Much has been said about the Boston bombers, about their possible motives, their origin, their upbringing and their thinking. We know quite a bit by now about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The older brother had links to radical circles and liked to watch extremist Chechen Islamist videos on Youtube; the FBI even interviewed him in 2011 after the Russian security apparatus showed concern. His younger brother seemed a nice enough chap without political affiliations, who was probably dragged into the radical abyss by his brother.
Still, a nagging question remains unanswered: how is it possible for a human being to kill an eight -year-old boy in cold blood?
Ten years ago, when I researched the motives of Chechen and Palestinian suicide bombers in their respective territories of origin (Chechnya, Russia/the Palestinian Territories and Israel), this is what I found: even when I interviewed aspiring suicide bombers - caught before the crime - even when they told me their motivation, there was still something missing from their accounts that would have explained their apparent willingness to kill innocent bystanders.
One thing is clear: an explosive cocktail of reasons leads people to commit crimes like these.
1) Zubeidat, the mother of the “Boston Bombers” said in an interview with Britain's Channel 4, the FBI called her to ask two years ago whether she thought Tamerlan could turn violent “because he was a strong boy”.
How could she have known? Mothers are in fact not good at sniffing out terrorists if they happen to be their offspring. If it is true that the brothers made the bomb by themselves according to an Al-Qaida-online-manual and had no organisation behind them, as the younger brother claims from his hospital bed, it would have been very difficult for the FBI to prevent this attack.
The “Boston bombers” have triggered a new debate. As Glenn Greenwald noted correctly in the “Guardian”, Muslim attackers are instantly called “terrorists” while non-Muslim mass murderers like Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people in Sandy Hook elementary school last December, were never charged with terror-related crimes -- even though they clearly terrorised not only the school, but the entire country. In the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the labelling happened very quickly: "We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice”, said White House spokesman Jay Carney.
America needs to update its definition of “terrorist”. Either all or none of these attackers, who have been killing in America’s cinemas, schools and marathons are terrorists.
Another relevant question is who has links to a terrorist organisation? And what is a terrorist organisation? Nina Khrushtcheva is spot on in "The Boston Paradox" when she observes that the bombings show how similar Russia and the US are in this respect: "Just as Russia must deal with a growing wave of fundamentalism that its own policies have fuelled, the summary condemnation of Muslims in America will breed more alienation and retribution from within."
2) Obviously the Tsarnaev brothers felt socially awkward. They felt they were not properly accepted in America. That of course is the case for most teenagers and not only in America. But the Tsarnaevs were not only new immigrants. They had to cope with a severe culture clash. Alyssa Lindley Kilzer, a former client of the youths' mother Zubeidat, explains in her blog how she was lying in Zubeidat’s “private spa” to get her facials on a table in the living room of the family flat while listening to stories about the forced marriages of the Tarnaev sisters. One of those ended quickly in divorce. Zubeidat only reluctantly agreed to it, even though she knew that her daughter had been severely beaten.
Bizarre culture clashes are of course no explanation for mass murder. Usually young people struggle through their adolescence without blowing other people up at the finishing lines of a city marathon. Even in Chechnya itself, where an entire generation grew up as children of a brutal war in the Nineties, very few turned into “black widows” as the female suicide bombers in their black chadors were called.
There is an additional factor which triggers the move to violence: those who walk the thin line between two cultures, two home countries and two societies with very different values are more prone to radicalisation. Sometimes, it seems, it is precisely the freedom in democratic societies that these young adults cannot handle.
3) Religious fanaticism clearly plays a big role in the descent into radicalism and Tamerlan Tsarnaev is no exception. The rise of political Islam – partly imported, partly home-grown – was an astonishing phenomenon in Chechnya during the wars in the Nineties. Wahhabism was foreign to Chechens before the wars of 1994-96 and 1999-2009. Traditionally many belonged to the Kunta-Hadji-Sect, a Chechen offspring of Naqshbandi Sufism. A clan structure with its own legislative codex, the “Adat”, was the defining organising principle of Chechen society, rather than sharia law. In the 20th century Soviet communism weakened religious affiliation.
Among those who were still religious was Ramzan Kadyrov’s father. Ahmed Kadyrov was the Mufti of Chechnya during the first war from 1994-1996. He called for a jihad against Russia. But as the Islamist rebels under Shamil Basayev grew stronger and stronger, Mufti Kadyrov decided to side with Russia in 1999. This was not only an attempt to keep his power. It was also an indication that the Chechen rebel movement had been taken over by Wahhabism, a new and much more radical interpretation of Islam. Ahmed Kadyrov was installed as governor of Chechnya by Putin. He was killed in a bomb attack by Islamist rebels in 2004.
This is how his son Ramzan came to power – by inheritance. Barely 30 years old, known as violent, he was given his father’s job by Putin to keep Chechnya under control. Ramzan has since developed a new religious regime blending traditional Islam with a more radical interpretation, throwing in some ultranationalist content and trying to implement sharia law. Some of this astonishing ideological mix seems to have spilled over the borders of the republic, now again part of the Russian Federation, and reached the head of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Maybe he was influenced by his mother, who became more and more religious in the last few years and even divorced her husband over it. Maybe he was also radicalised further in Dagestan, when he came to visit in 2010. Many fanatical Chechen fighters took refuge there from the Russian onslaught on their land.
