Abstract. The authors look at the issue of European security in the context of large migration flows that have brought not only a new mode of life to many European countries, but also new threats and the most serious challenges since WWII. They suggest a certain set of tools to prevent a similar situation in the Russian Federation.

The turbulent stream of migrants and refugees inundating Europe has been the most serious challenge to the Old World since the times of World War II. Thousands of migrants arriving in the European Union (EU) from he Middle East and Africa leave their native parts trying to escape death, devastation, hunger and poverty that came with war, or rather with the US theory of controlled chaos translated into reality. The lethal weapon in the form of American democracy distributed across the world has brought about numerous armed conflicts involving both illegal armed formations and all manner of terrorist organization.

If organizations of this kind emerge, there must be someone who wants them; there are the goals and tasks, the funding and other things that not only keep them going, but also encourage their spread. Accordingly, there are the tactics and strategy, the forms and methods of their use, which are the job of specially trained people. Who are they then, these puppeteers? What is their ultimate aim? Let us try and find out who needed a tense situation in Europe that is suffocating under an avalanche of migration problems and appears to be unable to solve them, its prosperity and well-being notwithstanding. The events unfolding with lightning speed in virtually all of Europe’s states makes one wonder what Europe may look like tomorrow if it does not revise posthaste not only its migration policy, but also its own views of the emerging world system on the whole.

  • Analysis of the current events related to the influx of refugees in Europe has shown that statistically the states of Western Europe are receiving the biggest numbers of refugees in the world, on the strength of the demographic situation, even though they have never espoused the melting pot ideology as the United State did, which in the 1930s, for example, sent migrants to build roads thus at once developing the transportation infrastructure of the state and relieving social tensions in the migrants’ milieu;
  • large numbers of migrants (refugees) require considerable expenses for their upkeep and integration in the receiving community;
  • frequently ethnic communities in compact settlements follow their own laws that clash with the laws and traditions of the relevant countries;
  • the presence of numerous integrated migrants results in racial and religious unrest, and an increase in ultraright sentiments among the locals, especially youngsters, in whose midst the ideas of radical political organizations start to take root;
  • migration processes are actively used by international criminal groups, drug dealers, smugglers, extremist and terrorist organizations, etc.

All of this seems to suggest that the flow of refugees to Europe is to the U.S.A.’s advantage. “Depopulation should be the top foreign policy priority with regard to the third world, since the US economy will require large and growing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from the least developed countries.”1 Europe attempted to lessen its dependence on its sovereign the United States, which, once the World War II was over, has been keeping it on a tight leash and is now paying the price. Europe, as part of the US-led coalition, therefore, endorsed its crazy ideas of establishing democracy, and actually unleashing aggression against sovereign states, and overthrowing the governments not to its liking without a thought of the consequences that lost no time in coming. One of such consequences was the creation of monsters, terrorist, radical, and extremist organizations, one of them the Islamic State (IS)* that is one of the world’s worst headaches at present.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the IS predecessor, was not of great danger to the world community. It was a local terrorist grouping whose ambitions, as follows from its name, were limited to Iraq and the Levant (the ancient appellation of what is now Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and the Sinai). But once it was rebranded and its name shortened to Islamic State, the danger got much too real, including for the Russian Federation, simply because the underlying idea was now that of the world caliphate, a single Islamic state not just on the territory of Iraq and the Levant but also wherever there was Muslim population to be found, including Central Asia (Khorasan to the Islamists), the North Caucasus, and the Volga Region.

* Terrorist organization banned in Russia.

At the summit meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) that convened in Dushanbe on September 15, 2015, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin said, “…the so-called Islamic State controls large sections of Iraq and Syria. The terrorists are talking of setting their sights on Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem.” Also Vladimir Putin said that the IS militants were expanding to the territory of Russia and CIS countries.2

According to Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, there are now over 2,900 Russian nationals identified as taking part in international terrorist organizations, almost 300 of them have already returned home to carry on with the jihad, but are fully under the control of law enforcers. Last year IS Islamists issued a no-nonsense warning to Russia and its president that they intend to unleash a bloody war in the North Caucasus.3

Ex-CIA director Michael Morell, speaking on January 12, 2015 before the House Committee on Armed Services, said that the numbers of IS militants had considerably increased in the previous year, and the growth rate far exceeded that displayed by Al-Qaeda in the past. He also said that IS branches were found in 20 countries. Things were very different merely a year earlier; in 2015, the number of foreign nationals among IS gunmen was put at 20,000, but this year, there are all of 36,000, and 6,600 of these carry passports of Western countries.4 This statement suggests the following unequivocal conclusion: the Islamic State is on the up and up and actively recruiting novices to build up its ranks.

