Earlier this spring, the Kremlin effectively declared victory after a decade and a half of conflict in the Chechen Republic. With pro-Moscow strongman Ramzan Kadyrov firmly in place, the authorities were able to declare that Chechnya was no longer a "zone of anti-terrorist operations."
Not so for Chechnya's neighbors, however. The president of Ingushetia, a region just west of Chechnya, remains hospitalized with serious wounds after a suicide car bomb attack on his motorcade earlier this week, and Kadyrov is now vowing "cruel revenge." It's part of a pattern of rising violence. A week earlier, gunmen killed a former top government minister in Ingushetia. Earlier this month, the interior minister of Dagestan, the republic to the east of Chechnya, was shot dead at a wedding in the city of Makhachkala.
After that incident, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev paid a high-profile visit to the region; he played up the tough-guy rhetoric, blaming the attacks on "terrorist scum." He may have been taking a leaf from his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, who once famously boasted that Russia would "waste them [terrorists] in the outhouse." But not long after his visit, a judge was gunned down in Ingushetia, and two police officers were killed in Dagestan.
Developments in Ingushetia are particularly troubling. The Ingush are the lowland cousins of the Chechens; they share a similar language; and they both suffered from Stalin's mass deportations in 1944. On a visit to the republic in March 2004, many people I spoke with warned that the republic had a potential for serious violence; a few months later, their predictions proved correct when rebels staged a daring raid in Nazran, the republic's main city.
Russia will have its hands full maintaining order in this region, which is beset with clan rivalries, ethnic tension and economic stagnation. Authoritarian habits don't help either: The official killed on Saturday had been a member of the government of Murat Zyazikov, a KGB agent who ran Ingushetia with a heavy hand. The authorities may have been able to declare some victory in Chechnya -- hell, they even hired a Canadian model to put a fresh face on things -- but a beautification campaign in Grozny or a photo opportunity in Makhachkala do not mean that all is quiet on Russia's southern frontier.
[PHOTO via HuffPo]
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