By Pavel Tarasenko and Elena Chernenko
KOMMERSANT/Worldcrunch
MOSCOW - As the U.S. woke up to discover
that the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing had been identified
and one had been killed, the news also came out that the two young men
were Russian citizens, Chechen brothers who appear to have grown up in
Dagestan. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a police chase through
the outskirts of Boston, while his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19,
remains at large.
Profiles
There was something to be learned about the two brothers from their profiles on vKontacte,
the Facebook-like website that is popular in Russia. According to
Dzhokhar’s profile, he speaks Chechen, Russian and English, and his
birthday is July 22. He went to school in Dagestan from 1999 to 2001, a
north-Caucasus republic in Russia that is home to many Chechen refugees,
and then went to Massachusetts to attend the Cambridge Ringe and Latin
School. He identifies himself as a practicing Muslim.
According to the profile, his most important goals in life are
“career and money.” He is a member of groups called “Chechnya” and
“Everything for the Chechen Republic.” There aren’t many posts - one
photo, one video and one joke. The joke is as follows: There’s a
riddle given at school. A Dagestani, Chechen and Ingush are going
somewhere in a car. Who is driving? The correct answer: The police. The last time he visited the site was 5:04 a.m. on April 19, Moscow time.
Not A Single American Friend
Tamerlan,
the older brother who was killed by police, kept a personal channel on
YouTube, and by the selection of videos posted he appeared to be
interested in Islam and boxing. His playlists include a Chechen singer
who sings about war, Islam and jihad, and "terrorist" videos that are
addressed towards fighters. Not long ago Tamerlan posed for a
photo-reportage by Johannes Hirn called "Will Box For Passport,”
although the link on Hirn’s site appears to be down. In the text that
goes along with the photos, Tamerlan says, “I don’t have a single
American friend, I don’t understand them.”
It also explains in the text that Tamerlan’s family fled Chechnya at the beginning of the 1990s, first to Kazakhstan, then to the United States.
He was studying at the Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and
wanted to be an engineer. He was a boxer and dreamed of making the
American national team. He said that as long as Chechnya was not
independent, he would box for the U.S. not Russia.
Read the article in the original language.
Ever since the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were
identified as ethnic Chechens, the national conversation about the
incident seemed to focus on the connection between the violence and
Chechnya. The two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, certainly
lived in two places at once: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in an
imagined homeland in Chechnya and the North Caucasus more broadly. And
although their ancestral land was something they knew mainly through
family stories and nationalist mythology, they reveled in that part of
their identity -- at least judging from their social media profiles and
the other traces they left in the public domain. In other words, the
Tsarnaevs seemed quintessentially American. Perhaps that is one reason
their involvement in the Boston bombing is so horrifying.
Observers have already pointed out two elements of the brothers’
story that investigators will no doubt pursue: Tamerlan’s being visited
by U.S. law enforcement officers in 2011 on a tip from an unnamed
foreign government and his six-month visit to Russia, including to his
father’s home in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan, in 2012.
The North Caucasus region has seen no shortage of bombs and
assassinations, and people from the area have been responsible for
spectacularly brutal attacks on civilians in other parts of Russia,
including the 2004 hostage crisis at an elementary school that left 380
dead and the 2010 suicide bombings on the Moscow subway that killed
forty.
So far, however, there is no direct information linking the North
Caucasus to the attack in Boston; armed groups in the region, including
the Dagestani branch of the so-called Caucasus Emirate -- the jihadist
network in the North Caucasus headed by Chechen warlord Doku Umarov --
issued a formal statement denying any connection to the Tsarnaev
brothers. The jihadists claimed instead that the brothers were pawns in
an elaborate attempt by Russian security services to turn American
opinion against the North Caucasus underground and against Muslims more
generally. That might be far-fetched, but it would hardly be the line of
argument the Emirate would pursue if it were suddenly using American
operatives to expand attacks outside of Russia. The logical thing would
have been for the Emirate to claim responsibility.