Things are now beginning to change thanks to the military operation in Syria that the Aerospace Forces of the Russian Federation have been carrying out since September 30, 2015. Yet, the terrorists are certain to resist doggedly by committing terrorist and subversive acts, which can be mass and systemic.

The expansion of the Islamic State has, therefore, caused a massive flow of migrants to the European Union that has been going on since the middle of 2015. And it is hardly a secret that some of the people coming to the EU as refugees from Syria, where the IS rules the roost, are in fact citizens of other Moslem countries where US-style democracy has taken root, as it were. The unending stream of migrants to tolerant Europe has brought not only budding chaos, violence, and the first terrorist acts (in France in 2015 and 2016, in Brussels in 2016), but also hunger, disease, and poverty, but mainly it has brought to Europe a new mode of life for which the EU citizens, apart from their elites, are not exactly prepared. Examples are legion, but the chief conclusion is obvious – Europe can become Islamic and cease to exist as it is now.

To bear out this scenario one can cite the outcome of the 1389 war between the united troops of Serb Prince Lazar and Bosnian King Tvrtko, where they suffered defeat at the hands of the Ottoman hordes of Sultan Murad I, when all ethnic groups then living in the Balkans were Christian – Orthodox, Catholic, and Bogomil. “It was the invasion of aliens that set off horrendous fratricidal wars in the region. Most of the Slavs, Vlachs, and Greeks preserved the Orthodox faith and their culture. Some recoiled and wavered. Either from mercantile considerations (Muslims did not pay many of the taxes imposed on the Slavs), or adopting the others’ religion from slavish zeal. That was how Muslims appeared – Bosniacs, Pomaks, Bektash The descendants of glorious Illyrian Shiptars were partly slaughtered, and the lands of what is now Albania were populated with Arnauts and Circassians whom the Turks had brought over from Persia and the Caucasus to populate the conquered areas. The Arnauts who had mingled with the indigenous Tosks and Shiptars formed a new ethnic group, Albanians. They were mostly Muslims.”5

A roughly similar thing happened during the Great Patriotic War. The volunteer highland division SS Skanderbeg was formed of the choice Albanian units in 1944. Also Albanians made up four Albanian Fascist militia battalions totaling some 12,000 men to carry out ethnic cleansing in Serbia. In 1943, units were formed in the Kosovo city of Mitrovica to fight Serbs, among them the bloody Kosova Regiment. They slaughtered over 40,000 Orthodox Christian Serbs and Macedonians, including women and children; hundreds of priests and monks were tortured to death.

A scenario used in countries where, according to the US, “human rights and freedoms are violated,” is virtually the same, except that the pretext is democracy promotion; on that pretext the United States and its allies bombed and dismembered Yugoslavia and helped all the former republics break away from Serbia.

The interests of the US and the EU Atlantic wing were only too obvious. Kosovo occupied by NATO is the home of two major US bases, and that country also controls thousands of highway kilometers, and hundreds of bridges in this crucial region. At present, everyone is very well aware that the main US objective there is control over hydrocarbons, which was why the Iraq and Afghanistan had to be invaded, and attempts were made to establish control over the Caspian hydrocarbons. More importantly, the United States realizes the pressing need to create its own trans-Balkan oil pipeline from Azerbaijan, via Georgia and Turkey, to the Balkans, and on to the subordinate Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania. And the bombing of Yugoslavia with Kosovo subsequently torn away was planned in order to “settle the issue of the strategic Bulgarian-Macedonian-Albanian oil transportation corridor, and communication lines that link the Black Sea and the Adriatic.”6

European politicians who joined someone else’s game “against the rules” (dismembering of Yugoslavia, the Arab Spring events in the states of the Middle East and Africa) ran a serious risk of ending up on a powder keg stuffed with radical Islam. This is what in fact is happening now. United Europe, while persisting in its flirtation with migrants, is dead set on ignoring the growing threat of its imminent end. There is plenty of proof for this theory, and the most fearsome are the recent terrorist attacks. Europe is also being rendered Islamic by means of soft power. For example, a ban on Christmas trees and celebrations, on chiming bells in Christian churches, on cooking and eating German sausages, the authorities concealing facts of law breaking by migrants, icons burned by migrants who in this way wished to get warm, and lots of other things that the tolerant Europe chooses not to notice.

