A file photo of some Russian Muslims.

MOSCOW, August 3, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – A leading human rights group accused the Russian authorities of carrying out a campaign of pursuit against Russian Muslims, under the guise of fighting terrorism.

"We are currently involved in 23 judicial inquiries concerning 81 people, all of them Muslims officially pursued for extremist or terrorist activities, but all the cases have political subtexts," said Vitaly Ponomarev, director of the Memorial's Central Asia Program, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported Tuesday, August 2.

He maintained that the pursuit campaign, launched after the bloody Beslan school hostage-taking crisis, targets mostly Russian Muslims as well as Uzbeks, Tajiks and Kyrgyz residing in Russia.

The director of the rights group, which was established in the last years of the Soviet Union to uncover the mass abuses that took place under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, said it had compiled numerous dossiers on Muslims who had been unfairly treated.

Ponomarev stressed that a Memorial study conducted in some of Russia's 89 regions showed at least 23 extremism cases involving over 80 people have been fabricated since last fall. But he maintained that the real number is estimated to be much higher.

Russian Muslims have been facing increasingly racist and violent attacks ranging from raping and body assaults to attacks on mosques, especially in the wake of the bloody end to the Beslan school crisis in September.

On September 16,2004, a Muslim woman was found in a remote area in the eastern city of Asbest raped and tortured to death.

Russian Muslims have repeatedly complained about social persecution and official ignorance despite their relatively high number.

Leaders of Russian Muslims repeatedly express resentment at being ignored by the federal authorities in dealing with Islamic affairs despite the sizeable minority that makes 23 million Muslims, out of a total population of 144 millions.

Svetlana Ganushkina of the rights group also accused the Russian authorities of targeting the Muslim minority in the country.

"This campaign has either been initiated from the top, or it is a campaign that people have understood they are supposed to carry out," he said.

The rights activist further warned that such a campaign was highly dangerous for the country, of which Muslims make up approximately 20 per cent.

"If one fights against terrorism . . . by placing innocent people in custody, the number of terrorists and extremists will not decrease, and most likely it will encourage recruitment of additional forces into their ranks."

Ganushkina further condemned the Russian authorities' detention of 14 Uzbeks on June 18 on suspicion of involvement in the bloody events that shook the eastern Uzbek province of Andijan in May.

"These people are still in detention and there was no document permitting their arrest for three weeks... Too often innocent people are found among the victims of the fight against terrorism in Russia," she said, according to AFP.

The protests were triggered in the eastern city of Andijan by the trial of 23 local businessmen on charges of religious extremism, a claim observers say used by the government to crack down on activists.

The unrest also feeds on long pent-up anger in Andijan regarding the treatment of prisoners, poverty, unemployment and other social problems.

Human rights campaigners estimated up to 500 people may have been killed in the ensuing operation to crush the protests.