Special Report on Russia: The wild south

RUSSIA

The wild south

Nov 27th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Russia’s treatment of its republics in the Caucasus has turned them into tinderboxes

“I DESIRE that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses, that my word should be for the natives a law more inevitable than death,” wrote Alexei Yermolov, Russia’s legendary general who waged total war during his conquest of the north Caucasus in the early 19th century. A hero of the Napoleonic wars revered by Russian romantics, Yermolov is still universally hated by “the natives” who think of him as brutal, contemptuous and genocidal. In the late Soviet period his statue in Chechnya was regularly blown up until it was eventually thrown into the river.

On October 4th a new, giant statue of Yermolov on a red granite pedestal was unveiled in the ethnically Russian region of Stavropol that faces the north Caucasus, marking an unseen line of separation between Russia and the five Muslim republics on its southern border.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Chechnya, the most rebellious of the five, demanded complete independence from Russia. Boris Yeltsin waged brutal war with it in 1994-96, with disastrous results. Vladimir Putin, trying to bring Chechnya to heel once and for all, resumed hostilities in an even more brutal form in 1999, with knock-on effects in the entire region. Nine years later the Caucasus still feels like a tinderbox. The Georgian war and Russia’s unilateral recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have added even more combustible material.

But the main cause of instability is Russia’s colonial methods in the Caucasus, which have altered little since Yermolov’s time. The difference is that he was conquering new territory, whereas Russia is dealing with people who are, at least on paper, its own citizens.

A peace of sorts
Chechnya is now relatively quiet under the thumb of a former rebel, Ramzan Kadyrov, who was installed as president by Mr Putin last year. Grozny, its capital, which was razed to the ground by the Russians, has been rebuilt. On October 5th Mr Kadyrov reopened the city’s main thoroughfare, now lined with trees. It used to be called Victory Prospect, but Mr Kadyrov has renamed it Putin Avenue.

In recent local elections Mr Kadyrov, who is fiercely loyal to Mr Putin, promised that the turnout of voters for his hero’s United Russia party would be “100% or even more”. But it is not clear that his loyalty extends to Russia as a whole. As he himself has said: “I am not anyone’s president, I am not a man of the FSB or GRU [Russian security services]. I am Putin’s man…Putin is God’s gift, he gave us freedom.”

And Chechnya is indeed much freer of Russian control than it was eight years ago. Mr Kadyrov has his own armed forces, makes women wear headscarves, levies his own tax on businesses and sets his own rules. The day after the unveiling of the new-look Putin Avenue the occupants of the ground-floor offices, cafés and shops found their premises sealed off. Before they could start trading again they had to pay a “fee” of 200,000-500,000 roubles to some agency.

Recently Mr Kadyrov asked for Grozny airport, which is federal property, to be made over to Chechnya and given international status. It would also be nice for Chechnya to have its own customs service, he said. As for the Russian troops still stationed in his republic, he thinks their main job should be to guard Russia’s international borders, not to meddle in Chechnya’s affairs.

Yulia Latynina, a Russian journalist and writer, says that “the war between Russia and Chechnya was won by Mr Kadyrov.” But although military resistance in Chechnya itself has subsided, violence has spread to neighbouring republics, notably Ingushetia and Dagestan. It is transmitted by state-sponsored repression, corruption and lawlessness that alienates and radicalises the population and drives young men into the hands of Islamist militants.

Ingushetia, a Muslim republic with a population of just 500,000, has turned into the region’s new flashpoint. Reports of killings, explosions and kidnappings have been coming in daily. In the past year the number of attacks on police by Islamist militants, both Chechen and Ingush, has almost doubled. In return, the Russian security and military services have terrorised the local population, using much the same methods as the militants.

Sliding into anarchy
On a recent visit, cars with tinted windows and no licence plates raced around Nazran, Ingushetia’s grim capital. Traffic policemen left their posts as soon as the sun set, in fear for their lives. “We don’t know who is fighting with whom, but every day mothers cry over their children,” said Zarema, who was selling Chinese clothes in a market. “If I am a Russian citizen, why are they not protecting me?” The word most often heard in Nazran is bespredel, or anarchy.

