Special report. The North Caucasus. An empire’s fraying edge

REUTERS

The creeping destabilisation of the north Caucasus, and what it means for the future of Russia

IN ANY other European country, the carnage would have caused horror. But ten years of war in Chechnya have inured most Russians to the fates of desperadoes such as the obscure Islamist group that two weeks ago holed up in an apartment in Nalchik, the capital of the north Caucasian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. A three-day siege ended bloodily: the apartment was gutted, and its seven occupants, alleged perpetrators of a murderous attack on a government agency in December, were all killed.

Still, the location of this particular last stand was troubling. Kabardino-Balkaria had until recently been a patch of relative calm in Russia's poorest, angriest and most complex region. So too, until last October, had seemed Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria's western neighbour. Then seven businessmen were killed, and their bodies thrown down a mine. The son-in-law of the republic's president was implicated in the murders, and a mob stormed the presidential headquarters in Cherkessk, the capital. A putsch was averted, or perhaps postponed. Last September, the siege in Beslan, North Ossetia, was horrific enough - over 330 hostages dead, more than half of them children - to appal even the most hardened of Russians.

Not so long ago, observers worried that the conflict in Chechnya would spill across its borders. Now the question is not whether it will spread, but where the spreading will end. “The explosive potential of Chechnya,” says Enver Kisriev, a Dagestani academic, “is being dispersed through the north Caucasus.” Even by Russian standards, the beautiful but benighted region's difficulties are extreme. But they are extreme versions of problems that afflict the country as a whole: poverty, fissiparousness and poor governance. And the explosive tendency of the north Caucasus may ultimately threaten the integrity of that whole.

After Chechnya, the north Caucasian republic with the most unstable recent history is Dagestan, the largest. Religious extremism, violent criminal groups and a dizzyingly fragmented ethnic rivalry are all entrenched. A raid into Dagestan by Chechen fighters in 1999 helped to ignite the second Chechen war (the first was fought between 1994 and 1996). Last month Ramzan Kadyrov - Chechnya's first deputy prime minister, and warlord son of a brutal pro-Moscow Chechen president assassinated last year - made another provocative violent incursion with some of his so-called kadyrovtsy henchmen after his sister was detained by Dagestani police. Assassinations, and shoot-outs between police and insurgents, are frequent.

But it is Ingushetia, Chechnya's small western neighbour, that has been most affected by spreading violence. Last June a phalanx of insurgents took over Nazran, Ingushetia's ramshackle main city, killing more than 90 people before retreating. On January 8th this year, a house on the edge of Nazran was razed in a siege.

According to Memorial, a human-rights watchdog, the security services' behaviour creates rather than staunches the trouble. As in Chechnya, masked men turn up in vehicles with no number plates. Sometimes the people they abduct are released; sometimes they are ransomed; sometimes they disappear; sometimes their bodies are found. Ruslan Zhadayev, who runs an information centre in a dilapidated Nazran apartment, relates how on January 12th masked and armed men forced his male colleagues to lie on the floor, lined the women against a wall, cut the phone line and removed the computers. They said they were hunting for terrorists; more probably, they meant to intimidate. But while many detect the hand of the FSB (Russia's post-KGB spy service) behind the mayhem, nobody seems really to be in control, including in control of the local FSB agents.

Ingushetia is not - yet - as perilous as Chechnya, where federal troops, the kadyrovtsy and plain criminals kidnap at will. Makhmut Magomadov, a human-rights lawyer, was abducted last month. The authorities mendaciously claimed that he has been released, a tactic that helps them disavow responsibility. Several relatives of Aslan Maskhadov, erstwhile president of Chechnya turned rebel, have also been seized. Memorial, which monitors only around a quarter of Chechen territory, counted 396 kidnappings last year: 24 victims have been found dead, and 173 have vanished.

