Trouble in the north Caucasus
An assassination attempt on the president of Ingushetia reveals a region scarred by violence, poverty and corruption
Early this morning, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the president of Russia’s Muslim republic of Ingushetia, was seriously hurt in a suicide bomb attackas he travelled to work.
It was the latest attack in a new squall of violence in Russia’s north Caucasus region that has demonstrated gaping inadequacies in the Kremlin’s efforts to contain Islamist militants and clan violence. On 5 June Adilgerey Magomedtagirov, the police chief of the mountain republic of Dagestan, was shot dead by a sniper at a wedding in the capital, Makhachkala. Following the killing, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev paid a surprise visit to the republic, a bare highland plateau scored by dizzying gorges on the coast of the Caspian. Medvedev adopted the tough rhetoric of his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, saying the “bandits” responsible must be “destroyed”. Insurgents in the north Caucasus, he stressed, were supported by foreign extremists or “freaks who come to our country for the sole purpose of causing damage to it”. The urgency of Medvedev’s words was underlined a day later when Aza Gazgireyeva, a supreme court judge in Ingushetia, was assassinated moments after dropping off her children at kindergarten.
No one should doubt the Russian leader is right when he says the perpetrators of such crimes cannot be tolerated. It is not certain that Islamist extremists killed Magomedtagirov and Gazgireyeva and injured Yevkurov – all three had many enemies – but it is highly possible. One need only think of the Beslan hostage siege in North Ossetia in 2004 to remind oneself what the militants are capable of doing. The days when one could venture sympathy with the Chechen separatists of the early 1990s – led by the dashing air force general Dzhokhar Dudayev – are long gone. Since Chechnya‘s drive for independence failed, intolerant strains of Islam have gradually radicalised militants across the north Caucasus, whose professed aim is now to wipe out “kuffirs” (infidels) and establish a caliphate founded on sharia law.
Yet a key component of Russia’s struggle to stop the cycle of violence is absent. To put it simply, there’s too much stick and not enough carrot. Over the last 15 years Moscow has modelled its approach to the region on Tsar Alexander I’s commander in chief, Aleksey Yermolov, who led Russia’s war to conquer the north Caucasus nations in the 19th century. Yermolov desired that “the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses” and that his word should be “for the natives a law more inevitable than death”. (Magomedtagirov, who led Dagestan’s fight against the militants, preferred the simpler slogan “Take no prisoners!”)
That resolve and military might are needed to fight determined and heavily armed rebels who murder state officials is not in dispute. In recent years there has been no carpet bombing like that which annihilated civilians in Grozny in 1995 and 1999, and swaths of that city have been rebuilt. But Russian security forces across the north Caucasus have consistently tortured and killed unarmed young men on flimsy evidence of their ties to rebel groups. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-loyal president of Chechnya, recently approved the burning of houses belonging to families of insurgents hiding in the hills of his republic. “Those families who have relatives in the forest are complicit in their crimes,” he declared.
Meanwhile, the root causes that force young men to go to the hills go largely unaddressed. Medvedev took a step in the right direction in Dagestan when he acknowledged that “high levels of unemployment, the monstrous scale of corruption and lack of trust in the authorities” caused the violence. What is lacking behind the president’s rhetoric is any real attempt to tackle those ills.
Last year I spent four months walking through Russia from the Black Sea to the Caspian, across the northern flanks of the Great Caucasus mountain range which stretches between the two seas. The journey took me through five Muslim republics – Karachay Cherkessia, Kabardino Balkariya, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan – where there is a smouldering insurgency and gave me some strong clues as to what drives young men to join the loose coalition of Islamist groups throughout the region.
The chief complaints were joblessness, corruption, police brutality and the utter contempt of people in power. Such problems afflict all of Russia, of course, but in the Caucasus they are particularly acute. While injections of funding from competing mafias or from extremists abroad – mainly in the Middle East – play a part in keeping the insurgency alive, poverty and humiliation nurture a desire for revenge.
In Kabardino Balkariya the imam of a village mosque talked of persecution by police who cannot tolerate believers that stray from officially sanctioned teaching. Some had crosses shaved in their heads, others were sexually assaulted with bottles. “When you are treated thus, a moment comes when your only option is to fight back,” he said.
In Chechnya I spoke to a nurse who described how she and other public sector workers had a proportion of their pay deducted each month as a “contribution” to the charitable fund named after Kadyrov’s father. There was grim laughter earlier this year when Kadyrov filed a declaration on his belongings, as required by Medvedev in a new anti-corruption drive that has already become a laughing stock. The Chechen leader, who travels in a cortege of Porsche Carreras and lives in a large villa with a garage, a mini-zoo and a series of faux stone towers, said he owned two things: a 1999 Lada saloon and a 36-square-metre apartment in Grozny. (Asked for his comment on the declaration, the head of Russia’s audit chamber joined the hilarity, saying: “Ramzan Kadyrov owns the whole republic so you needn’t worry about him.”)
State-sanctioned theft is rife. An aid worker in North Ossetia described how her organisation contacted a senior local bureaucrat to offer asphalt for a children’s playground. Several week later the playground had still not been built, but the bureaucrat had a nice new driveway in front of his house. Jobs in the state sector are sold at high prices because they offer splendid opportunities for bribe-taking or embezzlement. An officer on the force where Magomedtagirov was in charge even told one reporter the sliding scale: $12,000 to become a bog-standard traffic cop, $20,000 for an organised crime officer and up to $120,000 to head a police station.
Dagestan, where policemen and state officials are assassinated almost daily, presents the acutest problem. A patchwork of more than 30 nationalities live in highland communities that are struggling to survive: many have waited years to be linked to the gas network or to get a doctor’s clinic. Lack of irrigation for crumbling terraces puts thousands of hectares of land out of use. Many villages live by their own laws (“Two criminals came here trying to buy human organs,” said a teacher in one hamlet. “No-one stopped them. So we captured them and burnt them to death in the village square.”)
Money doesn’t solve everything. True, huge tranches of federal cash have helped rebuild Chechnya and restore relative peace. Yet dignity is also at stake. In Ingushetia, a parched scrap of steppe rearing into mountains where at least half the workforce is unemployed, I found anger at rigged elections. “When the Kremlin fixes the vote to give its party 99%, what right do they have to demand allegiance from us?” one man asked. It was hard to suggest an answer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/22/ingushetia-president-assassination-caucasus