However, this is not the most dangerous force growing in Europe now. Do not forget that the bulk of the migration flow to the EU consists of males under 35, and also of young women, some of them pregnant, with terrorists among them. What Europe may look like in the medium term is suggested by the following quote, “… and among the diaspora a tacit program of ten children per family is steadily propagated. And while Serbs are jeering at lazy Albanians, saying they cannot make anything apart from siring progeny, the latter continue their quiet creeping occupation. And are biding their time.”7 We would like to remind the reader that when setting up the Islamic State, the organization leaders actively recruited not only gunmen, scientists, doctors, teachers, but also young girls. A perfect case in point it the story of Moscow State University undergraduate Varvara Karaulova.

The United Nations Organization issued a report entitled Children and the Islamic State where the IS future basis is outlined, namely that the terrorists stake their prospects on children believing that youngsters can be molded into more universal and ruthless fighters than adults. Also the report notes that on the territory under IS control there are about 31,000 pregnant women whose children the gunmen intend to use in the future as the new generation of terrorists. In terms of psychology, human babies are born as a sort of tabula rasa, and their personality evolves depending on what methods and ways of education and upbringing are used, as well as on the environment. In this case, children are to be used as living shields and also soldiers who will act as messengers, spies, and guards. From the first, children are trained to spy. They have to share information about their family members, neighbors, and friends who do not abide by caliphate rules. When they have sufficiently mastered this skill, they are taught to do more complex and responsible things. It they find themselves on the front line, they are tasked with spying on the enemy. Children are taught to make speeches and public addresses. If they prove to be good at that, they are used for propaganda and recruitment of comrades-in-arms. This not infrequently bears better fruit since children are more emotional and also can win other children over to their side.

A good deal of attention is paid to the recruited children’s family members. In previous conflicts children were forced to kill their kith and kin to break down the protective psychological barriers of the child who will then have no one to go back to. But because the IS needs to have proper society, mothers are given books with instructions on how to raise young jihadists. Children are used to execute those who do not follow the IS ideology. Making children take part in executions, the IS renders cruelty the norm. Some help adults during executions handing them knives while others perform the execution on their own. They are told that executions are an honor and in a way a prize. Sometimes they are trained to commit suicide. Thus they are made to put on suicide bombers’ belts by way of exercise. As recently as July 2015, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights registered 19 cases of children used as suicide bombers. The IS approach to children’s education is reminiscent of the Nazi Germany’s policies in education and with regard to children. The point of teaching is to induce the child to concentrate all of his/her mental and physical energy on serving the state.8

Assuming that coming to the EU with the refugees were also pregnant wives and widows of IS gunmen (both living and killed), one can guess whom they will eventually sacrifice to their ideals and desire of revenge. For example, in France and Germany 20 percent of those who leave for Syria and Iraq to support the terrorists over there are women.9

Nor should one overlook the fact that some of the children born and raised in the EU will receive good education, take up fitting jobs and get access to state governance, and then the state will hardly be developing according to democratic principles. Because politics tackle the matters of public governance, their ability to hold sway politically will provide them with opportunities and capabilities to affect society with the utmost efficacy. But that is a medium-to long-term prospect. In the immediate future, though Europe may see the Arab Spring that will completely alter the ethnic makeup of the EU, according to the migrants’ own experience. The reason is simple – any other experience (meaning, positive) is something they do not possess.