Almost everyone curses Murat Zyazikov, an ineffectual former KGB general installed by Vladimir Putin as the republic’s president in 2002. Under his watch 600 people died and 150 disappeared without a trace, says Bamatgiri Mankiev, a former member of parliament and now one of the opposition leaders. Yet Mr Zyazikov could not be voted out because in 2004 Mr Putin abolished regional elections across Russia. Only when the situation came to resemble a civil war did the Russian government remove Mr Zyazikov on October 30th and appoint a tough military commando instead. As the Ingush celebrated Mr Zyazikov’s departure, his officials were clearing anything of value from the administrative buildings.

Reuters

Kadyrov is Putin’s manAt a recent protest rally demonstrators threatened to call a referendum on independence for Ingushetia unless the government in Moscow treated them as Russian citizens. The cause of the rally (and probably of Mr Zyazikov’s removal) was the brazen murder of Magomed Yevloyev, the editor of an opposition website that publicised human-rights abuses. He had irritated Mr Zyazikov by running an “I did not vote” campaign, collecting 90,000 signatures to counter the official claim that 98% of Ingushetia’s 164,000 voters cast their ballot for the Kremlin’s party in last year’s parliamentary election.

On August 31st Mr Yevloyev arrived in Nazran on the same flight as Mr Zyazikov. When they landed, Mr Zyazikov was whisked off in a limousine and Mr Yevloyev was arrested and driven away in an armoured car. Minutes later he was dead, “accidentally” shot in the temple by one of the guards in the car. His body was dumped in front of a hospital. When Mr Yunus-Bek Yevkurov took over from Mr Zyazikov, he immediately offered his condolences to Mr Yevloyev’s family.

Over the past 60 years Ingushetia has seen little kindness from Russia. In 1944 Stalin deported the entire Ingush and Chechen populations in cattle trains to Kazakhstan. When the survivors returned in 1957 they found their houses occupied by the mainly Christian North Ossetians. In 1991 Boris Yeltsin signed a law restoring the territorial rights of the Ingush. But the mechanism for this “territorial rehabilitation” was never established and soon a bitter conflict broke out between the Ingush and the North Ossetians.

Russia took the Ossetians’ side, allowing them to push 60,000 Ingush out of the Prigorodny district. Some 18,000 refugees are still unable to return home. The official explanation is that “their neighbours are not prepared to live next to them.”

Russia’s war in Georgia and its backing of the South Ossetians inflamed feelings of injustice and anger in Ingushetia. Many Ingush identify with Georgia more than with Russia. And Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia has created new precedents for the North Caucasus.

Ruslan Aushev, Ingushetia’s first post-Soviet president, feels strongly about the issue: “Russia fought two wars in Chechnya, which cost a lot of lives, blood, sweat and money, defending the principle of its own territorial integrity. Now it has recognised two small republics and added two new hotspots to its existing problems. This does not bode well for Russia.” The biggest mistake the Kremlin made in the Caucasus, he says, was to use force.

The irony is that despite the many historic injustices it suffered, Ingushetia has traditionally been loyal to Moscow. The problems in Ingushetia, says Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya of Memorial, a human-rights group, are of Russia’s own making. Most of them stem from indiscriminate violence in the second Chechen war which spilt over into Ingushetia.

Until 2001 Mr Aushev, a charismatic military commander who had served in Afghanistan, managed to keep Ingushetia relatively stable. He resisted attempts by the government in Moscow to drag the republic into the Chechen war and did not allow it to be used as a military base for the Russian army. Keeping Ingushetia neutral was no mean achievement, given its close ethnic ties with Chechnya. When Russian forces carpet-bombed the Chechen capital, Mr Aushev ignored Russian orders to cut off all escape routes from Chechnya and allowed 300,000 Chechen refugees into Ingushetia.

But in 2002 Mr Aushev was replaced by the much more co-operative Mr Zyazikov. The first bout of violence in Ingushetia was directed at Chechen refugees. Alleged rebels and their sympathisers were kidnapped and often tortured, both by Mr Kadyrov’s forces and by their Russian backers. An Ingush official who tried to investigate the Russian security services’ behaviour was himself kidnapped by the FSB. Mr Zyazikov did nothing.