The terror helps to explain why a sizeable rump of the Chechens who sought sanctuary from the war in Ingushetia are still there. Some are afraid to return because they have children of an age vulnerable to kidnap. One 55-year-old, who lost her three sons and her mother in the first war, says she has nothing to go back to: the house she left behind is now a pit. Her new home is a small cardboard-walled container in a Nazran yard. The only decoration is a poster of Alu Alkhanov, who took over as president of Chechnya from the slain elder Kadyrov after a sham election last year. She put it up, she says, because he gave her 1,000 roubles ($36) to vote. Looking for help, “I go round and round like a squirrel in a wheel.”

But the number of Chechen refugees in Ingushetia has fallen, from a peak of 240,000 to around 34,500 (many more are displaced within Chechnya itself). Murat Zyazikov, the president of Ingushetia, says the returns have always been voluntary; some relief agencies report government pressure. Growing local hostility towards the Chechens has played a part. But so has the fact that, at least in the bald terms of the body count, the situation inside Chechnya is improving. Even if some of the war compensation money from the federal government is still stolen, more seems to be getting through. Mr Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev, Russia's most wanted man, last week reportedly declared a temporary “ceasefire”, though Mr Basayev has also vowed further abominations.

Who is to blame?

The slim improvements in grim Chechnya may help to explain some of the deterioration in the neighbouring republics. Some dislodged Chechen fighters have moved on. Cynics speculate that declining returns at Chechen border posts, and from smuggling and embezzlement, may also have something to do with it. But the region's problems have two other profound causes: its messy history, and a chronic failure of government.

Devilishly complex ethnic divisions, within and between republics; ancient but persistent grudges; a Babel of languages; clan-based sub-rivalries; war with Russia, from the tsars to Vladimir Putin, Russia's current president: such is the historical inheritance of the north Caucasus. Perhaps the most influential tragedy occurred during the second world war. A teacher in Zilgi, a predominantly Muslim village outside Beslan, says that, after the school siege, when her pupils ask her the eternal Russian question - who is to blame? - she gives a one-word answer: Stalin.

During the war, Stalin ordered the wholesale deportation of four north Caucasian Muslim nations, along with several others, at an enormous cost in lives: the Chechens and Ingush (ethnic cousins), Karachays, Balkars and Meskhetian Turks. A sliver of Ingush territory was given to North Ossetia - the only predominantly Christian republic in the region, and Moscow's traditional bulwark. (Vladikavkaz, the name of the North Ossetian capital, means “Power over the Caucasus”.) The Ingush tried unsuccessfully to recover the land in a short but nasty war in 1992. The husks of Ingush and Ossetian homes destroyed in the fighting still lie unrepaired. Thousands of Ingush refugees still live near the border, in scarcely better conditions than the Chechen exiles.

To live with this legacy - and to make the most of the powers conferred on Russia's autonomous republics by the Soviets, which they kept when the Soviet Union collapsed - the region needs strong, independent leaders. Instead it has communist relics, and ruling clans that monopolise local industry. As in the rest of Russia, business and politics are corrosively intertwined, and corruption is rampant.

The tribulations of the owner of a small taxi business in Vladikavkaz are instructive. He no longer needs to pay protection money to criminal gangs, but instead faces regular extortion by local organised-crime police. He covertly tapes the conversation when they visit; but the only real defence, he says, is powerful friends. You must be careful too, he says, not to be too successful. He himself would rather sell up than pay up, but “a lot of other people are frightened like a rabbit in front of a snake.”

Alexander Bazoev, boss of a big Vladikavkaz construction firm, says that, because “nobody knows what will happen tomorrow”, big companies are scared to invest; young people are moving away and the labour pool is drying up. All of which means that a region that ought to live comfortably on transit trade and tourism is instead Russia's poorest. Mr Zyazikov, the president of Ingushetia, claims to have created some jobs. But unemployment in Ingushetia, as in Chechnya, is catastrophically high - perhaps 80%. In North Ossetia, where vodka production, much of it in the shadows, is the main trade, the situation is scarcely better. Kabardino-Balkaria is in the same state.

Local rulers with too much power of the wrong kind and too little of the right kind make for brittle government, unable to cope with shocks. Such as Beslan.

