[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 110 (Wednesday, September 15, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1648-E1649]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          THE ROAD TO RUSSIAN TERROR GOES THROUGH SAUDI ARABIA

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. DAN BURTON

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                     Wednesday, September 15, 2004

  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. 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

[[Page E1649]]

     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.