Bombshell (10 page)

Russian authorities have also alleged that the girls were under the influence of drugs. It suits the Russian government to say that drugs, brainwashing, and blackmail are involved. To blame societal dynamics in Chechnya is easier than facing up to the role played by Russian soldiers in radicalizing Chechen women. The authorities do not want people to conclude that the situation in Chechnya is so desperate and the living circumstances so awful that women are driven to suicide and murder. So the Russian media regaled readers with stories of drugged and coerced zombies and implied that responsibility for their condition rested entirely on the Chechens themselves and on radical groups like Al Qaeda.

The claims perpetuated in Russian propaganda are refuted by stories of Russian soldiers laughing as they charge Chechen fathers 300 rubles (about $20)
not
to rape their daughters. According to the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, 85 percent of the women raped in Chechnya were raped by soldiers or police officers and 15 percent of the attackers were Chechens.
⁶⁰
In Chechnya, rape constitutes “normal conduct” and many of the cases never go to court due to the cultural norms or fear of retribution from the Russian authorities. The human rights violations fall under Russian policies of
bespredel
(without limits or boundaries)—committing atrocities and acting with impunity. The concept originated in Moscow's world of organized crime and was exported to Chechnya; thus soldiers could do anything to Chechens with impunity.
⁶¹

While the situation for women in Chechnya was dire, the truth about how women become involved in suicide operations remains murky. Certainly, Russian actions have played a significant role in traumatizing women and incentivizing them to seek revenge. However, a black-and-white interpretation is complicated by reports that several of the women who participated in the Dubrovka siege were “sold” to the resistance to become suicide bombers—as we have seen in the case of Fatima and Khadizhat Ganiyeva. Several of the women were the sisters (not the widows) of well-known jihadis who had been paid as much as $1,500 per sister to deliver
shahidat
. The families of four of the women (Aset, Raina, Ayman, and Koku) reported that their daughters had been kidnapped and trained to kill against their will.

It is difficult to know for sure. Whatever the truth—whether these women chose their fate willingly or were pushed into participation—the attack against the theater was very much a family affair. The terrorists in the room comprised sisters, aunts, uncles, husbands, cousins, and wives. Thirty-two of the terrorists carried their real passports (which were later used to identify them) and several of the attackers were related to one another.

There is no doubt that recruiters routinely target young women who have lost someone during the war, like a close male relative. As a result of the stress from the war, women are highly impressionable and readily convinced to carry out a suicide mission. The organization instills an intense hatred of Russians for causing the death of her loved ones. The outside world is cast in terms of good and evil and an intense religious indoctrination follows.

Not all of the girls are religious. Most of them have grown up in secular environments, wearing miniskirts, listening to rock and roll, and watching American movies. But the recruiters deliberately misinterpret the
Qur'an
to persuade their recruits to become martyrs. Most of the girls have grown up in large families and are
told that as
shahidat
they are the only hope for the families' future and their actions will save the whole clan. The girls' new comrades promise to make sure that their families will be taken care of financially, and promise the girls' families thousands of dollars for their daughters' sacrifice. The girls are placed in a closed environment in which they know no one. The psychological process involves bolstering the girls' self-image while simultaneously cutting it down. So while the women train to be fighters, they are also made to do the men's laundry and cook for them. Some of the girls think that life in the rebel camp will be full of adventure. No longer mere village girls frightened by life, they will be transformed into fighters and future heroines respected by their comrades and celebrated by their communities.

Although not all of the Chechen female bombers fit this profile, the majority were younger than thirty. While not all had lost relatives in the fighting against Russian troops or in the brutal purges of Chechen civilians by Russian security services, many had suffered during the mopping-up operations. Not all of them were raped, tortured, or humiliated by the Russian military, but all could tell tales of degradation under the occupation.
⁶²
Starting with the Second Chechen War, a new culture arose in which the norms of Chechen society and expectations of what women could contribute changed irrevocably. Many girls are convinced that a martyrdom operation is their best option. Recruiters now know that they cannot force the girls to do anything. A coerced bomber is considered “vocationally unsuitable and would blow the operation at any moment.” In the end the girls go to their deaths voluntarily.

TERROR AND COUNTER-TERROR

After the siege at the House of Culture, then Deputy Internal Affairs Minister Vladimir Vasilyev pledged publicly to cleanse not only Moscow, but all of Russia of Chechen “filth.” The hostage-takers'
families bore the brunt of Russia's response. The relatives of the women terrorists were persecuted, kidnapped, and killed. Five weeks after the siege, while the parents of the Ganiyeva girls were with their grandchildren at a neighbor's home watching television, the FSB came to the village of Assinovskaya and blew up their house. The Russian authorities destroyed the houses of all of the terrorists they could identify from the Dubrovka. In retaliation for the attack against the Ganiyevs, the homes of four Russian families in Assinovskaya were burned down three days later. Asya's home, too, was blown up by the Chechen administration and the Russian security services in retaliation for her participation in the siege. That December, the FSB killed Movsar Barayev's brother Adlan. And the cycle of violence—as the Moscow subway bombings in March 2010 demonstrated—continues.

THE “PREGNANT” BOMBER

We are prepared to fast to the death, if necessary, but our love for justice and our country will live forever.

—Mairéad Farrell, Margaret Nugent, and Mary Doyle, hunger strikers, Armagh Prison, December 1, 1980
¹

We are actively involved in the struggle at all levels raising the issues of sexism, violence against women, and discrimination, women must fight for their freedom.

