From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 4/24/2006 2:22 AM
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Analysis: Are Ingushetia, North Ossetia On Verge Of New Hostilities?
By Liz Fuller
Russia — North Caucasus map
(RFE/RL)
It has been more than 13 years since Ingush and Ossetian informal militias, the latter backed by Russian security forces, engaged in a brief but brutal conflict in North Ossetia’s Prigorodny Raion, to which both ethnic groups lay claim. More than 500 people died in six days of fighting in early November 1992 that precipitated the flight from North Ossetia of tens of thousands of Ingush settlers.
Due partly to a lack of political will and partly to inadequate funding, measures adopted by successive Russian governments intended to enable the Ingush fugitives to return to their abandoned homes in Prigorodny Raion have been implemented only half-heartedly, with the result that the Ingush collective sense of grievance has festered.
The Ossetians, for their part, remain resolutely opposed either to changes in their republic’s borders that would hand Prigorodny Raion back to Ingushetia, or to the wholesale return of the Ingush to the district. The two sides have recently launched new propaganda offensives intended to impel the Russian leadership to amend the status quo in their favor.
Origins Of The Dispute
Prigorodny Raion was incorporated into North Ossetia when the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) of which it was originally part was abolished in the wake of the 1944 deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush peoples to Central Asia.
When both ethnic groups were exonerated under then-CPSU General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and their republic was reconstituted in 1957, its borders were amended to leave Prigorodny Raion within North Ossetia.
In April 1991 the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted a Law on the Rehabilitation of the Repressed Peoples that stated that Prigorodny Raion should be handed back to the then-Checheno-Ingush ASSR, but failed to specify how and over what time period this should be done. The Checheno-Ingush ASSR split into separate Chechen and Ingush republics in July 1992, but the borders of those two territories were not formalized.
A detailed new program was unveiled in May 2005 for expediting the return of the Ingush displaced persons to their abandoned homes in Ingushetia by the end of 2006.
