Bombing suspects’ uncle a ray of hope
Brave, accurate words just what Americans needed to hear now
On one of the most extraordinary days in modern American history — a great old city under lockdown, its people ordered to stay in their homes as thousands of police and military searched for the younger of two Boston Marathon bomb suspects — one man stood as a beacon of hope and clarity.
Ruslan Tsarni is the uncle of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, who was killed in a shootout with police early Friday morning.
(The 200-round shootout was hardly unprovoked, but followed the apparently coincidental robbery of a convenience store, the murder of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer and a hijacking. The brothers reportedly introduced themselves to the man in that vehicle as the marathon bombers. He emerged unharmed.)
As virtually anyone on the continent with that surname (whether the anglicized version or not) was quickly hunted down by either/or both police and the unofficial investigators of the press and duly surrounded, so was Tsarni assailed outside his home in Montgomery Village, Md.
Almost everywhere else one looked, from Watertown and Cambridge to Toronto and New Jersey, there was professed bewilderment (the usual tired question, how two young men, apparently welcomed into the grand American bosom, could have become bombers), denial (from the Tsarnaev parents), flourishing conspiracy theories (the parents again, but also social media).
Tsarni came out to address the cameras. A slim, fit-looking man, he first delivered condolences to the victims of the bombing and said he shared their grief. He called the attack an atrocity, which of course it was.
He immediately disassociated himself from this wing of his family, saying there had been a split with the suspects’ father, his brother, a schism of some duration. “We’ve not been in touch for a number of years,” Tsarni snapped. “They never lived here.”
If he’d had any inkling his nephews had been radicalized, or for some other reason turned to violence, he said, he would have been “the first one to bring them into responsibility.”
He was asked if he had any idea what could have led the brothers to do something like this. Tsarni snorted, “Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves (in the United States) … just hating everyone who did.”
Had the brothers perhaps been traumatized in their native Chechnya? Did this perhaps have something to do with Islam?
He was unequivocal. Anyone who claims this had anything to do with Islam, he said, “is a fraud,” and Chechens are “different,” peaceful, and besides, the brothers had spent little if any time in Chechnya. “He put a shame on this family and entire Chechen ethnicity,” Tsarni said. “Those who were able to make this atrocity are only losers.”
He was asked if he was ashamed. “Of course we’re ashamed,” he said. “Yes, we’re ashamed.”
What would he say to Dzhokhar, who might be listening?
“Dzhokhar,” he replied immediately, “if you’re alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness from the victims, for the injured, ask forgiveness from these people.”
He was asked for his view of America.
“I teach my children and that’s how I feel,” he said, “this is the ideal ...
“I respect this country. I love this country, this country which gives chance to everybody else to be treated as a human being, to feel yourself human being. That’s what I feel about this country.”
Then he begged for privacy — “I dearly ask you to respect our property” were his words, as if that would happen — and went back into the house.
Later, the cameras spotted him as he walked to the end of his little cul-de-sac and knocked on a neighbour’s front door to apologize for having attracted the media horde. The woman who met him there listened for a few minutes, then, thank God, embraced him.
It is this proud, ferocious man who best exemplifies the generations of immigrants — including Muslims of course — who have built this continent.
The brothers’ mother and father, apparently back in Russia now, respectively claimed that their kids had been framed or set up.
An aunt, who lives in Toronto — heartening to know that there’s a Canadian connection — repeatedly demanded to see “the evidence.”
She told reporters she suspected the pictures of her nephews strolling by the finish line with backpacks were “staged” and said, “I am used to being set up. Before I left former Soviet Union countries, that’s how it was.” She said that as a Chechen, she is used to having to prove herself by being “three times better” than anyone else. It seemed to me the chip on her shoulder was at least 26.2 miles long.
Meanwhile, social media conspiracy theorists raged about government being behind the attacks.
When, shortly after the bombing in Boston, a friend texted me about the California man who bought the domain name BostonMarathonConspiracy.com — purely as a way of preventing “some conspiracy kook from owning it” and asked readers to “Please keep the victims of this event and their families in your thoughts” — I thought little of it.
But Jamie Meuhlhausen, the man who did that, was much wiser.
I wonder if he, too, is tempted to crawl into a cave somewhere and not come out for several weeks, by which point perhaps some slight measure of sanity will have returned to Boston and the rest of the world. Only Ruslan Tsarni stops me from doing it.