Tit for tat
The violence soon engulfed the republic and in 2004 Nazran was attacked by armed rebels. “At the time”, says Ms Sokiryanskaya, who spent five years in Ingushetia, “everyone was shocked by how many Ingush took part in the attack. Today no one is surprised that Ingushetia has its own armed underground.” According to a survey carried out by Ms Sokiryanskaya with a North Ossetian think-tank, the main reason young people join the armed rebels are personal revenge, the violence of the security services, unemployment and propaganda by religious extremists.

Timur Akiev, who heads the Nazran office of Memorial, says the tactics of the Russian security services changed after 2005. Until then suspects were taken to North Ossetia, where they were tortured and made to confess. They were then brought back to Ingushetia for trial and sent to jail. However, jury trials in Ingushetia stopped relying on such “confessions” and started to acquit suspects. Mr Akiev says that from then on people started to disappear or were shot during arrest even if they showed no resistance. Sometimes the dead bodies were fitted up with weapons or grenades.

What eventually sparked public protests in Ingushetia was the killing of a six-year-old boy. Early in the morning of November 9th 2007 three armoured personnel carriers, several minivans and a military truck, all without number plates, drove into a small Ingush village as part of a “special operation” to capture an alleged terrorist. After throwing a smoke bomb through the window of a house, a group of armed men burst in and opened fire. But all they found was a family of five. One of the bullets had killed the youngest child.

When the soldiers realised what they had done, they made it look as though they had been attacked, throwing grenades at the empty house, moving the child’s body and putting a machine gun next to it. The Ingush authorities took three days to react to the murder. Mr Zyazikov promised personally to supervise the investigation. So far no one has been arrested.

When people took to the streets, they were dispersed by the police in brutal fashion. A group of TV journalists who had arrived from Moscow to cover the murder and the protest were kidnapped from their hotel, beaten and “deported” from Ingushetia as if it were a separate state.

Two months later people came out in protest again, carrying pro-Putin banners and pleading with him to protect them from state lawlessness. Mr Putin dismissed the protests with the words: “Someone had decided that Ingushetia is a weak link in the Caucasus and we see attempts to destabilise the situation there.” Maksharip Aushev, an opposition leader in Ingushetia (no relation to the former president), spoke for many when he said: “Until then I could have bet that Putin did not know what was going on here, that the money is stolen, that unemployment is almost 80%, that people get abducted. But it is now clear that we have to do something ourselves.”

Until last year Mr Aushev ran a successful marble-trading business and had little interest in politics. But in September last year his son and his nephew were abducted by the security services. He launched his own search and forced the local prosecutors to investigate what turned out to be a secret prison in Chechnya where Ingush residents were being taken for torture and execution. Mr Aushev later learnt that his son and nephew were taken to the mountains to be executed with snickers (explosives tied to their bodies) but at the last minute they were let go.

Unable to convey their anger through the ballot box and unwilling to take up arms, Mr Aushev and several others have set up an alternative parliament elected by family clans. They have agreed to co-operate with Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, Mr Zyazikov’s replacement, who had previously commanded Russian troops in Kosovo and taken part in special operations in Chechnya. His first steps were encouraging, but to stop the violence he will have to fight both the militants and the federal forces who have got out of control. Unless Russia stops treating this region as enemy territory and begins to observe its own laws here, violence will escalate.

More devolution please
What happens in the Caucasus will define the future of federalism and of territorial integrity in the whole of Russia. The central government’s policy failures in the Caucasus are particularly clear when compared with the far more successful policy being pursued in Tatarstan, the largest Muslim republic, which was integrated into the Russian empire in the 16th century and has been at peace ever since. In the early 1990s oil-rich Tatarstan became a symbol of decentralisation in Russia. It was here that Yeltsin famously said: “Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.” Under Mr Putin this phrase came to symbolise the weakness of Mr Yeltsin’s regime. In fact it was its strength. It is the centralisation of power and the colonial methods of suppression of dissent that are the biggest threat to that territorial integrity.