Tom Parfitt

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

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.

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