Tuesday, Oct 19, 2004
The Kremlin consolidates
By Vladimir Radyuhin
Vladimir Putin's planned political reforms will strengthen his hold on Russia's restive regions and Parliament.
IN THE wake of the Beslan school tragedy last month, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has launched a sweeping political reform aimed at re-establishing centralised control in Russia to face up to what he described as an "all-out war" unleashed against it by international terrorism.
The Russian leader has sent a bill to Parliament that would scrap the election of regional Governors by popular vote. The bill allows the President to select and nominate Governors subject to approval by regional lawmakers. If the lawmakers reject the candidate twice, the President could appoint an acting Governor and disband the legislature. Mr. Putin also proposed that the State Duma, Parliament's lower house, be elected solely on the party-list basis to facilitate the rise of strong political parties. At present, half of the State Duma's 450 deputies are elected on party lists, while the other half are filled from individual constituencies. The reform will consolidate Mr. Putin's hold on the regions and Parliament, already dominated by pro-government parties.
The revolutionary reform plan has raised a storm of criticism from the West, as well as Russian liberals. Mr. Putin has been accused of rolling back Russia's fledgling democracy and even aiming to set up a dictatorship. Critics ignore the fact that the election of regional Governors introduced by the former President, Boris Yeltsin, in the chaotic 1990s did little to promote democracy. As Mr. Putin explained to foreign academics and journalists recently, a mechanical transfer of Western democratic models to Russian soil would be "counter-productive" and "destructive."
In the absence of strong political parties, regional elections have been manipulated by local bureaucracy, big business and criminal groups to grab power in the provinces. In the strategic far eastern region of Primoriye, elections brought to power a criminal ringleader-turned-businessman three years ago. This year the Primoriye Governor, Sergei Darkin, helped another businessman with a criminal background get elected as Mayor of the regional capital, Vladivostok. In a recent opinion poll, three-fourths of Russians said they believed criminals had infiltrated government bodies in their regions. Some ethnic autonomies, such as Muslim Bashkortastan and Buddhist Kalmykia, have been turned by their bosses into despotic fiefdoms.
But it is a rapid rise in fundamentalist Islam in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and a separatist war in Chechnya that the Kremlin sees as the gravest threat to Russia's integrity. Russia has at least 20 million Muslims - 15 per cent of the population - and the number is growing fast due to high birth rates and migration from ex-Soviet Muslim states, while the Russian population keeps shrinking. A majority of Russian Muslims live in ethnic autonomies, which makes Russia particularly sensitive to the growth of fundamentalism.
"There is no other federative state in the world that has ethnically-defined republics as we do in Russia," the Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, Vyacheslav Surkov, said commenting on Mr. Putin's reform proposals. "I think the people in Washington would understand us better if the United States included, for example, an Afro-American Republic or a Hispanic-Jewish Autonomous Region with its own language, Constitution ... We are a very vulnerable country and must defend ourselves."
Russian officials admit that radical Islamist doctrines have taken root in post-Soviet Russia. From Chechnya, Islamist fundamentalism fuelled by Gulf Arab money has spread to neighbouring Dagestan, other Muslim regions of the bitterly poor North Caucasus and further north into mainland Russia. The presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District, Sergei Kirienko, said that over the past few years hundreds of Muslim leaders had returned from training in Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states to his district, which incorporates Russia's biggest Muslim republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortastan, and were now busy spreading Wahhabism and other radical Islamic teachings alien to Russia's Muslims.
Meeting with Hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church early this month, Mr. Putin drew attention to the fact that foreign financial aid was being channelled only to those Islamic priests in Russia who "deviate from traditional Islam," and called for state support to all mainstream religious confessions in Russia.
A recent spate of Chechen terror strikes revealed a growing involvement of fundamentalists from other Muslim republics of Russia in terrorism. Security experts warned of the emergence of a ramified terrorist network in Russia linked to an array of extremist religious organisations. Last year Russia's Supreme Court banned 15 Islamist groups, including Jamaat-e-Islami, Hizbul-Tahrir al-Islami and Islamic Brotherhood. However, experts say the situation has since deteriorated with the extremist groups going underground.
"We are convinced that the extremist network covers at least two-thirds of Russia and can be mobilised to full combat readiness at any moment," a security service source said in a recent interview. Last week, authorities in Nizhny Novgorod, a predominantly Russian regional capital in the Volga Federal District, detained 11 men accused of being members of Hizbul-Tahrir. The group, which includes several foreigners, may face charges of instigating or aiding in terrorist crimes.
The rise of religious fundamentalism is aggravated by a host of simmering ethnic and confessional conflicts in Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union, rekindled after the break-up of the superpower.
"These conflicts are in the dormant stage so far, but if we don't do anything about them, they could flare up instantaneously," Mr. Putin said after the Beslan hostage drama.
In Beslan, the terrorists sought to re-ignite one such conflict - between North Ossetia and Ingushetia. In 1992, the two autonomies fought a small but bloody war over a small territory that had formerly belonged to the Ingush but had been transferred to North Ossetia after the late Soviet dictator, Iosif Stalin, deported the Ingush and the Chechens to Kazakhstan after World War Two. The involvement of Ingush militants in the Beslan school siege may now provoke retaliation by the Ossetians. The fact that the Ossetians are the only Christian group in the otherwise Muslim North Caucasus adds a sinister religious tone to their confrontation with the Ingush.
Mr. Putin warned that a conflict between North Ossetia and Ingushetia could explode the entire North Caucasus, where Russia has been fighting Chechen separatists.
The abolition of gubernatorial elections should prevent a fundamentalist or separatist leader from coming to power in an ethnic autonomy by a popular vote. It will also give the centre more room for manoeuvre in selecting local leaders. In Tatarstan, for example, Mr. Putin may go for reappointing the moderate veteran President, Mintimer Shaimiyev, who has successfully held nationalists and fundamentalists at bay, but who would have to step down soon under the current election rules that limit the number of terms a regional leader may serve.
By making the post of regional governors appointed, rather than elected, all over Russia, Mr. Putin scores a double win: he eliminates regional bosses as an independent centre of power and a potential source of opposition, and turns them into his own power base.
The regional government reform is likely to speed up a long-planned re-division of Russia into larger territories. A plan drawn up by Russian economists and academics calls for redrawing Russia's 89 regions into 28 provinces on the basis of economic expediency. This will resolve the problem of ethnically-defined autonomies as they will become part of larger multi-ethnic territories. The process started earlier this year when the Komi-Perm ethnic autonomy was merged with the bigger Perm Region. The reform will bring to logical conclusion the overhaul of Russia's political system Mr. Putin launched after winning presidency in 2000 to curb the Yeltsin-era omnipotence of regional bosses and oligarchs and consolidate power in the centre.
The Kremlin admits that the scrapping of regional elections is fraught with many risks. The reform may fuel extremist and separatist movements in ethnic autonomies that will resent being stripped of the right to elect their leader. People's grievances in provinces will now be addressed directly to the President, rather than to local Governors appointed by him. The system of checks and balances will be critically weakened as half of the upper house, the Federation Council, will now be appointed by Governors appointed by the President. The reform may also be fatally discredited if bureaucratic appointments turn up just as corrupt and inefficient as the current system based on direct regional elections.
However, Mr. Putin made it clear he is prepared to take the risks in order to "strengthen national unity" in the face of the terrorist offensive, which, he warned, was a mere instrument in the hands of Russia's enemies who are out to "tear away parts of Russia" - a clear reference to increasingly aggressive attempts by the United States and NATO to re-carve the political map of the former Soviet Union.
Copyright © 2004, The Hindu.