Moscow’s secret war in Ingushetia
Russia’s President, Dmitry Medvedev, pretends that this republic is a haven of stability. Not so, says Tom Parfitt: the Ingush are subject to a campaign of murder and repression
Among the first-class passengers who flew into Ingushetia’s Magas airport from Moscow on the afternoon of 31 August were two grey-haired men in suits. The pair avoided each other’s gaze. One was Murat Zyazikov, 50, a former KGB officer and president of Ingushetia, the small Muslim republic which borders Chechnya in southern Russia. The other was Magomed Yevloyev, 36, an outspoken critic of Russia’s brutal rule in Ingushetia, founder of the ingushetiya.ru website, and Zyazikov’s great nemesis.
The fates of the government bureaucrat and the government critic, which had been so closely bound up with each other, were about to diverge. Once the plane had touched down and the passengers offloaded, Zyazikov was ushered into a waiting Mercedes and swept away. Yevloyev meanwhile was met by a team of armed police. They bundled him, protesting, into their vehicle and drove off. Within 20 minutes Yevloyev had been shot in the temple. His near-lifeless body was dumped at a hospital where he died hours later.
Officials in Moscow and Ingushetia’s police say that Yevloyev’s death was the result of an accidental shot when he tried to grab an officer’s weapon. But too many unarmed people have died in Ingushetia while ‘putting up armed resistance’ for this to be at all believable. Yevloyev, a former state prosecutor who turned to journalism by chance, was almost certainly killed because his popular website provided one of the few sources of independent information about government murder and corruption. The website was a thorn in Zyazikov’s side. Officials tried to close it down, citing anti-terror laws, but nonetheless tens of thousands of readers continued to access it via mirror sites and mobile phones. So Yevloyev had to go.
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Ian C
September 12th, 2008 1:07pmSee you back here in the UK quite soon then Mr Parfitt!
The next challenge to peace - Russia. Must get the UN to sort this one out chaps.
Bill Corr
September 12th, 2008 8:34pmSo the Ingush - but not the Chechens or Daghestanis - had a nasty little armed spat with the North Ossetians in the early nineties, did they ?
'Spectator' readers are generally well-informed but this revelation probably comes as news to many, who are still struggling to remember whether North Waziristan is closer to South Ossetia than to West Virginia. And Milliband, undisputed maaster of Mr. Bean grimaces, evidently feels we ought to get more actively involved in this part of the world, does he?
Interested 'Spectator' readers might care to look at the *Kavkaz Center* website on the Internet, which is a pro-Caliphate site, on the side of the armed mujahideen of the North Caucasus, hosted by the ever-obliging Swedes.
David Lindsay
September 13th, 2008 4:26pmA Guardian correspondent writes in The Spectator that those who - in alliance with global capital, European federalism and American military-industrial hegemony - wish to create a Caliphate where Russia currently is in the North Caucasus are just fine and dandy, and are lovely, peaceable Sufi Muslims, which is presumably why they murder so many public officials and ethnic Russians.
The fantasy of Sufi placidity bordering on pacifism, wholly incompatible with anything like Wahhabism or Deobandism, is not true in the Caucasus (Ingushetia, neighbouring and closely connected Chechnya, and elsewhere), not true in the Balkans (where they rallied to the likes of Izetbegovic and the Kosovo "Liberation" Army), not true in Libya (where at least one third of the population nevertheless adheres to the Sanusi synthesis of Wahhabism and popular Sufism), spectacularly not true in the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora, not true all round.
But never mind. The real bad guys are those who, egged on by Moscow, want out of globalisation, European federalism, American military-industrial hegemony, and the militant Islam to which those forces are so closely allied, and instead wish to preserve the Christian synthesis of Classics and the Bible.
Yes, they are the real bad guys.
Aren't they?
Augustus
September 16th, 2008 4:09pmYet another blot on Russia's landscape. Ingush opposition members have been mysteriously disappearing for years under Zyazikov's rule, who uses security forces sent by Moscow to suppress the slightest hint of dissent. The trouble is that the Kremlin has very little control over proxies like Zyazikov. It only needs the police to open fire on a crowd of demonstrators and...here we go again!