—Mairéad Keane, Director, Sinn Féin's Women's Department, July 1990
²

SIOBHAN

Siobhan
³
sat by herself staring out the window of a bus full of tourists and holidaymakers en route to Belfast International Airport. Her rosy cheeks were flushed with both nervousness and excitement. She was wearing denim overalls, the kind that pregnant women often wear, and concealed underneath them fifteen pounds of Semtex explosives strapped to her waist. Her mission: to plant the explosives at the airport and wait for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) to make its warning call to clear the premises. In her mind, she could accomplish this task without any civilians
getting killed. However, the economic reverberations of such an attack would be huge: tourism in Northern Ireland would grind to a standstill and make it too expensive for the British government to remain and maintain its presence. By attacking a high-value site like the airport, the PIRA would also show that no target was beyond its reach. Siobhan's mission took the PIRA's use of female bomb smugglers to a new level. In a weekend of heightened bombing activity, with nine bombings and shootings all over the province that very day, in Lisburn, Newry, Derry, and Strabane, Siobhan's ruse—pretending to be an expectant mother—might enable her to successfully carry out her mission without anyone ever suspecting her real identity.
⁴

At Templepatrick, near Newry, the airport bus started to pull away from the border customshouse and then jerked to a stop. Without warning, several uniformed police officers boarded the bus. They scanned the faces in the crowd and made a beeline for Siobhan. The other passengers looked on quizzically, not yet alarmed, as patrols often boarded the buses to check ID and travel papers. When they began to question Siobhan, the passengers may have assumed that something had happened to the baby's father or that there was some emergency. She looked at them with big blue eyes, trying to appear calm, but they asked her for her identification papers and immediately escorted her off the bus. When they were on the curb, one of the police officers quickly frisked her. The patrol did not yet know what they were dealing with. He undid the metal buttons fastening her overalls and the bib dropped to her waist, exposing the bomb strapped to her midsection. The officers escorted Siobhan to another area and instructed the driver to move the bus as the passengers looked on with horror. The young woman was not pregnant at all, but carrying a bomb. No one had ever seen anything like this before.

Siobhan was loaded into a police car and driven to the station
for interrogation. The special explosive unit defused the bomb slowly and carefully and destroyed it with a controlled explosion. Curiously enough,
An Phoblacht
/
Republican News
, the official newspaper of Sinn Féin (and the PIRA's mouthpiece according to critics), claimed that the attack was successful, writing in its war news a few days later that an IED had exploded at the customhouse, without mentioning that Siobhan had been caught before her mission was complete.
An Phoblacht
never even mentioned her name.

The Belfast airport bombing by a woman feigning pregnancy did not happen that day. When a Sri Lankan woman emulated the tactic the following year, she managed to blow up herself and former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, India, on behalf of the Tamil Tigers. History records that Gayatri (Thenmuli Rajaratnam) was the first female bomber to feign pregnancy when, in fact, the women of the IRA had been smuggling explosives in their panties and under the guise of pregnancy for years; they just hadn't been suicide bombers.

Siobhan was sentenced to fourteen years on May 21
,
1990. The judge tried to convince her to recognize the authority of the court, take a guilty plea, and throw herself on the court's mercy. After all, she was so young, she could have pled to a lesser charge as a minor. She refused. The authorities and even the defense lawyers then tried to pressure her parents to get her to consent and work with the authorities. Siobhan recalled with a smile that her parents had told them where to go, and how to get there.

THE RISE, FALL, AND RISE OF THE IRA

Religious and sectarian violence began in Ireland as far back as the twelfth century, but it culminated in the 1970s during the Troubles. The Emerald Isle had been invaded by Vikings, Romans, and Normans, but the invaders that stayed were the English.
Beginning in the twelfth century, the English began to assert their control. Gaelic Ireland was completely defeated by 1691, at which time thousands of Scottish and English settlers were brought in to farm its rolling green hills. The Gaelic Irish were Catholic and their new masters were Protestant. This religious divide had both economic and political ramifications, with Irish Catholics banned from becoming members of parliament under the Penal Laws, even though they constituted 85 percent of the population. All economic and political power rested in the hands of the Anglo-settler community for two hundred years and land distribution and access to resources varied depending on people's religion.

In 1798 Wolfe Tone, influenced by ideas from the French and American revolutions, led the Irish Rebellion against English rule. The rebellion possessed some of the worst characteristics of a civil war. Sectarian resentment, fueled by the Penal Laws, resulted in even more repression. Rumors of atrocities and massacres multiplied on both sides. Executions of Protestant Loyalist prisoners were answered by the massacres of captured Catholic rebels. The 1798 rebellion was the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history, and resulted in thirty thousand deaths over three months.

As a result of the rebellion, the English employed a divide-and-rule strategy, using the sectarian conflict to whip up nationalist sentiment among Protestants. In 1801, in the Act of Union, the United Kingdom formally annexed Ireland, making it part of Britain's colonial empire. While King George III had vetoed emancipation of Catholics, in 1829 his son George IV signed into law the Catholic Relief Act, which sanctioned their participation in parliament. This mitigated the source of conflict, but Ulster, in the north, where most of the British had settled, remained the center of the violence between Catholics and Protestants. Elsewhere, tensions had an economic cause, as a growing divide between landowners and tenant farmers resulted in social unrest. Land allocation and
socioeconomic status were often highly connected to religious affiliation and so hostility between the two religions remained high.