In Retort to Paris, Chechens Denounce ‘Permissiveness’

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/world/europe/chechens-march-to-protest-religious-caricatures.html

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MOSCOW — Tens of thousands of people marched on Monday through Grozny, the capital of the mainly Muslim Chechnya region of Russia, in a conservative retort to the mass demonstrations in France this month expressing solidarity with the victims of the terror attacks in Paris.

The march in Grozny was led by Ramzan Kadyrov, an ally of President Vladimir V. Putin who has used a combination of force and favors to quell radical Islam in Chechnya. The marchers converged on the largest mosque in the region, many of them carrying placards reading “We love Muhammad!” and “We are against caricatures!”

The marchers said they were not rallying in support of the terrorists who killed 17 people in Paris, many of them employees of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. But Mr. Kadyrov said that he and his supporters were “ready to die” in order to protect Muhammad and they praised Russia’s “principled position” of protecting the rights of believers by banning offensive material. Charlie Hebdo frequently published cartoons that poked fun at Muslims and Muhammad.

Wearing a vest emblazoned with “We love the Prophet Muhammad,” Mr. Kadyrov said that Europe had not learned any lessons from the recent bloodshed in Paris. He called the recent marches for peace in France a “street show with slogans in support of permissiveness that lead to bloodshed.”

It was not possible to independently assess the size of the crowd at the march. The Russian Interior Ministry put it at 800,000 people, a figure that, if accurate, would make the march one of the largest public demonstrations in Russia in modern times. It would also mean that the crowd was three times the size of Grozny’s resident population and that 60 percent of all Chechnyans were there.

Chechnya is known for reporting election results that are nearly unanimous in support of Mr. Putin and his allies. Critics say that those numbers are manipulated.

A similar march was held in Ingushetia, a neighboring Russian republic in the North Caucasus, over the weekend. Local news media reported that 15,000 people took part there.

But in Moscow, a city with one of Europe’s largest Muslim populations, a petition to hold a similar rally was denied, apparently because of concern over public order, the Interfax news service reported.

Mr. Kadyrov has often been accused of pursuing violent, extralegal policies to keep a lid on extremism in Chechnya, which has been riven by civil war twice since the collapse of the Soviet Union. When terrorists mounted an attack in Grozny last month, killing 14 police officers, Mr. Kadyrov was criticized for calling for relatives of the attackers to be punitively expelled.

“Their houses will be razed to the ground,” Mr. Kadyrov wrote on his Instagram account.

In the days afterward, a human rights group documented attacks against nine homes belonging to relatives of suspects in the attack.

More recently, Mr. Kadyrov has been one of a number of conservative public figures in Russia to condemn the West for permissiveness, pledging to defend Mr. Putin from his enemies.

Other conservatives have attacked the film “Leviathan,” which deals with alcoholism and neglect in Russia’s far north, or have formed teams of conservative counterprotesters to disrupt anti-Putin demonstrations.

In Grozny on Monday, Mr. Kadyrov suggested Western security forces may have planned the attacks in Paris, a conspiracy theory that was also promoted on the front page of one of Russia’s most popular newspapers the day after the attacks.

“We strongly declare that we will not allow anyone ever to insult the name of the prophet and our religion without punishment!” Mr. Kadyrov said on Monday in televised remarks.