On his trip to Russia, Tamerlan may well have taken inspiration from
the ongoing struggle between Russian security forces and Emirate
fighters, but the modus operandi in that battle is decidedly different
from the one attributed to the Tsarnaevs. In Dagestan, the targets tend
to be uniformed police and security officials. In Chechnya -- a
relatively peaceful place since the formal cessation of Russian military
operations there in 2009 -- the targets are usually people that the
jihadists label “apostates” -- local Chechens loyal to the regional
government of President Ramzan Kadyrov, who has ruled Chechnya as a
virtual puppet of Moscow since 2007. (His father, Akhmad Kadyrov, also
Chechnya’s president, was assassinated by local jihadists in 2004.) The
goal, in most cases, is to kill Russian government loyalists, whatever
their ethnicity or religion.
Doku Umarov certainly did claim responsibility for some of the
shocking terrorist attacks that have periodically ravaged Russia. But
these date from before early 2012, when he formally called for an end to
strikes on civilians. Other attacks have been the work of freelancers
or local field commanders. In these cases, the brutality and scale are
thought to have been efforts by these fighters to increase their own
standing within the organization. The Tsarnaevs might have been
freelancers themselves, but a relatively small-scale, although
barbarous, attack in a foreign country would have been an odd resume
builder for a person looking to catch the Emirate’s eye. And if Tamerlan
received training in the North Caucasus during his most recent trip
there, as some have posited, he put it to little use. The Boston bombing
was considerably less sophisticated than the high-profile attacks
formerly staged in Russia (or, for that matter, than the heavy-arsenal
killing sprees of some American gunmen).
American and Russian officials will no doubt work together to follow
up on any connections Tamerlan might have made during his most recent
trip to the North Caucasus. According to the FBI, Russian security
officials did, in fact, point him out to U.S. homeland security
personnel in 2011, but if Moscow were truly serious about the potential
threat, it would be inconceivable that Russian officials did not monitor
him on his return to Dagestan the following year. And if Russia
expressed no further interest in the case even after Tamerlan’s trip, it
would not be surprising if the United States investigated and then
dropped the case for wholly legitimate reasons.
Republican lawmakers have labeled this episode an intelligence
failure by the Obama administration, but despite the stories of advance
warnings from Moscow, Russian officials are now eager to cast attention
away from the brothers’ ethnicity and any links with Russia itself. In a
statement that came immediately after the Tsarnaevs were announced as
suspects, Kadyrov pointed out that the brothers had no connections with
Chechnya other than their family background. He argued that
investigators should look to the American culture to explain their
behavior. A senior official with Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Vladimir Kotliar, likewise downplayed any connections with Russia. Given
that one of the Tsarnaev brothers was an American citizen, the other
the holder of a Kyrgyz passport, and both residents of the United States
for nearly a decade, Moscow’s bemusement at the intense American
interest in finding a Russian angle is understandable.
It may yet emerge that Tamerlan did, in fact, have some link to the
North Caucasus jihadist scene, but even if he did, it would still do
little to explain the involvement of his younger brother, Dzhokhar, who
seems to have been as deeply American as Lee Boyd Malvo, the younger
shooter in the Washington sniper attacks of 2003. Nor would it likely
have any real impact on U.S.-Russian relations, other than convincing
some American policymakers of the point that their Russian counterparts
take for granted: that people from the North Caucasus, by their very
presence, are somehow a security threat. That will be especially
important in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics in 2014, when Moscow will
be especially security-obsessed and will want to deepen its already
tough surveillance of religious Muslims, especially young men, in the
North Caucasus. The United States, convinced of the threat, will likely
look the other way when it comes to ongoing human rights abuses in the
region.
The brothers’ father and aunt, Anzor and Maret, who have both spoken
to the media, seem to have understood this point intuitively. They have
consistently maintained that the two brothers were set up and are wholly
innocent of any role in the Boston bombing. This may sound like a
bizarre conspiracy theory but from the perspective of people from the
North Caucasus, scenes of armored vehicles on city streets, an entire
neighborhood in lock-down, and a dramatic shoot-out between heavily
armed federal police and alleged terrorists on the lam are familiar
sights. Sons that fall to Russian bullets are consistently believed to
have been innocent victims. And in fact, many of them are. When Russian
federal forces begin an “anti-terrorist operation,” few of the targets
exit alive. The Watertown, Massachusetts, operation was a different
matter entirely, of course, but the optics were all too familiar. With
the Tsarnaev family’s background, distrusting the state -- any state --
comes with the territory, and in the North Caucasus, that is never a bad
rule of thumb to follow.