Five months after the siege, the school has been neither demolished nor preserved. Snow falls through the rafters to smother the scattered paraphernalia of lessons, and the toys and bottles of water (because the hostages were denied it) left by relatives of the murdered children.

The graffiti maps out the vectors of anger in the town. “We will ask our rulers first, and then the Ingush,” reads one scrawl. The renewed strife between Ossetians and Ingush, which, because there were some Ingush among the hostage-takers, was widely expected to ignite after the formal 40-day mourning period, failed to materialise. Opinion divides over whether it may yet. The Ingush living in North Ossetia, who paint the gates of their houses green, are easy to find.

But fury with the government has remained. The bereaved blame the authorities for failing to negotiate; for the botched storming; and for the pace of the parliamentary inquiry into the tragedy. Vladimir Khodov, a local administrative chief whose ten-year-old grandson was shot, says people are convinced that there were more terrorists than the authorities acknowledge, and that weapons were hidden in the school in advance. Parents say the federal compensation for a lost child - 100,000 roubles - is insultingly low.

Some are angry with Mr Putin personally; others exonerate “Vladimir Vladimirovich”. But almost everybody wants Alexander Dzasokhov, the president of North Ossetia, to resign. They are still furious with the falsehoods Mr Dzasokhov's officials circulated during the crisis. Lev Dzugaev, the spokesman who disseminated implausibly low hostage figures (and now the republic's minister of culture), says the administration wanted to prevent a wider conflagration.

For many, the biggest scandal is that nothing appears to have changed to prevent another attack. A foreigner can still cross the North Ossetia-Ingushetia border without showing his documents. If the worst happens again, the response will be less patient.

What is to be done?

Like a sick child in a family, says Mr Bazoev, the Vladikavkaz businessman, the north Caucasus needs special attention. After Beslan, it is finally getting a little. Mr Putin dispatched Dmitry Kozak, one of his most trusted aides (and tipped to be prime minister if the current one is sacked), to be his representative in the region, with a special brief to foster economic development. Mr Kozak has talked candidly about the grip of clannishness and corruption. But he is spending much of his time quelling local revolts.

The state of the north Caucasus almost makes another post-Beslan reform - Mr Putin's assumption of the right to appoint regional governors - look like a good idea. Nostalgia for Soviet stability is more prevalent than longing for democracy. In Beslan, Mr Khodov talks wistfully about weekends spent driving through Chechnya and Dagestan to eat caviar by the Caspian. Unfortunately, the Kremlin tends to pick leaders for loyalty rather than competence. Ruslan Aushev, a respected Ingush president who negotiated with the Beslan terrorists, was eased out in 2001. The first regional test may come in Kabardino-Balkaria, whose president, Valery Kokov, is ill. In Vladikavkaz, Alikhan Khugayev, editor of an opposition newspaper, says that if Mr Putin appoints a stooge in North Ossetia, “North Ossetia will explode.”

What sort of explosion? Active secessionist sentiment is weak. As Alexei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Centre puts it, “Nobody is ready to pay the Chechen price for independence.” Local elites know going it alone is impractical. Since (as elsewhere in Russia) poor government and tax evasion go hand in hand, local administrations are cripplingly dependent on subsidies from Moscow.

Likewise, the danger of violent Islamic radicalism is real, but limited. In Ingushetia and North Ossetia, people whisper about unknown bearded men turning up at mosques. Mass unemployment helps to make militancy seem like a good career option. But while the threat may be growing, only a small minority dream of a north Caucasian caliphate. Many of the region's problems have nothing to do with either religion or ethnicity.

The big risk is simply that more and more of the north Caucasus may slip into lawlessness and drift out of Moscow's orbit. After his meddling in Ukraine, pundits talked of Mr Putin's plans to reconstitute the Russian empire. But, in a sense, Russia is already its own empire. The possibility that it may one day crumble as the Soviet Union did is Mr Putin's central fear. The neglect of the north Caucasus may eventually lead to that fear's realisation.

The creeping destabilisation of the north Caucasus, and what it means for the future of Russia.

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