Russia’s hot spots. Caucasian dominoes

Date: 15/10/05

Havoc spreads from Chechnya to another part of the north Caucasus

UNTIL recently, the southern Russian city of Nalchik was a sluggish place where the local authorities more or less kept the lid on ethnic and religious tension. But on October 13th, gun-battles broke out in the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, a semi-autonomous republic in the north Caucasus mountains.

Details were hazy as The Economist went to press. Early reports in Moscow spoke of the armed seizure of a school, as happened at Beslan, in the neighbouring region of North Ossetia, in September 2004. But it later seemed that the attackers' targets had instead been an arms shop and assorted federal and security installations, including police stations and the local department of internal affairs. A Chechen website claimed that all those places were assaulted simultaneously by Muslim fighters of the "Caucasus Front".

Witnesses reported bodies being ferried in cars, blasts across the city, helicopters hovering overhead, buildings ablaze and gunmen car-jacking passing vehicles as they tried to flee. A Kremlin official said hostages had been taken. The numbers of insurgents (possibly hundreds), and of casualties (at least scores), are yet to be confirmed.

Given the self-exculpating misinformation that Russia's government emits after such incidents, the details may stay murky. But the trend is clear: violence once confined to Chechnya, where Russia has fought two grisly wars against separatism, has spread across the entire north Caucasus region.

Though there have been gun-battles and sieges in Nalchik before, the city was until recently deemed safe-ish, at least compared with Grozny in Chechnya. Kabardino-Balkaria now looks as brittle and unstable as Ingushetia and Dagestan, Chechnya's other neighbours, where shoot-outs and killings abound.

As night follows day, Russia's government will blame "Wahhabis" (Russia's catch-all term for Muslim extremists) for this week's strike. The creation of a pan-Caucasian conflict, and subsequently a caliphate, is indeed an aim of some Chechen terrorists . The scale and boldness of the Nalchik havoc certainly point to a Chechen connection, and perhaps to the involvement of Shamil Basayev, the organiser of the Beslan attack. Grabbing arms, freeing prisoners and showing strength are among the likely motives.

But indirectly, the culprits are the local and federal authorities. The tactics used in Chechnya, and then in nearby Ingushetia, have been applied in Kabardino-Balkaria too, with predictable, alienating results. In the past year, large groups of "suspects" have been rounded up and brutalised; the security services harass and torture with impunity. Meanwhile, the corruption which lets terrorists slip across internal borders has crippled the local economy, monopolising business for the elites, creating deep resentment and unemployment, and feeding extremism. President Vladimir Putin last month replaced Kabardino-Balkaria's veteran ruler with a businessman--perhaps on the dubious principle that rich people can resist corruption.

The attackers in Nalchik were said to have blown up a monument to Russian-Kabardine friendship. Their dream of a pan-Caucasian caliphate may be fantasy, but the widening of an arc of pain and instability is all too real.

Havoc speads from Chechnya to other parts of the north Caucasus.