The war without a name By Oleg Kusov, special to Prague Watchdog
MAKHACHKALA, Dagestan – If Russian state television were to offer its viewers real news about the situation in the North Caucasus, the Republic of Dagestan would never be off their screens. That is the grim joke told by political and military analysts in the capital city Makhachkala as they discuss the details of the regular attacks by insurgents on security police and government officials. In November alone there have been just under a dozen of these tragic incidents here. On November 30 Abrek Khadzhiyev, head of the republic’s Magaramkentsky district, was killed in downtown Makhachkala. Early on the same day there was an explosion on the stretch of railway line between the towns of Izberbash and Inchkhe. The bomb went off under an electric passenger train that was travelling from the Russian province of Tyumen to Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. The locomotive was damaged, but fortunately there were no casualties. On November 26 Lieutenant Colonel Shapibula Aligadzhiyev, a special forces commander, was shot and killed outside his apartment building in Makhachkala. A few days earlier the victim was a police officer who tried to remove a booby-trap mine from the roof of his car. .On November 13 a bomb blast killed a school teacher in the village of Gubden, Karabudakhkentsky district, Yelena Triftonigi, and her daughter and cousin at a local cemetery where they had gone to honour the memory of Triftonigi’s husband, police officer Abdumalik Magomedov. On November 11 two unidentified gunmen travelling in a Zhiguli car on the outskirts of the city of Khasavyurt opened fire on a traffic police post on the Makhachkala-bound side of the highway, killing one policeman and wounding another. was wounded. On November 2 the vehicle of a law enforcement officer was booby-trapped in Makhachkala. Analysts believe that the bomb was planted at night, and that for some for some unknown reason it did not go off.
Dagestan’s leaders have so far been unable to explain the causes of the bloody chaos to the general public, who are sceptical about the superficial explanations they are offered. Dagestan’s President Mukhu Aliyev categorically disagrees with claims that a low-level war has broken out in the republic between law enforcers and the Islamic armed underground. As evidenced by his recent interview for Kommersant newspaper, he calls anyone who endangers the lives of policemen "criminals" or "terrorists" without making any distinction, and says that the criminals and terrorists must be fought. Experts are inclined to believe that the local authorities are incapable of meeting the intellectual and ideological challenges they currently face and prefer to act according to the old prescriptions, placing the blame for what is happening on "international mercenaries who have intensified their efforts since last year's war in South Ossetia."
At a special event held recently to mark the annual holiday of the Dagestan police, President Aliyev reiterated his customary view of the dynamics of the struggle with the Islamic underground, coupled with some rather vague statistics. He recalled that 49 police officers had been killed so far in 2009 (this tragic figure has since risen). The President stressed that this year the republic's law enforcement authorities have prevented 24 terrorist attacks, killed 114 militants and arrested 103 members of armed gangs and their associates. Among the neutralized militants were five leaders of the terrorist underground, who were members of international terrorist organizations. Aliyev said that the threat from Islamic extremists was the Interior Ministry’s number one priority.
The situation of law enforcement officers in other republics of the North Caucasus is no less complex. Out of habit, the authorities there tend to ascribe it all to an "increased level of criminality.”
The beheaded corpses of two policemen were recently found in the Kabardino-Balkarian town of Chegem, just north of the capital Nalchik. On November 25 Karabulak police chief Abdul-Kerim Tsechoyev was wounded when the armoured vehicle in which he was travelling hit a landmine on Gubina Street in Ordzhonikidzevskaya, Ingushetia. He later died in hospital. On November 24 unidentified gunmen in the village of Barsuki, Ingushetia, opened fire on a vehicle in which a senior police lieutenant, Khadzhibrakar Buzurtanov, was travelling with his family. Buzurtanov was killed together with his 11 -year-old daughter, and his wife was taken to hospital with injuries. On November 23, Alikhan Buzurtanov, head of the administration of Nazran’s Nasyr-Kortovsky municipal district was killed in the city.
So far the authorities have remained more or less silent, though experts are analyzing the current situation. Some speak of the deliberate destruction by "international forces” of the existing system of administrative control in southern Russia, while others allude to the rebirth of nationalist movements which again they say are being helped by neighbouring states. The experts usually posit internal reasons for the ongoing destabilization when they want to emphasize the difficult socio-economic situation faced by people who live in the North Caucasian republics.
Neither the authorities nor the experts have so far offered a serious analysis of the destablization in the North Caucasus. It is possible that most are hindered by the general “party line”, according to which the problem of the North Caucasus as a whole has long been solved. In this view, all that remains is for the one or two isolated armed groups of radicals still in the mountains to be eliminated, and for the borders with Georgia to be blocked. But as the system cannot even articulate the problem with much clarity, it is hardly able to solve it. Almost every day there are attacks on police and officials, and explosions are heard. Destabilization and radicalism have become elements to be used in the interests of the prevailing system of government. If that system is dismantled and replaced, one of the major sources of destabilization may vanish. At all events, the problem that now afflicts the North Caucasus did not appear out of the blue – it is a result of the progressive disintegration of the control structure which North Caucasian power elites are trying to hold in place. The destabilization which is a product of that sagging structure now threatens to devour the government, with potentially fatal consequences. Government officials refuse to acknowledge the logic of the process – though it may be that they simply do not understand it.
Photo: kazan.kp.ru. (Translation by DM) © 2009 Prague Watchdog (see Reprint info). (P,DM)
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