Monday, Aug 01, 2005
Threat to Russia's hold on Caucasus
Vladimir Radyuhin
Chechen rebels have fanned out to neighbouring territories, particularly Dagestan, increasing the pressure on Moscow.
RUSSIA HAS largely brought the security situation in rebel Chechnya under control but the violence has spilled over to neighbouring territories, threatening to set the entire North Caucasus on fire and wreck Moscow's efforts to establish a stronger strategic presence in the region.
A network of Chechen-led militant groups — jamaats — mounted nearly 80 armed attacks in Dagestan since the beginning of this year, an increase of 230 per cent on the last year. For the first time Dagestan has beaten Chechnya for the number of rebel strikes.
A Muslim territory of two million people that is home to over 100 ethnic groups and shares a 540-km border with Chechnya, Dagestan has been the target of Chechen rebels since 1999 when they staged a massive armed incursion into the neighbouring region. This prompted Moscow to launch a second military campaign in Chechnya to dislodge its separatist government. In contrast to the first war in 1994-1996 that ended for Russia in a humiliating peace and military withdrawal from Chechnya, this time Russian forces have crushed organised rebel resistance and installed a loyal administration in Chechnya. But they have failed to prevent violence from plaguing the rest of Russia's North Caucasus.
New front opened
Their ability for armed resistance in Chechnya heavily curtailed by federal forces, Chechen rebels have opened a new front of terror war against Russia in the North Caucasus.
A daring Chechen raid into Ingushetia and the bloody Beslan hostage tragedy in North Ossetia last year signalled a sharp escalation of terrorist activity around Chechnya, above all in Dagestan, the biggest and most vulnerable Russian territory in the region.
Daily reports from Dagestan read like a war chronicle. On Thursday, a police officer was killed when security forces stormed a rented flat in the capital Makhachkala killing several militants and foiling a plan to prepare a major terror hit in Moscow. On Wednesday, a senior intelligence officer of the Interior Ministry was killed in an operation to ambush a car carrying several militants. On Tuesday, six Interior Ministry troops were wounded in Dagestan when a bomb planted by the roadside detonated as they were driving past. Two days earlier a bomb derailed a commuter train killing one person. In early July, 11 Russian soldiers were killed by a bomb while they were on the way to a bath-house.
Violence has also rocked Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessiya, North Ossetia, and Ingushetia as emissars of Chechen and international terrorist groups fanned out from Chechnya to neighbouring territories. A recent report written by Igor Dobayev, a terrorism expert with the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that about 2,000 Islamists, including 300 "instructors and treasurers" from other countries — mainly Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Jordan — and with links to Al-Qaeda were involved in terrorist activities in the North Caucasus.
Russia's Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev told the country's Parliament recently that the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region was "a breeding ground for Wahhabism."
Islamic militants act as a trigger for social, ethnic and clan conflicts brewing in the North Caucasus. The North Caucasus is one of the most depressed Russian regions with unemployment running from 40 per cent to 70 per cent. The millions of dollars in federal subsidies that the centre pumps into the region land in the pockets of clan-based mafia-like local elites, which sometimes resort to the services of Islamists in their struggle for control of lucrative businesses and government money. The killing of Dagestan's Minister for Ethnic Affairs by the "Sharia Jamaat" in May was apparently a case of such potentially explosive tie-ups between rival ethnic clans and Islamists.
Rampant corruption and widening social rifts between the more prosperous and secular cities in the North Caucasus and the poor and religious rural territories provide fertile soil for Islamic extremism. Thousands of unemployed youths fall easy prey to rebel recruiters.
Vladislav Surkov, Deputy chief of staff of President Vladimir Putin's administration, has compared the situation in the North Caucasus to a spreading "underground fire," while Mr. Putin's special envoy to the North Caucasus warned of an explosion in the region.
"Unresolved social, economic and political problems are building up to a critical level," Dmitry Kozak, Mr. Putin's right hand man in the region, wrote in a report to the President this month. "Further ignoring [of these problems] ... can lead to a sharp rise in protests and acts of civil disobedience, and set off an uncontrolled chain of events escalating into open conflicts."
Growing instability in the North Caucasus may undermine Russia's efforts to stave off the U.S. thrust into the adjacent Caspian region. Georgia was the first former Soviet state in 2003 where the U.S. orchestrated a "velvet revolution" to install a pro-American regime. With the opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in May this year, Washington broke Russian monopoly over energy flows from the Caspian and Central Asia. The U.S. is now pushing to deploy troops and aircraft in Azerbaijan and Georgia for "pipeline protection."
A key oil pipeline linking Azerbaijan and the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk runs through Dagestan. An even more strategically important pipeline operated by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) passes through neighbouring Kalmykia, a poor Buddhist territory that may be sensitive to instability in Dagestan. The CPC is Russia's main hope for competing with the U.S.-sponsored BTC pipeline.
A large part of Russia's Caspian naval flotilla is based in Dagestani ports. Dagestan also lies on the strategic North-South transport route linking India and South-East Asia with Russia and Europe.
Earlier this month President Putin visited the region vowing to beef up Russia's military muscle in the North Caucasus. The Russian flotilla in the Caspian will get new ships and two special forces brigades will be deployed in Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Dagestan. Mr. Putin also ordered the strengthening of the border guards along the border with Azerbaijan and Georgia, from where Islamists and support for rebels come.
The measures may improve the security situation in the region but it will take much more to deal with the root cause of the growing instability and violence — the acute social and economic problems of the North Caucasus.
Mr. Putin admitted that the centre had overlooked the crisis. "The situation remains fairly difficult, and we can't say that we have done everything possible," he said in televised remarks. "We are aware of the local situation, so we must and will resolve this problem."
Islamic extremism
The Russian leader said economic conditions in the North Caucasus need to be sharply improved to counter the growing Islamic extremism. Mr. Kozak unveiled a radical plan to modernise the region by weakening the hold of local clans on power and resources. Under his proposal, Moscow will introduce direct rule in regions whose budgets are heavily subsidised by the federal government. The impoverished regions of the North Caucasus, including Chechnya, are the prime target of Mr. Kozak's plan: last year they received more than 70 per cent of their budgets from the federal government.
"We face an option in the Caucasus — either petrify the enormous economic, social and political problems ... or show willpower and overcome clannish politics and economics and create conditions for honest, legitimate competition in these spheres of life," Mr. Kozak said in an interview earlier this year.
The Kremlin's plan is bound to meet with fierce resistance from the local elites, but the stakes are too high for Moscow to adopt less drastic solutions.
Copyright © 2005, The Hindu.