The Volatile Caucasus Keep on Burning
Senior Ingush Aide the Latest to Fall Victim to Continued Violence in the North Caucasus
Moscow Times reports . . .
Attackers shot and killed a senior specialist on ethnic relations in Ingushetia on Saturday after a week of violence authorities suspect resulted from tensions between Christian and Muslim communities.
Vakha Vedzizhev, a top adviser to the Interethnic and Public Relations Ministry of Ingushetia, was killed after unidentified attackers sprayed his car with automatic gunfire in the town of Karabulak, a spokesman with the Ingush Interior Ministry said.
Vedzizhev died from his wounds on the way to the hospital.
“According to the information we have, Vakha Vedzizhev received threats and his murder was likely related to his professional activities,” Ingush prosecutor Yury Turygin was quoted as saying by Interfax.
On June 16, the bodies of an ethnic Russian woman, Lyudmila Terekhina, and her 24-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son were found, apparently after they were shot in their sleep.
Two days later, a bomb exploded in a crowd of mourners at Terekhina’s funeral, wounding at least 10 people.
Meanwhile in Chechnya . . .
RIA Novosti reports . . .
Five policemen were wounded in a gun attack on their vehicle in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, a local police spokesman said Monday.
All the injured police officers were hospitalized, and an investigation is underway.
A Russian Defense Ministry officer was also wounded in the Shatoi district.
Later reports said two members of illegal armed formations, aged 24 and 32, were arrested in the Grozny district. The two are suspected of committing crimes in Chechnya and are currently being interrogated.
In addition, police in the Vedeno district in southeastern Chechnya found a large weapons cache belonging tomilitants.
As sporadic violence is mounting in Chechnya, security official’s are on high-alert in the run-up to Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov, marking his first 100 days in office through a high-profile publicity campaign.
RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service has more . . .
Cars are being searched at checkpoints around Grozny and other towns.
In northern Grozny, one driver was told the reason his car was being searched was that Chechen rebels had received a big sum of money from abroad, and were preparing an attack.
Based on various accounts by aid organizations and news reports, the 100-days celebration seems to signify not much more than window dressing on the part of Kadyrov and his Moscow-backed government. While there may be some progress in Chechnya, it appears to be marginal in the face of a renewed campaign of violence by militant insurgent groups.
ReliefWeb has more on this continued summer upsurge in violence in Chechnya. . .
People here say that in recent weeks, the insurgents have grown so bold that they have started coming into villages in large groups, encountering no resistance from the security forces.
On July 9, Russian commanders announced that all interior ministry units in Chechnya had been put on an increased state of alert.
One interior ministry official, speaking confidentially to IWPR, said that he was seriously concerned that the situation was deteriorating in the republic. He said separatist leader Doku Umarov had received a large sum of money from abroad a few weeks ago, and the militants had also acquired 400 police uniforms. As a result, groups of guerrillas disguised as police had been moving around at night, planting explosive devices on the roads, especially in the highlands of Chechnya.
“Under the pretext of checking documents, they stop vehicles and shoot security officials,” he said.
The upsurge in rebel activity has not just been confined to the mountainous south. On the morning of July 6, police officers in the Oktyabrskoe district of the Chechen capital Grozny surrounded a house in which a fighter was holed up and subjected it to intense gunfire.
A squad then stormed the house, and in the ensuing firefight, one police officer was killed, one was wounded, and the militant blew himself up with a grenade.
Outside Chechnya, the picture is also worrying. In neighbouring Ingushetia, several dozen guerrillas attacked an army base used by a Russian regiment on the night of July 6. They directed gunfire at it for 20 minutes, withdrew and vanished. No information was available on any casualties.
The headquarters of the border guards in Ingushetia’s main city, Nazran, was also attacked several times in late June and early July.
This summer escalation of violence suggests a coordinated plan by the rebels to step up their activity, in the view of a local political analyst who asked not to be named. |Read more…
ReliefWeb contributor in Chechnya’s capital city Grozny, who writes under the pseudonym Umalt Dudayev, concludes in his report. . .
Whether or not the recent increase in fighting is merely a short-lived summer campaign, it does suggest that such claims are over-confident and that the rebels still possess the strength to keep the security forces in Chechnya – numbering some 20,000 men – on a state of alert.
All things considered, the public relations game of a cheerier picture in Chechnya and the whole of the Caucasus region remains locked in reality by the continued violence on the part of separatists and radical extremist groups who continue to wage attacks against local and regional authorities.
Mark Mackinnon sums it up this way . . .
I keep hearing that the war in Chechnya is now over, and reading nice features in places like the New York Times and Newsweek about how pleasant it is to visit Grozny these days. Then you scan the news wires and get a very different image. . . . As someone who visited Chechnya more than once, I’ve always been extremely skeptical that Vladimir Putin’s money and Ramzan Kadyrov’s thuggishness could bring anything more than a facade of stability to a republic that is no more comfortable under Russian rule now than it was in the 19th Century.
BTW, The Great La Russophobe also touched on this topic on Friday. Kudos!
