Thu, 02 July 11:14 2009

Scant peace for Ingushetia

WHEN winter ends and summer arrives so, too, does trouble in former Soviet Union republics, which remain – often fretfully - within Russia’s fold. One such is Ingushetia, where on June 22 a terrorist blast in Nazran, the capital, badly injured its 45-year-old president Yunos-Bev Yevkurov, who was taken to hospital in a critical condition although doctors afterwards confirmed that he was conscious and stable.

A bodyguard was killed and three others, one of them Yevkurov’s brother, were injured when a suicide bomber drove a car containing explosives into the president’s vehicle shortly after 8am local time. Described by the Russian president Dmitri Medvedev as an act of terror, this was Ingushetia’s third high-profile crime in less than two weeks.

On June 10, gunmen in the capital Nazran, opened fire on the vehicle of the Supreme Court deputy chairwoman, Aza Gazgireyeva, killing her as she took her children to school. The assassination was interpreted as an attempt to pressure the court over its investigations into the June 2004 raid on Nazran, when rebels commanded by the late Chechen militant Shamil Basayev occupied official buildings and killed 56 army, police, and intelligence officers.

Three days later, on June 13, former Deputy Prime Minister Bashir Aushev was shot dead outside his home although this was by no means the first attempt on his life. A former police colonel who served in the governments of former presidents Fuslan Aushev and Murat Zyazikov, he was blamed for pushing the country to the brink of civil war with his heavy-handed treatment of Islamist dissidents, many of them refugees from neighbouring Chechnya.

Aushev possessed inside knowledge of Zyazikov’s collaborators as well as the death squads operating in Ingushetia, and his killing could have been the work of these groups or the families of their victims. Many, however, suspect that the former prime minister was killed by Islamist activists but have said little for security reasons and to avoid undue pressure from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Following the failed attack on Yunos-Bev Yevkurov this will inevitably increase.

The two assassinations earlier this month were already an embarrassment because they coincided with Yevkurov’s briefing to Moscow praising the outcome of a joint counter-insurgency operation between Ingushetia, the FSB and Chechnya. The apparently successful operation took place in the Sunzha and Achkhoi-Martan areas on the common border between both countries and the Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov only recently boasted that the rebels, principally Islamist activists, had been dealt with. Following the events of June 22, both he and Yunos-Bev Yevkurov must plainly think again.

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