Flamming_Python
02-27-2009, 03:08 PM
An interesting article from the IHT:
In volatile Russian region, high hopes in a new leader
Nazran, Russia: Something is changing in Ingushetia, the tiny tinderbox of a republic that neighbors Chechnya.
The new president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, has ordered security barriers removed from most government offices, reasoning that the authorities should not need protection from their own people. He rents a modest cottage from a retired state prosecutor, saying he is more comfortable there than in the gold-domed presidential palace.
And in a region where criticism of the government has been all but forbidden, Yevkurov seems to be soliciting it. In his first 100 days in office, he met at least seven times - three times in private - with a human rights activist who dogged his predecessor, and established a telephone hotline for citizens to air their grievances against the government.
Whether this new approach can bring Ingushetia under control is another question - and a crucial one for Russia. Soon it will be spring, marking a new season of war between armed Ingush militants and the federal forces struggling to control them. Left to deteriorate, Ingushetia could become another Chechnya, spreading chaos on Russia's southern border.
President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia, inheriting the problem of Ingushetia, has chosen a different path from his mentor, Vladimir Putin. In October, Medvedev responded to mounting civil unrest by removing the republic's unpopular leader. He brought in Yevkurov, who is both a devout Ingush Muslim and a Russian military intelligence officer, and set about the delicate task of winning back popular trust in an atmosphere charged with violence.
"Yevkurov is balancing right now," said Grigory Shvedov, editor of the Web-based news service Caucasian Knot. "Let's see how successful he will be in balancing. Clearly he needs to get results that are close to impossible."
Crossing the border into the republic of Ingushetia is like entering another country. Pedestrians must register at an office plastered with wanted posters - men in their teens and 20s sought as terrorists. Checkpoints are manned by Russian federal troops wearing full camouflage and face masks, and many passing cars have no license plates.
Slightly fewer than half a million people live here, in low-slung brick compounds surrounded by a slight wood-stove haze. Schoolchildren feel safe enough to make their way home in gathering dark, but under the surface is a social shambles, with unemployment officially reported as 47.4 percent, the highest of any Russian republic.
During the Chechen war, hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded in, and violence followed, as federal forces tried to hunt down fighters. Magomed Mutsolgov of MAShR - a nongovernmental organization whose name means "peace" in Ingush and which tracks violence in the region - said 170 people, mostly men, had disappeared since 2004, presumably at the hands of security organs. Often, their brothers and cousins respond by departing for "the forest," where militant groups offer both money and a shot at revenge.
"I would compare this war to a fire on a peat bog," Mutsulgov said. "You may not see the flame, but there is a fire."
Tensions in Ingushetia increased last Aug. 31 with the murder of Magomed Yevloyev, who operated an opposition Web site, Ingushetiya.ru. Yevloyev happened to fly into Nazran on the same plane as the former president, Murat Zyazikov. He was arrested upon landing, and his body was dumped near a local hospital less than an hour later, dead from a single bullet wound to the head. The authorities said he had been shot accidentally while trying to take an officer's gun.
Eight weeks later, Medvedev removed Zyazikov. Many here saw the decision as a distinct change of course, something that could not have happened while Putin was in office.
"People have become very suspicious of authority," said Azamat Nalgiyev, 68, a former member of Parliament who came out of retirement to chair Yevkurov's new Human Rights Council. "At the same time, they are dying to believe in someone."
The new president is hardly a traditional liberal. He received Russia's highest military honor, the Hero of Russia, for leading the force that took control of the Pristina airport in Kosovo in advance of NATO's troops. In a recent interview with Novaya Gazeta, he said he believed that English and American secret services were backing Islamic militants in Ingushetia as a way to "bring down Russia, just as the Soviet Union was brought down."
Yet he has clearly loosened the strictures on political life. In January, Yevkurov convened the Fifth Congress of Ingush Peoples, an event that Zyazikov never allowed, out of fear of stoking separatist impulses. After intense discussions, a series of prominent human rights figures agreed to join his government, and ordinary people speak of him glowingly.
"You feel a person could talk to him in simple human language," said Murat Barchiyev, 52, a retired bus driver. "He waved his hand and removed all the tension here. He's a decent man. I know now that at any time I can express my opinion."
But the breach between the expectations of the Ingush public and the realities of federal rule may be impassable.
"Yevkurov has received a lot of credit in the form of people's hopes," said Mutsolgov, of MAShR. "The more those hopes melt away, the worse it will be. And they are melting away."
Melting - or exploding. Late on Feb. 12, a 200-kilogram, or 440-pound, barrel of explosives detonated in a house on Gorovodzheva Street in Nazran, leaving nothing but a crater and two blood-spattered kitchen walls. Federal forces had tracked a group of militants there, and the FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB, later reported that it had foiled a plan to assassinate the republic's new leaders.
But it was not the militants who enraged Aslan Aushev, a 23-year-old Ingush policeman who had rushed to the scene to rescue his mother and 5-year-old sister. He was fuming over the Russian forces who had forced him to stand against a wall for two and a half hours, arguing openly about whether to shoot him and ignoring his protests that he was a policeman.
By the time his family escaped the basement where they had been cowering, he said, his little sister was so traumatized that she had developed a stutter.
"They didn't respect my rank," he said of the federal troops. "From today, I will never respect them."
Aushev gave Yevkurov credit for visiting the neighborhood after the blast and said he believed the president had convinced the federal troops to allow his family to finally go free.
But the Russians, and his anger at them, blotted out everything else. Staring at the crater that was all that was left of No. 8 Gorovodzheva Street, he spoke tonelessly.
"They used to say that when we got a new president, all this would stop," Aushev said. "But now we have a new president, and it's continuing."
