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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| North Caucasus in danger of flying apart |
| 2005-09-26 |
| Two powerful bombs slammed into the armoured convoy of Ingush Prime Minister Ibragim Malgasov as he headed for his Magas office on Aug 25, killing one bodyguard and sending Malgasov to hospital. A week later, the republic's security chief narrowly escaped when a gunman opened fire on him. Kidnappings, bombings and assassinations have become routine in Russia's southern republic of Ingushetia, where an increasingly bold Islamist insurgency has killed more than 100 police and officials over the past two years and dragged the tiny mountainous region to the brink of anarchy. "These attacks against me and my officials are the work of desperate men who want to destabilize the situation in southern Russia," says Ingushetia's pro-Kremlin president, Murat Zyazikov, who survived a suicide bombing last year. "They want to create chaos here, but they are bound to fail." As the war in Ingushetia's neighbouring Chechnya grinds into its seventh year, conflicts are spreading around the north Caucasus, a mountainous wedge between the Black and Caspian seas that has been a zone of tension since being conquered by Russia in the 19th century. The region is a crazy quilt of warring ethnic groups and rival religions that makes Europe's other tangled knot, the Balkans, look tame by comparison. Many experts say Moscow's grip, iron-hard in Soviet times, has slipped disastrously in recent years. "The Chechen conflict is spilling into neighbouring republics, escalating the process of destabilization," says Alexei Malashenko, an analyst with the Carnegie Center in Moscow. "A big explosion across the north Caucasus cannot be excluded." At the Caspian edge of the north Caucasus arc is Dagestan, with 32 constituent ethnic groups, where Islamist rebels stage almost daily bombings and ambushes against Russian security forces. To Ingushetia's south are two breakaway republics, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which are locked in long-simmering wars of independence against the post-Soviet state of Georgia. To the west is traditionally-Christian North Ossetia, hereditary enemy of the mainly-Muslim Ingush, with whom they fought a savage border war in 1992. The Kremlin has tried to maintain its authority by easing out "unreliable" local leaders, such as former Ingush president Ruslan Aushev, and replacing them with loyalists like the KGB veteran Zyazikov. "This tactic is not working," says Alexander Iskanderyan, head of the Yerevan-based 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 North 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 North Ossetia. Three days later, amid circumstances that remain murky, Russian security forces launched a massive assault of the building, leaving 331 people dead, half of them children. Zyazikov and other pro-Kremlin officials deny any local causes and blame the outrage on "international terrorism" imported into the region by al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremists from the Middle East. But 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 newly built School No. 8. "I'm terrified of it, but I'm sure it's coming." If all-out Ingush-Ossetian war transpires, there will be no shortage of weaponry. Many men in the region privately admit to owning a Kalashnikov assault rifle; some speak of hidden stashes of heavier ordnance. "It's no secret that when the U.S.S.R. was falling apart and the army was weakened, many people acquired guns," says Larissa Khabitsova, chairwoman of North Ossetia's parliament. At stake, experts say, is Russia's fragile post-Soviet unity. "When you look at the spreading instability across the region, it's hard to escape the feeling that we're living in a slow-motion collapse," says Malashenko. "And it's speeding up." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #6 Never mind, it's politics. I was thinking about the mountain range. |
| Posted by: Shamu 2005-09-26 16:35 |
| #5 Never underestimate the weak force. |
| Posted by: Shamu 2005-09-26 16:34 |
| #4 Over a decade of slow implosion. |
| Posted by: MunkarKat 2005-09-26 11:21 |
| #3 "In Danger"? I think it has been flying apart for years. |
| Posted by: mmurray821 2005-09-26 10:22 |
| #2 Ingushetia's pro-Kremlin president, Murat Zyazikov I'd been wondering where you've been, Murat. |
| Posted by: Spot 2005-09-26 08:19 |
| #1 oh well |
| Posted by: Uninetle Hupating2229 2005-09-26 08:08 |