MOSCOW: Take Chechnya’s embattled police force, corrupt government, poor population and violent Islamists, then add dozens of feuding ethnic groups. Welcome to Dagestan, the new front in Russia’s spreading Caucasus war.
Unlike the Chechens, who have fought Moscow’s rule for a decade, the Dagestani peoples stayed largely peaceful after the Soviet collapse in 1991. They are not any more.
“There are attacks on police, terrorist acts, attacks on deputies and ministers,” said Saigidpasha Umakhanov, the ethnically Avar mayor of the town of Khasavyurt, who says the government is too corrupt to stop the carnage.
“The government has seized the whole republic, so as to divide up all the money for itself. Well, for the people that is a problem,” he said by telephone. “The government is fighting the people.”
On Thursday, a train was derailed by a bomb north of regional capital Makhachkala. The blast followed a gun battle in the town centre on Wednesday, and an explosion in the town last Friday that killed 10 Russian servicemen.
Police say they have lost at least 28 officers to attacks this year. Militants and federal forces have lost many more, and civilian losses are unknown.
“There is 60 per cent unemployment, there is uncertainty about the government, there is tension between the Avars and the Dargins, who are the two main peoples who want their representative (as local leader),” said Alexei Malashenko, an analyst from the Moscow Carnegie Centre think tank.
“The situation is just getting worse, in every way. This terrorism is a war against the police by the Islamist groups, who are getting bigger alongside their criminal allies.”
If Chechnya’s chaos fully engulfs Dagestan, Russia will have lost civilian control over half the North Caucasus. Further chaos would also threaten to destabilise the oil-rich states to the south and seriously overstretch Russia’s creaking military.
Government posts are largely handed out to reflect the ethnic make-up of the region, making ministries the preserve of a single clan or family group.
Veteran local leader Magomed Magomedov, in power since Soviet times, is a Dargin and leaders of rival nations have claimed his relatives have an unfair monopoly on power.
HUGE TENSION: The potential for inter-ethnic tension is huge. Dagestan is the size of Scotland, but its 2 million impoverished inhabitants speak some 29 mutually unintelligible languages — about the same number spoken in the entire European Union.
And they have a long tradition of resistance.
Imam Shamil, the legendary leader of Caucasus resistance in the 19th century was an Avar, a member of the largest nation in the Dagestani patchwork.
His successors in the fight share his strict Islamist beliefs, with militant groups using Chechen rebel websites to advertise their jihad. They recently pledged to attack Moscow in an operation called “Stab the Pig in the Heart”.
“If it is necessary we will come and destroy you with your children and wives, as you have come and destroyed ours,” a statement on www.kavkazcenter.com from the “Shariat” group said.
Officials have long said the Islamists, like the Chechen rebels, are “international terrorists”. But they have recently been forced to admit the militants stem from local stock.
“I can say only one thing, this is related to Dagestan’s internal problems. No one could have imported this into the republic of Dagestan from outside,” Andrei Novikov, the local deputy interior minister, told reporters on Wednesday.
Commentators say corruption is so high that police have more or less given up. Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the Russian government’s official daily, said they were “completely paralyzed”.
“Who would want to put his head in the way of a bullet, when a high-ranking relative or sponsor of the person you are fighting can phone your boss tomorrow and demand you be sacked,” the paper asked.—Reuters
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