Translated material
Invisible Parliament
"Ingush people" held a congress at a safe house
The Ingush oppositionists decided to postpone the protest rally for several weeks, which, as the Vremya Novostei newspaper wrote, was scheduled for March 12. This decision was made by a supposedly extraordinary congress of the Ingush people, which, as its organizers say, took place on the night of March 9 in the second largest city of Ingushetia - Karabulak. Since the congress was held under conditions of strict secrecy and was not directly covered by any journalists, it is difficult to say with certainty whether it even took place at all. Nevertheless, the initiators of the congress claim that they were able to gather more than 100, and according to some estimates, up to 500 “delegates.”The initiative to hold the congress came from the so-called “alternative parliament” of Ingushetia, which calls itself “Mekhk-Khel” - roughly translated, “council of the country.” The fact is that simultaneously with the Russian presidential elections on March 2, 2008, Ingushetia held elections for the republican legislative assembly. Naturally, 20 of the 27 seats in the new convocation of parliament were won by United Russia, three by the LDPR, and two each by the communists and A Just Russia. The oppositionists, grouped in Ingushetia not around this or that public leader, but strangely around the Internet resource “Ingushetia.ru,” announced a month before the elections that they knew the composition of the future parliament , agreed upon and approved by the President of the Republic, Murat Zyazikov.
The main complaint of the oppositionists was that representatives of several large Ingush teips were not allowed to participate in the fight for seats in parliament. These teips held a series of meetings in villages, at each of which alternative candidates were nominated. But since the regional election commission had neither the time nor the desire to register them, these teip nominees created an alternative parliament, which met in the very first days after the official elections.
The alternative elected officials planned a congress of the Ingush people for March 8-9, and another protest rally for the 12th. Such rallies were already held in Ingushetia in November 2007 and January 2008, their main slogans were calls for the resignation of the unpopular President of Ingushetia Murat Zyazikov and an end to “indiscriminate violence” on the part of security forces, which are intensively fighting the sabotage and terrorist underground. The number of participants in both cases, even according to the most radical estimates, did not exceed one and a half thousand people - but the authorities reacted quite harshly. Both times the rallies were dispersed, and before the January one in Nazran a counter-terrorist operation regime was even temporarily introduced - under the pretext of receiving operational information that militants were preparing an explosion in a crowded place. Despite this, the second rally was more crowded than the first, and it is quite possible that the third rally would have continued this trend, but at the last moment they decided to postpone it due to the position of the Ingush prosecutor's office, which claims that it did not receive notification from the activists about the impending action. And if the rally is not authorized, the police will have every right to disperse it.
The police, in fact, tried to prevent the congress - some of the organizers were even brought to administrative responsibility the day before for attempting to hold an unauthorized rally. On the streets of Nazran on International Women's Day, armored personnel carriers appeared, and the building of the shopping center chosen to host the event was closed by the sanitary and epidemiological station due to suspicions that harmful bacilli of several infectious diseases were found in it. Therefore, the participants had to gather underground.
Several resolutions and documents emerged from the underground in fits and starts, for example, official congratulations to Dmitry Medvedev on his election to the post of President of Russia. The authors of the congratulations hope that once Mr. Medvedev takes office in May 2008, Ingushetia will “stop kidnappings, illegal arrests, unauthorized searches and other illegal actions... and put an end to corruption among officials around Murat Zyazikova".
This emphatically loyal formulation only strengthens the long-standing assumption that behind the opposition movement in Ingushetia there is, apparently, a group of Ingush politicians and businessmen interested in the departure of Mr. Zyazikov and the redistribution of power in the smallest republic of the North Caucasus in their favor .
At the same time, the initiators of the protests themselves stubbornly remain in the shadows, and it is very difficult to assess the real scale of this protest. Let us remind you that after the State Duma elections on December 2, 2007, the opposition challenged the official data on the turnout at polling stations of more than 98 percent of voters. Independent observers allegedly collected tens of thousands of statements from people who did not go to vote on December 2, but were marked in the lists as having received a ballot. However, these statements were not submitted to the court or even shown to journalists. Which, of course, could not help but cast doubt on the fundamental existence of these statements.
“Mekhk-Khel” itself with its congress may turn out to be exactly the same “conditional”. Even some opponents of Murat Zyazikov admit that Mekhk-Khel has no real weight in the republic, that the official parliament is ultimately not that bad and includes quite respectable people. And that “Mekhk-Khel” is needed by the oppositionists solely in order to speak to the outside world with a voice more impressive than the only resource on the Internet.
And on Monday, unknown persons once again fired at the so-called remote post of the 503rd motorized rifle regiment of the Russian Ministry of Defense, located in the village of Troitskaya (Ingushetia), in Ingushetia. The total number of attacks on soldiers and police officers in this republic continues to grow, and the authorities, represented by Murat Zyazikov, are objectively doing a worse job of coping with the situation. And it is still unknown whether the Kremlin’s unwritten rule of not accepting gubernatorial resignations under public pressure will be a saving grace for him...
Makhmud Sakalov, who headed the United Russia list in the elections of deputies to the People's Assembly of the fourth convocation of Ingushetia, was unanimously re-elected chairman of the parliament at its first meeting. President of Ingushetia Murat Zyazikov, who was present at the meeting, expressed hope that the deputies will make decisions that meet the needs of today. “Parliamentarians need to work in a mode of constant open exchange of views with the population,” Mr. Zyazikov emphasized.