SEPARATISTS QUESTION RAMZAN’S PIETY

Publication: North Caucasus Weekly Volume: 7 Issue: 12

The separatist Daymohk website on March 20 posted a critique of Ramzan Kadyrov’s putative revival of Islamic law in Chechnya. The author of the piece, Mayrbek Taramov, wrote: “The Russian public is suddenly worried that Kadyrov, the incumbent head of the Chechen puppet government, has started to revive Muslim laws in the republic. The Russian media is saying that Kadyrov has introduced a law making it compulsory for women to wear head-dresses. I would quickly like to assure the ‘dear Russians’ that no such revival of Islamic laws is happening in Chechnya, nor could it, mainly because the initiator of these undertakings is not a Muslim, although he does possess certain Muslim attributes. If something akin to Sharia law does occur in the republic, then it is nothing more than a masquerade. And the order for such Islamic performances comes straight from the Kremlin and the Lubyanka.”

Further on in his critique, Taramov wrote: “Meanwhile, our modern Muslim Kadyrov is pretty much like his father: everyone in Chechnya knows about the sexual adventures of the former mufti. And one of the photographs that have appeared on dozens of Internet sites shows a drunken Akhmat Kadyrov, both a Hajji and ‘ruler’ of Chechnya, with his arms round a prostitute [accompanying Taramov’s piece, Daymohk posted a photograph of the elder Kadyrov with one arm around a blond woman]. As the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya points out, the video of [Ramzan] Kadyrov in a sauna with prostitutes are not the most scandalous ones. It seems the current propagandist of ‘Sharia law’ loves to pose before the camera when his fellow-countrymen are being tortured in Khosi-Yurt prisons. And such photographs exist.”

Taramov concluded: “We will not have long to see how this Satanic witches Sabbath in today’s Chechnya will end. Once it has bolstered the KGB regime in the republic, this whole riff-raff, headed by the thug Kadyrov, will be rejected as superfluous. Everyone knows that on May 9, 2004, a Chekist land-mine turned the seat of Kadyrov Sr. upside down. But Kadyrov Jr. now has nowhere to go—for a year now he has been dangling like a roach on the hook of the ‘Kremlin fisherman’, awaiting his miserable fate.”