In the long term, the Chechnya link will probably end up being less
important than, oddly, the Syrian one. In blocking further international
involvement in the Syrian crisis, Russian officials have long
maintained that Syrian rebel groups are dominated by al Qaeda
affiliates, whose victory in the Syrian civil war will have dire
consequences for the region and beyond. Now, Russians have already begun
to portray the Tsarnaevs as an unlikely link between Boston and
Damascus. There are somewhere “between 600 and 6,000” Chechens from the
North Caucasus fighting in Syria, said Kotliar in a recent interview
with Russian media, “and from what happened in Boston, perhaps Americans
will finally draw the lesson that there are no good terrorists and bad
terrorists, no ‘ours’ and ‘yours.’” Keep arming the Syrian rebels, the
argument goes, and sooner or later you will have to face the
consequences of a Syria overtaken by Islamist radicals.
That might not be a bad line of reasoning, especially given what we
know about the complicated mix of ideologies and motivations inside the
Syrian opposition movement. And after Boston, Moscow now has an
additional argument, however tenuous, against greater international
involvement in Syria. That is also why, from the perspective of the
Tsarnaevs’ parents, things all look like a set-up -- tarnishing the
reputation of Chechens as a way of serving some vague end contemplated
by an all-powerful Russian state. Chechnya’s moment in the American
consciousness may end up leading in a bizarre direction: the tragic
aftereffects of the death and maiming of people in Massachusetts may
well be the continued killing and brutalization of a great many more in
Syria.
More than $2 billion in private scholarships is given to smart,
hardworking students such as yourself. But sometimes hard to stand out
in a pool of thousands of other students. Unfortunately only 1 out of
13 students wins an outside scholarship. On top of competition, there
are also fraudsters out there looking to get some money from you by
charging application or processing fees. That’s so wrong! We want you to
have the best possible chance, so we’ve gathered some tips from
scholarship judges, fraud investigators, and previous winners to help
boost your chances of winning that moolah.
Don’t enter any contest or scholarship that requires you to pay money.
At Cappex, we don’t list scholarships that require you to pay to
apply or a credit card number to “hold” it, because we think it’s wrong!
Legitimate scholarships never do this, according to Scholarship
America, and we agree. Many applications require proof of financial
need, but there’s no need for them to have bank account or credit card
information.
Don’t copy previous winners.
In a pool of hundreds or even thousands of applicants, your goal is
to stand out from the crowd, not blend in. Use that creativity and don’t
copy others. Too many entrants in the $3,000 Duck-brand contest to make
prom outfits from duct tape simply tweak the designs of previous
winners, says Bethany Schmotzer, a Duck Products executive. Winners will
be those who think outside of the box!
Follow instructions and do a spell check.
Applications with horrible spelling and grammar mistakes are going to
end up in the trash, as are those that don’t follow instructions.
Judges in the OP Loftbed essay contest say they discard about 60% of
entries for not following contest rules and ditch 50% of those for bad
spelling and grammar. Spend a few minutes making sure your application
is clean and clear…or ask your mom proofread it for you.
Zig where the competition will zag.
On standard essay questions, there are going to be standard or
“canned answers.” Lesley Wainwright, who won one of the prestigious
Coca-Cola Scholars Foundations scholarships in 1994 and has judged for
the $20,000 top prize, had to answer the question, “If you could go back
in history, what one thing would you change?” She guessed that everyone
else would write about saving Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. or John F.
Kennedy or abolishing slavery. So instead, she wrote about something she
just studied: she’d prevent the burning of the library in ancient
Alexandria. By not choosing something conventional, she stood out from
the masses.
Moral of the story: be creative, be yourself. Make sure you submit
something that you are proud of and your chances will increase tenfold!
Photo Credit: estudentloan.com
Source: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/060910/18scholarships.htm