In volatile Russian region, high hopes in a new leader
Nazran, Russia: Something is changing in Ingushetia, the tiny tinderbox of a republic that neighbors Chechnya.
The new president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, has ordered security barriers removed from most government offices, reasoning that the authorities should not need protection from their own people. He rents a modest cottage from a retired state prosecutor, saying he is more comfortable there than in the gold-domed presidential palace.
And in a region where criticism of the government has been all but forbidden, Yevkurov seems to be soliciting it. In his first 100 days in office, he met at least seven times - three times in private - with a human rights activist who dogged his predecessor, and established a telephone hotline for citizens to air their grievances against the government.
Whether this new approach can bring Ingushetia under control is another question - and a crucial one for Russia. Soon it will be spring, marking a new season of war between armed Ingush militants and the federal forces struggling to control them. Left to deteriorate, Ingushetia could become another Chechnya, spreading chaos on Russia's southern border.
President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia, inheriting the problem of Ingushetia, has chosen a different path from his mentor, Vladimir Putin. In October, Medvedev responded to mounting civil unrest by removing the republic's unpopular leader. He brought in Yevkurov, who is both a devout Ingush Muslim and a Russian military intelligence officer, and set about the delicate task of winning back popular trust in an atmosphere charged with violence.
"Yevkurov is balancing right now," said Grigory Shvedov, editor of the Web-based news service Caucasian Knot. "Let's see how successful he will be in balancing. Clearly he needs to get results that are close to impossible."
Crossing the border into the republic of Ingushetia is like entering another country. Pedestrians must register at an office plastered with wanted posters - men in their teens and 20s sought as terrorists. Checkpoints are manned by Russian federal troops wearing full camouflage and face masks, and many passing cars have no license plates.
Slightly fewer than half a million people live here, in low-slung brick compounds surrounded by a slight wood-stove haze. Schoolchildren feel safe enough to make their way home in gathering dark, but under the surface is a social shambles, with unemployment officially reported as 47.4 percent, the highest of any Russian republic.
During the Chechen war, hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded in, and violence followed, as federal forces tried to hunt down fighters. Magomed Mutsolgov of MAShR - a nongovernmental organization whose name means "peace" in Ingush and which tracks violence in the region - said 170 people, mostly men, had disappeared since 2004, presumably at the hands of security organs. Often, their brothers and cousins respond by departing for "the forest," where militant groups offer both money and a shot at revenge.
"I would compare this war to a fire on a peat bog," Mutsulgov said. "You may not see the flame, but there is a fire."
Tensions in Ingushetia increased last Aug. 31 with the murder of Magomed Yevloyev, who operated an opposition Web site, Ingushetiya.ru. Yevloyev happened to fly into Nazran on the same plane as the former president, Murat Zyazikov. He was arrested upon landing, and his body was dumped near a local hospital less than an hour later, dead from a single bullet wound to the head. The authorities said he had been shot accidentally while trying to take an officer's gun.
Eight weeks later, Medvedev removed Zyazikov. Many here saw the decision as a distinct change of course, something that could not have happened while Putin was in office.
"People have become very suspicious of authority," said Azamat Nalgiyev, 68, a former member of Parliament who came out of retirement to chair Yevkurov's new Human Rights Council. "At the same time, they are dying to believe in someone."
The new president is hardly a traditional liberal. He received Russia's highest military honor, the Hero of Russia, for leading the force that took control of the Pristina airport in Kosovo in advance of NATO's troops. In a recent interview with Novaya Gazeta, he said he believed that English and American secret services were backing Islamic militants in Ingushetia as a way to "bring down Russia, just as the Soviet Union was brought down."
Yet he has clearly loosened the strictures on political life. In January, Yevkurov convened the Fifth Congress of Ingush Peoples, an event that Zyazikov never allowed, out of fear of stoking separatist impulses. After intense discussions, a series of prominent human rights figures agreed to join his government, and ordinary people speak of him glowingly.
"You feel a person could talk to him in simple human language," said Murat Barchiyev, 52, a retired bus driver. "He waved his hand and removed all the tension here. He's a decent man. I know now that at any time I can express my opinion."
But the breach between the expectations of the Ingush public and the realities of federal rule may be impassable.
"Yevkurov has received a lot of credit in the form of people's hopes," said Mutsolgov, of MAShR. "The more those hopes melt away, the worse it will be. And they are melting away."
Melting - or exploding. Late on Feb. 12, a 200-kilogram, or 440-pound, barrel of explosives detonated in a house on Gorovodzheva Street in Nazran, leaving nothing but a crater and two blood-spattered kitchen walls. Federal forces had tracked a group of militants there, and the FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB, later reported that it had foiled a plan to assassinate the republic's new leaders.
But it was not the militants who enraged Aslan Aushev, a 23-year-old Ingush policeman who had rushed to the scene to rescue his mother and 5-year-old sister. He was fuming over the Russian forces who had forced him to stand against a wall for two and a half hours, arguing openly about whether to shoot him and ignoring his protests that he was a policeman.
By the time his family escaped the basement where they had been cowering, he said, his little sister was so traumatized that she had developed a stutter.
"They didn't respect my rank," he said of the federal troops. "From today, I will never respect them."
Aushev gave Yevkurov credit for visiting the neighborhood after the blast and said he believed the president had convinced the federal troops to allow his family to finally go free.
But the Russians, and his anger at them, blotted out everything else. Staring at the crater that was all that was left of No. 8 Gorovodzheva Street, he spoke tonelessly.
"They used to say that when we got a new president, all this would stop," Aushev said. "But now we have a new president, and it's continuing."