in Baltimore. There, Tayyib Yunus, head of the
group's youth section, complained, ``We all want to see our
youth to succeed to become doctors, to become engineers; but
how many of you can actually say that you want to send your
sons to jihad, to Chechnya? How many of you can actually say
that you want to send your youth to fight in jihad?'' Chechen
advocates claim that money collected in mosques in America
and other Western countries never reaches the Caucasus.
Wherever al Qaeda and its supporters operate--which means
wherever Wahhabis are to be found, including in the United
States--atrocities like those in Beslan may occur. Why should
a conspiracy capable of the attacks of September 11, 2001,
known to have been plotting the use of nuclear dirty bombs,
and guilty of bloodshed from the nightclub bombing in Bali to
the Madrid metro massacre shrink from taking children hostage
anywhere? To defeat the perpetrators of Beslan and its like
must be the goal of all who would protect civilization. Yet
two questions must be posed: How can we defeat the
terrorists? And, is Russia under Putin truly an ally in the
struggle?
The Wahhabi conspiracy that has taken over a section of the
Chechen movement is controlled from Riyadh. To stop another
Beslan from occurring, the United States and other leaders in
the global war should do everything necessary to terminate al
Qaeda, capture bin Laden and his command staff, and quiet the
storm in Falluja. That is, they must force the rich Saudis
and Saudi state institutions to halt their international
promotion of Wahhabism. Notably, the terror financing
charities operating in the Chechen refugee camps in
Ingushetia must be dismantled.
Action by President Bush calling the Saudis to order on
this matter would be more effective than waiting while
Vladimir Putin further mishandles a problem that the Russians
have never been able to deal with. The Russians respond to
such challenges by attempting to manipulate them for
political purposes, rather than by trying to save lives and
catch terrorists. In dealing with al Qaeda and its allies,
Russia can be as slippery an ally as the Saudi kingdom.
Historically, the conflict between Russian power and the
Caucasian Muslims, of whom the Chechens are the largest
group, dates back more than a century and a half. For a
useful glimpse of how the original Russo-Chechen war played
out, one may consult the novella of Tolstoy, Hadji Murad, his
last major work of fiction. Tolstoy was a young officer in
the tsar's 1851 campaign to suppress a Caucasian insurgency.
His book evokes the wild landscape and the experiences that
drove him to an open and emotional identification with the
Muslim fighters.
Back then, the Chechens were idolized by many in Europe as
a freedom-loving, indigenous people who had done to the
tsarist regime what the oppressed Poles and, later, the
persecuted Jews could not do: inflict serious military
losses. Among Russian Jews, respect for the Caucasian Muslims
was so great that the Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem M.
Schneerson praised the Islamic leader Imam Shamyl as a hero
of resistance to injustice.
The Chechens were not to be spared from vengeance for their
success at undermining Russian authority. The most brutal of
Russia's rulers in the past 150 years, Joseph Stalin, whose
family tree included some Ossetians, ordered a whole range of
Caucasian Muslim nations--Chechens, Ingushes, Karachais,
Balkars, and Meskhetian Turks--deported to Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan, and other Central Asian republics during and
after the Second World War. In most cases, the pretext was
alleged collaboration with the Nazis, who seldom even reached
the territories these despised peoples inhabited.
In the 1950s, Stalin's successors allowed the Caucasian
Muslims to return to their homes and absolved them of the
charge of assisting the Nazis. But many of them settled in
Central Asia, where they followed a moderate form of Islam.
In a long interview with me in Almaty in June, the deputy
mufti of Kazakhstan, Muhammad-Husein Hadzhi Alsabekov, one of
that country's top Muslim clerics and an ethnic Caucasian,
expressed his sorrow and outrage at the September 11 attacks
on the United States.
Nevertheless, the Chechen problem resurfaced in the
Caucasus after the Soviet Union fell apart. At first, Chechen
leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, who as an infant had been deported
from his native land in a railroad cattle car, served, with
his supporters, as a protector of nascent democracy. A Soviet
Air Force commander in Estonia, Dudayev turned over a nuclear
air base to the newly freed Estonians in 1990, making him a
hero in the Baltic states. Inside Chechnya, however, order
soon disintegrated. For years, many Chechens demanded
independence from Russia of the kind their leader had helped
the Baltic peoples gain. But unlike Estonia, Chechnya has
oil, and Russia was not about to let it go. The result was a
series of low-intensity, high-atrocity conflicts, with
Chechen militants striking at Russian forces guerrilla-style,
and the Russian military responding with mass killings and
disappearances of Chechen civilians.
Dudayev, a force for moderation and stability, was slain by
the Russians in 1996. Russian president Boris Yeltsin then
made peace in Chechnya, in cooperation with the moderate
Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov, and withdrew the Russian
army. But in 1999 the Wahhabis showed up in Chechnya and
neighboring Dagestan in force. Among Muslims, it was said
that they were Arabs who had been excluded from participating
in the Kosovo war by the Albanian leaders of the Kosovo
Liberation Army, who considered the Kosovar struggle
nonreligious, and who did not want to alienate their U.S.
allies.
For whatever reason, the arrival of the Wahhabis, led by a
Saudi--Samir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem, who called himself
Khattab, and who would be killed in mysterious circumstances
in 2002--plunged Chechnya back into a nightmare of
kidnappings, murders, suicide terrorism, and similar
incidents, which has yet to end.
But if the Chechen problem persists, so do its Russian and
Saudi counterparts. Many in Russia and elsewhere believe that
the Putin regime has a stake in maintaining the Chechen
conflict as a means to unite his people behind the president,
regardless of the criminal ineptitude displayed by Russian
authorities at places like Beslan. According to authoritative
Western experts, official Russian complicity in Wahhabi
terror in the Caucasus cannot be doubted. The worst of the
Wahhabi kidnappers, Arbi Baraev, and his nephew Rovshan, who
carried out the hostage-taking in a Moscow theater in 2002,
were connected with the Russian security services. The
Russian authorities partly face a problem they themselves
fostered.
Be that as it may, the decisive struggle to prevent
atrocities like Beslan from being repeated will happen at the
source, which is Saudi. We cannot, at this late date, expect
Putin to suddenly come to his senses and find new Chechen
allies capable of isolating the terrorists. Rather, we should
recall the end of the Cold War. Once the Kremlin stopped
financing world communism, the phenomenon nearly disappeared
from the planet. If America can compel Saudi Arabia to cut
off funding for global Wahhabism, the ghastly spectacle of
Beslan will not be repeated again and again.