It has to be stressed that the suggested scenarios of EU development may at first sight seem unrealistic, but a closer look at all pros and cons prompts the following conclusions:

  • The main reason for this state of affairs may be some features of the Islamic creed that consist in there being quite a few provisions of a radical nature (jihad interpreted as a holy war, fighting first and foremost not reprehensible habits, but a different way of thinking), which in the absence of a widely spread system of knowledge about the essence of Islam help Islamic youths quickly turn radical, because they try to make up for lack of knowledge, life objectives, and ideological landmarks by turning to the origins of the Muslim religion;10
  • Of no small significance is the manifestation of the so-called Islamic factor, or rather its scope; it manifests itself wherever there are Muslims and their organizations, whether in Muslim or non-Muslim countries, in relationships between Muslims and with non-Muslims; depending on the object of influence (a state, society and groups therein, individuals), the Islamic factor can also assume a state, public or particular* nature;
    * Particularism (from the Lat. particula, particle) is the principle of social and political activity aimed primarily at protection of private and narrow group interests. Particularism is striving for independence of parts of the state or various sections of public life, and also a trend toward making the individual autonomous and relying on the private interests (Political Science. Encyclopedic Dictionary, Moscow, 1993).
  • The EU political leadership creates certain conditions, namely, concealment of crimes committed by migrants from their compatriots, payment of generous financial allowances to migrants while the wages of their own citizens get cut, indulgence to the emergence of migrant enclaves where even the police are powerless, etc. The civic society, meanwhile, is encouraged to be tolerant toward migrants.

The result of similar reckless actions will be the numerical superiority of Muslims over Christians in Europe, which will ultimately bring about not only a change in the political regime, but also establishment of the Muslim way of life.

The explosive growth of migration in 2015 is the immediate consequence of the irreparably collapsing balance between the center and the periphery of the globalized world. This is no longer about advanced countries and the Third World. Wars and the horrendous economic situation in North Africa and the Middle East are forcing the people in these areas to move to trouble-free Europe resorting to fairly risky methods to do so. The terrorist activity of migrants in Europe is the other side of military conflicts triggered off by the West in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Moreover, deprived of its statehood, Libya has turned into the biggest criminal transit zone for illegal migration of the entire African continent. A destabilized political and economic situation created conditions for a precipitous rise in the wave of illegal migration from the problem and failed states of Africa and the Middle East to the outwardly safe and prosperous EU countries. Yet their well-being is relative, while chronic unemployment is absolute in one tenth of all cases.

Former migration policies and the multiculture model of society’s existence in new conditions merely promote the social chaos. Illegal migration challenges Europe’s civilization foundations. Instead of this state of affairs, the European Union must create a total control system, which should adopt new measures of electronic police accounting not only of migrants, but of all EU citizens. Should this be done, a control system like that will make irrelevant all talk of individual freedoms, private life, etc. And the current level of technology is perfectly up to the job. One can only wait till the need for this project of a superpolice supras-tate is recognized.11

What is under way now is, therefore, a geopolitical reorganization of the world that is very different from the world system of a hundred years ago. The centers of power have been shifted, with new leader states appearing, while Europe has ceded its dominance of world civilization with virtually unlimited opportunities, both economic and military-political.

Russia, after two decades of economic and political retreat, is gradually stepping up development rates and gaining more influence in the world, turning into one of the power centers. And Russia’s methods of influencing other countries to attract allies are drastically different from the European and American ones. The Russian Federation focuses attention primarily on economic and political alliances with a view to establishing goodneighborly relations, general progress, and mutually advantageous cooperation.

But at the same time, some of the countries in various parts of the globe are witnessing both home- and foreign-policy aggravations and confrontations growing into armed conflicts. The result is emergence of armed groupings, such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, with extremist and terrorist leanings. For these organizations to emerge, apart from sociopolitical discord, it is necessary to have the following prerequisites:

  • an advantageous geopolitical position of the region;
  • natural resources;
  • centuries-old territorial disputes between the ethnic groups in the conflict region;
  • unjust distribution of profit from exploitation of natural resources and industry not only among individuals, families and clans, but also among whole nations living in the same region;
  • presence of representatives of other, often incomprehensible and so hostile, ethnic cultures, languages, religions, etc.

In cases like that, there will always be people and whole states interested in rocking the boat, achieving a sociopublic imbalance and an atmosphere of mutual intolerance degenerating into open armed confrontation in order to establish control over regions under most plausible pretexts.

Nurtured from outside, spontaneously emerging armed groupings quickly become major terrorist organizations, typically of a religious persuasion. The main danger of these groupings and organizations is that they attract not only individuals from various states and of various nationalities, professions and creeds, who join them for a variety of reasons, but also whole regions and ethnic groups. And this destabilizes the sociopolitical situation both in the given region, and in the world at large.