4) But the Islamist aspect is not the final layer of motivation one should examine. As I concluded in my book “Terror and Trauma”, the reasons for becoming a living bomb go even deeper. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are perpetrators, but they are also victims.
The collective trauma of whole peoples like the Chechens can cause havoc generations later, if not properly treated and resolved. The past 200 years of violent history between Chechens and Russians has never been explored, there was no reparation and no serious attempt at restitution.
The Chechens were forced into the Russian empire in the 19th Century; Stalin deported the entire population in 1944 to Central Asia, allegedly for conspiring with Hitler's Third Reich; a quarter to a third of the population died during operation “Chitsevitsa” – “Lentils” from hunger and cold; When the Chechens came back (uninvited after Stalin's death in 1956) it was official Soviet policy not to speak about the deportation at all. There was no restitution of property or recognition of the injustice done to an entire people; during perestroika at the end of the Eighties, there was a brief attempt to seek justice. Even then Chechens were only part of a big parcel: Stalin had Volga-Germans and Krim-Tatars deported and Kalmyks and Ingush – Chechens were only one of many peoples. The Supreme Soviet declared in November 1989 that “the repressive acts against all peoples who were forcefully deported were illegal and criminal”.
But there was no time for reconciliation. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Chechens rushed to declare independence. Dzhokhar Dudayev, the man who became the first president, had been a general in the Soviet army -- he lied about his Chechen ethnicity on the army forms in order to get accepted. But he turned into a furious Chechen nationalist once the Soviet empire crumbled. And then he became a poor politician, under whose leadership Chechnya turned into a mafia state, ruled by violent gangs and spreading its violence all the way to Moscow. Russia used this as an excuse to return and force Chechnya back under its rule. The parents of the younger Boston bomber named their son Dzhokhar, who was born in 1993, after this man, Dzhokhar Dudayev.
The cycle of violence started again. After two wars in the Nineties, Chechnya was pretty much destroyed. Russia had won once again, but with heavy losses and little gain. No word has been spoken since about responsibility for the 100.000 victims. On the contrary, Putin sees the Boston bombs as justification for his military campaign against Chechnya: "We have always said that action is needed and not declarations. Now two criminals have confirmed the correctness of our thesis," the president said in his live phone-in event on April 25.
But as a result of Russia's military strategy and Kadyrov’s rule, everyone who can leave Grozny and the surrounding Caucasian mountains does so. Exactly like the parents of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov reacted to the bombing by saying: "It is necessary to seek the roots of evil in America.” It is hardly a question of evil or not. But anyone can argue that post 9/11 America was fiercely anti-Muslim and that racial profiling was and is humiliating and alienating for Americans with Muslim backgrounds. The United States has interfered often not out of pure humanitarian interest. The US helped create the Islamist terrorists of today by financing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion. Yes, all of this.
But one of the reasons why Chechens still live abroad today is the fact that Ramzan Kadyrov, with Putin's consent, established a cruel, anti-democratic, Islamist mafia state in Grozny. Putin himself gained initial popularity as prime minister of the Russian Federation in 1999, when he decided to invade Chechnya once again to finish off the resistance against Russian domination by “flushing the bandits down the toilet” as he so famously said at the time.
Putin is directly responsible for the destruction of Chechen society which has created these uprooted generations of forced emigrants. Benedict Anderson calls the diaspora "long distance nationalism" and indicates through this term the heightened sense of belonging to a former homeland. The same way that, in a long-distance relationship, the desire to be together again can get irrationally bigger when separated.
All this of course is no excuse for what the Boston bombers did. But the background explains some of the underlying reasons for the radicalisation of the Tsarnayev brothers.
Some have argued that the Tsarnaev brothers have never even lived in Chechnya. They were born in far-away Kyrgyzstan. But this Central Asian republic was in fact the place Stalin deported the Chechen people to in 1944. Some returned, some stayed. But nobody forgot the narrative of the deportation, for it was told from babushka to grandchild. The collective memory reaches far back. And maybe herein lies also the answer to the emotional numbness, the lack of empathy for the victims, which they showed. Trauma, if not properly treated, can create Terror. When justice is never done, then a thirst for it can emerge at the most irrational moments.
Such as when a 19-year-old American kid wearing his baseball cap the wrong way round places his rucksack filled with explosives next to an eight-year-old fellow American kid and walks away.
Who is a terrorist?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/22/boston-marathon-terrorism-aurora-sandy-hook
Interview with Zubeidat Tsarnaeva about her sons:
http://www.channel4.com/news/mother-of-boston-bombers-fbi-rang-me-before-attacks.
Nina Khrushtcheva's: "Boston Paradox":
My book “Trauma and Terror”: