Russia struggles to keep grip in Caucasus

By Fred Weir, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Tue Sep 13, 2005

Murat Zyazikov, the pro-Kremlin president of the southern Russian republic
of Ingushetia, is a hunted man.

Since taking office in 2003, he has narrowly escaped assassination at the
hands of a suicide car-bomber and a sniper, allegedly sent by local Islamic
militants. In the past month alone, insurgents have bombed the motorcade of
his deputy premier and opened fire on his security chief. A year ago,
fighters loyal to Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev briefly seized the Ingush
capital of Nazran, killing almost 100 police officers and government
officials.

Mr. Zyazikov, a former general of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB),
shrugs all that off. “Things here are calm and peaceful,” he told
journalists at a meeting in his plush, golden-domed presidential palace.
“These attacks against me and my officials are the work of desperate men who
want to destabilize the situation in southern Russia. They hate the fact
that we are building a worthy life for our people.”

As the war in neighboring Chechnya grinds into its seventh year with no
resolution in sight, conflicts are metastasizing around the troubled north
Caucasus, which has been a zone of tension since it was conquered by Russia
in the 19th century. The region is a patchwork quilt of warring ethnic
groups and rival religions that makes Europe’s other tangled knot, the
Balkans, look tame by comparison.

Many experts say the Kremlin’s grip, iron-hard in Soviet times, has slipped
disastrously in recent years. “The Chechen conflict is spilling into
neighboring republics, escalating the process of destabilization,” says
Alexei Malashenko, an analyst with the Carnegie Center in Moscow.

Zhairakhsky, a sparsely populated district amid the high, snow-capped
mountains of southern Ingushetia, has remained relatively untouched by
conflict. But, says local administrator Yakhya Mamilov, “if you stand on a
mountaintop here and look around, you’ll see wars flaring or brewing in
every direction. It’s impossible to build for the future with any confidence
while these conditions last.”

Rebel fighters from Chechnya, a few kilometers to the east, often take
refuge among their Ingush ethnic kin in Zhairakhsky, locals say.

Further east is the Caspian Sea republic of Dagestan, with 32 constituent
ethnic groups, where Islamist rebels stage almost daily bombings and
ambushes against Russian security forces.

To the south and west two breakaway republics, South Ossetia and Abkhazia,
are locked in long-simmering wars of independence against the post-Soviet
state of Georgia. Just next door on another side is traditionally Christian
North Ossetia, hereditary enemy of the mainly Muslim Ingush, with whom they
fought a savage border war in 1992.

Moscow has tried to maintain its authority by phasing out “unreliable” local
leaders, and replacing them with loyalists like Zyazikov. “This tactic is
not working,” says Alexander Iskanderyan, head of the Center for Caucasian
Studies. “Moscow imagines that exchanging ‘bad’ officials with ‘good’ ones
will change things, but the main trend we see is a steady loss of control.”

Passions in Ingushetia and N. Ossetia are still seething over the Beslan
school massacre a year ago. On Sept. 1, 2004, a squad of 32 terrorists, most
of them ethnic Ingush, drove from Ingushetia and seized 1,200 hostages in
Beslan’s School No. 1, just across the border in N. Ossetia. Three days
later Russian security forces launched a massive assault on the building,
leaving 331 people dead, half of them children.

Zyazikov, and other pro-Kremlin officials, blame the outrage on
“international terrorism.” North Ossetia’s acting president, Taimuraz
Mamsurov, says the Beslan school siege was a deliberate attempt by “certain
forces” to stir up ethnic war between Ingush and Ossetians. “Tensions have
increased (since Beslan), that’s natural,” he says. “But I think we’ve
succeeded in restraining our people from fulfilling that scenario.”

Others doubt the danger has passed. “Everyone here is always talking about
getting ready for war with the Ingush, to get even with them,” says Madina
Pedatova, a teacher at Beslan’s spanking new School No. 8. “I’m terrified of
it, but I’m sure it’s coming.”

Just across the heavily fortified Ingush-N. Ossetian border thousands of
Ingush refugees forced from their homes in N. Ossetia in 1992 live in a
sprawling, squalid refugee camp. Here the hatred is palpable. “The Ossetians
are like Nazis. They drove us from our homes (in 1992) like cattle, showing
no humanity,” says Umar Khadziyev, unemployed, who lives in a small hut with
his wife and three children.

Mr. Khadziyev says he condemns the Beslan attack, with its terrible death
toll of children. But then he adds: “Do you know why the fighters drove past
two Ossetian schools before taking School No. 1 in Beslan? It’s because the
Ossetians used that very school as a prison for our people in 1992. Yes, our
women and children were held there, in that same gym, beaten up and denied
food and water. Nobody talks about that, do they?”

For Moscow, the spreading unrest, fuelled by Islamic extremists in some
republics and ancient ethnic antagonisms in others, poses an almost
nightmarish challenge. After Beslan, President Vladimir Putin warned that
the cost of failure could be “the destruction of Russia.” Says Khadziyev,
the Ingush refugee: “Our grandfathers told us the USSR would collapse one
day. I’m sure that Russia is going to fall apart too.”