Currently, the source of serious terrorist threat to Russia is increasingly the activity of the Islamic State in whose plans a major role is reserved for gunmen, including from the CIS states, in the hope that they will return to their home country eventually, and also will recruit like thinking persons in those countries for subsequent dissemination of extremist ideology. For example, according to Western analysts, about 15 percent of all foreign gunmen in the IS come from post-Soviet countries. Of them 1,500 jihadists are from Russia (mostly from Chechnya), 500 from Uzbekistan, 360 from Turkmenistan, and 250 from Kazakhstan.12

Considering that European politicians have opted for banishing from Europe most refugees who have nothing to do with the consequences of the armed conflict in Syria, should the situation escalate in Afghanistan with fighting restarting there? One cannot rule out a scenario of refugee flows from Afghanistan and Central Asian states heading for Russia’s border areas via the territory of Kazakhstan with which Russia has a land border several thousand kilometers long. In order to promptly respond to a similar situation development in the future it might be a good idea to plan and carry out in advance measures to prepare for protecting the population in those areas and for actions in conditions of a mass refugee exodus from territories affected by armed conflicts. These measures should be comprehensive (interdepartmental) and, we believe, can include the following:

  • continuous monitoring of the situation in neighboring countries and borderline areas;
  • forecast of the migration situation development in the future;
  • joint planning coordinating the goals, tasks carried out, and actions by interested bodies of state power;
  • practical activity by state power organs taking part in the tasks set;
  • creation of necessary material reserves;
  • improving (and if need be, toughening) the RF immigration laws and other regulations (procedures) in this sphere;
  • developing international cooperation in matters of migration regulation, refugees, and protection of the population in the receiving countries;
  • consolidating efforts to fight terrorism and extremism at the international level, regardless of differences and contradictions in any issues;
  • international political, economic, informational, and if necessary, also military support of legitimate and lawful state leaders fighting terrorist organizations on their territory;
  • interaction between relevant state agencies to counter terrorism at the international level;
  • working out intolerance toward propaganda of terrorist and extremist organizations and their members;
  • explanatory work among the public at all levels with every available means, etc.

To carry out the measures of preparing for the protection of and protecting the public, material, and cultural values on the territory of the Russian Federation from unlawful activity by migrants (refugees) the following forces can be called for: the Interior Ministry, RF National Guard, Emercom, Main Intelligence Directorate, Federal Security Service, Defense Ministry of Russia, and other interested bodies of state power within the limits of corresponding powers.

In conclusion it has to be said that unless we wish to witness the European scenario enacted in the activity of refugees in Russia, we must even now decide how to counter that.

NOTES:

1. Kissinger, H., National Security Study Memorandum 200. April 24, 1974.

2. “Podvodya itogi. V Dushanbe zavershilsya sammit glav gosudarstv ODKB [Summing Up. The Summit of CSTO Heads of State Closes in Dushanbe],” URL: http://tjk.rus4all.ru/news/ 20150915/726148759.html (Retrieved on April 22, 2016.)

3. URL: www.youtube.com (Retrieved on April 22, 2016.)

4. URL: https://lenta.ru (Retrieved on April 22, 2016.)

5. Ye. Chuiko, “Velikaya Albaniya – islamskiy kapkan dlya Yevropy [Greater Albania, an Islamic Trap for Europe],” URL://http://www.srpska.ru (Retrieved on April 22, 2016.)

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. URL:http://tvzvezda.ru/news/vstrane_i_mire/content/201603081303-n319.htm (Retrieved on April 22, 2016.)

9. URL: http://www.warandpeace.ru/ru/news/view/110512 (Retrieved on April 22, 2016.)

10. S.A. Mel’kov, Islamskiy faktor i voyennayapolitika Rossiyi [The Islamic Factor and Russia’s Military Policy], Monograph, Moscow, 2001.

11. URL: http://maxpark.com/community/politic/content/3662413 (Retrieved on April 22, 2016.)

12. URL: http://www.warandpeace.ru/ru/news/view/110512 (Retrieved on April 22, 2016.)

Translated by Margarita Kvartskhava