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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Chechen war spreading throughout North Caucasus |
| 2005-08-29 |
| The two bombs went off 10 seconds apart as Ibrahim Malsagov's black Mercedes swept along a dusty road in front of a run-down market. The Ingush prime minister was wounded in the hand and leg; his driver was killed and two others hurt. The blasts last Thursday in Nazran, the main city of the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia, on Chechnya's western border, came three days after a bomb attack aimed at police killed a passerby and injured several others. On Saturday, a bombing derailed a train in Dagestan, east of Chechnya. A year after the horrific school siege in Beslan - half an hour's drive from Nazran, in North Ossetia - the Kremlin faces a growing insurgency across the region as violence spreads outwards from Chechnya's borders. Barely a day goes by without some kind of rebel attack in Russia's northern Caucasus republics. Dmitry Kozak, named as President Vladimir Putin's special envoy to southern Russia after Beslan, has warned of impending crisis. In a leaked report to Mr Putin, he said corruption, nepotism and ineffective government by local leaderships were stoking radicalism and could turn the northern Caucasus into a "micro-region of socio-political and economic instability". Local academics and human rights groups endorse Mr Kozak's warning. "The Beslan attack was presented as an attempt to destabilise the region," says Alexander Dzadziev, an ethnologist at the Institute of Humanitarian and Social Studies in Vladikavkaz, the North Ossetian capital. "But the North Caucasus has long been destabilised. One way or another, all the republics are linked with the Chechen conflict." The tangle of clan, ethnic and religious rivalries across its seven republics, also including Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Adygeya, mean the north Caucasus, conquered by Russia in the 19th century, has always been volatile. Dagestan, the most unstable republic outside Chechnya, has 34 ethnic groups among 2.5m inhabitants. Throw in the poor governance Mr Kozak talks about, and the situation is ripe for exploitation by extremist groups. How closely groups with Islamist names such as Shariah Jamaat (Community of Justice), are linked to Chechen rebels is unclear. But Chechen rebel leaders have announced their intention to spread the fight into neighbouring republics, even while the Russian authorities have attempted to contain the conflict by installing a pro-Kremlin government in the republic, with its own security services. In an ominous move, Shamil Basayev, mastermind of the Beslan attack, was on Friday named second in command of the Chechen rebels. Aslan Maskhadov, the more moderate leader killed by Russian forces in March, had spurned Mr Basayev and his tactics. But Mr Maskhadov's successor, the Muslim cleric Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, has re-embraced him. Alexei Malashenko of the Moscow Carnegie Center thinktank says it is too early to tell whether Mr Basayev's appointment shows the rebel leadership is becoming more radical, or that Mr Basayev has opted to pursue more moderate methods. "But I think it is a sign of radicalisation," he says. He warns violence is likely to increase in the approach to Chechen parliamentary elections on November 27. Yet while Chechnya's declaration of independence from Russia in 1991 led to the two wars that have devastated the republic, locals say there is little popular separatism elsewhere. "Not one of these republics wants independence," says Tamerlan Akiyev, in the Nazran office of Memorial, a human rights group, adding that the whole region depends on Russian government hand-outs. Nor is Islamic extremism in itself a driving force, though all the republics except North Ossetia are predominantly Muslim. Experts say social and economic factors are pushing people into rebel groups that have forged links with international Islamist terrorism. "Fundamentalist Islam is a form of social protest," says Mr Malashenko. Poverty is one factor: gross domestic product per capita is half the Russian average and unemployment is 80 per cent in some Caucasus republics. Others are resentment of corrupt local leaderships, and ethnic and land disputes unfrozen when the Soviet Union collapsed. Human rights groups add that heavy-handed tactics by local security forces, claiming to be rooting out extremists but often targeting individuals with no rebel links, are fuelling radicalism. Disappearances and beatings, long common in Chechnya, have spread into Dagestan, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria. Locals say Mr Kozak's recognition of some root causes of the problems is positive, but may be too late to prevent violence from escalating. "There is already a war in Dagestan, there is already a kind of war in Ingushetia," says Mr Akiyev in Nazran. "It is like a volcano. You see smoke from it now and again, but it could erupt any time." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 Ossetian and Ingusetian regions have been fighting off and on for hundreds of years. New wars make new reasons to fight, with Beslan standing out as a reason for the North Ossetian's to lay out some of that revenge since the Beslan seige was planned in Ingushetia. That's just the beginning of the racial and tribal tensions across the Caucasus. Add Putin's new gubernatorial appointing powers and a little graft and corruption with a pinch of Islamic radialism and you've got funtime for the Northern Caucasus. Central Asia seems much more strategically important than is the middle east. IMHO we need to stomp out and/or mitigate radicalism there before our gateway to China and Russia is compromised. EP |
| Posted by: ElvisHasLeftTheBuilding 2005-08-29 17:44 |