Translated material
King of the Hill
The President of Chechnya may be first among equals in the North Caucasus
Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov admitted that there are legitimate authorities in Ingushetia and they can count on the help of the people of Chechnya and its president in solving any problems. “We are one people, in fact brothers,” the Chechen leader emphasized.An explanation was needed to dispel the suspicions that some observers had in connection with the unprecedented activity of the Chechen president immediately after the attempt on the life of his Ingush colleague Yunus-Bek Yevkurov on June 22 of this year. Immediately after this, Ramzan Kadyrov, together with the federal security ministers, was received in the Kremlin, as if personifying North Caucasian power. President Dmitry Medvedev praised Chechnya's anti-terrorist experience. This has led observers to speculate that Mr. Kadyrov may prove to be the main military and perhaps political manager in Ingushetia during the period of Mr. Yevkurov's restoration.
Ramzan Kadyrov himself comments so confidently on the situation in Ingushetia and Dagestan, as if he had really already turned into some kind of supra-regional authority - he had become something like an authorized representative of the federal government in the east of the North Caucasus. “The peoples of Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan do not support terrorists, do not provide them with shelter, and the militants do not have any social base. There is a strong will of the federal center to ensure order, to completely destroy terrorists, and this goal will be achieved,” says Mr. Kadyrov. And it denotes its own powers: “We have clear instructions from the country’s leadership to wage an irreconcilable fight against illegal armed groups. Special operations will be tough, permanent and offensive in nature.”
Mr. Kadyrov’s position today is indeed much more reliable than the positions of the leadership of the two neighboring regions. The President of Ingushetia is in the hospital with serious injuries. Constitutional acting President of Ingushetia, its Prime Minister Rashid Gaisanov is a member of Yunus-Bek Yevkurov’s team, but he is a second-rank politician. In Dagestan, where Interior Minister Adilgirey Magomettagirov was shot dead a few weeks ago, President Mukhu Aliyev is awaiting the imminent expiration of his presidential term and it is not yet known whether this term will be extended. Meanwhile, the head of state’s praise for Ramzan Kadyrov, heard on the day of the assassination attempt on Mr. Yevkurov, only strengthened his confidence in his own abilities. Indeed, throughout the entire period of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency, it remained unclear whether Ramzan Kadyrov would be able to establish the same specific relationship with the new owner of the Kremlin that he had and still has with Vladimir Putin. Now that the North Caucasus appointee of the head of state, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, is effectively out of action, Dmitry Medvedev has no choice but to encourage Mr. Kadyrov.
There has not yet been a case in Russian history where a regional leader received powers that went beyond the boundaries of his own region. Moreover, powers of a force nature, that is, those that in a normal situation are the exclusive prerogative of federal executive structures. But the Chechen president’s self-confident comments could not help but breathe life into the already forgotten theory of regional consolidation.
The President of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, appointed last fall to replace the extremely unpopular Murat Zyazikov, understood that the strategic task of restoring the trust of the majority of the population to the authorities could only be achieved by a leader who, like Ramzan Kadyrov, would be able to turn the sympathy of, if not the majority, then a significant one in his direction. part of the republic's inhabitants. Such a reversal is necessary for the reason that, turning away from the regional authorities, peaceful Ingush increasingly began to look towards the forest. There was only one way to carry out a turnaround - by showing that the president of the republic was the master of the situation, capable of fighting the militants and protecting civilians from violence from the federals.
Strictly speaking, this is Kadyrov’s scenario. After the man who was supposed to carefully transfer its most constructive components to the soil of Ingushetia turned out to be the victim of an assassination attempt, there could be an assumption that Ramzan Kadyrov himself could best cope with the task. Moreover, until 1991-1992, Chechnya and Ingushetia were a single state entity within Russia - the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. And today's Chechnya and Ingushetia have several border territorial disputes, which theoretically should be resolved by the end of the year, because this is the period determined by the federal legislation on municipal reform.
But the possibility of one form or another of spreading the political experience of Kadyrov’s Chechnya to Ingushetia and Dagestan does not please either the majority of the federal security forces, who internally have not come to terms with the actual transfer of Chechnya, which they twice conquered, into the hands of the Chechens themselves, or the residents of these regions. Dagestan, where young politicians of the Kadyrov type, who also maintain friendly relations with the Chechen president, may likely compete with the current president, is a much more complex and multifaceted mechanism than mono-national Chechnya. If Kadyrov's combination of populism and violence is used, for example, by the Avar leader in Dagestan, this will not stabilize the republic, but, on the contrary, will explode it.
The same can be said about the possibility of using Chechen security forces outside Chechnya. Even in fraternal Ingushetia, Kadyrov’s security forces are strangers, and, as the first President of Ingushetia Ruslan Aushev rightly noted the other day, they should work there only if requested by the Ingush leadership and under the Ingush leadership, but not independently.
The project of restoring a united Checheno-Ingushetia definitely contains more dangers than opportunities for stabilization. Within the framework of a hypothetical united republic, the Ingush will lose sovereignty that is important to their identity, return to the position of a secondary outskirts relative to Chechnya proper, and will lose even the formal basis for raising the issue of solving the problem of the Prigorodny region of North Ossetia, which for the Ingush is approximately the same as Kosovo for the Serbs. After the rehabilitation of the Chechens and Ingush in 1957, the district remained in Ossetia in exchange for three districts of Stavropol, which were transferred to Checheno-Ingushetia as compensation, but in 1992 went exclusively to Chechnya. The issue of the Prigorodny region is key to Ingush identity, and an attempt to close it forever by recreating a two-part Vainakh republic will immediately lead to violent protest.
These Ingush fears were immediately felt by the Ingush opposition, which was formed in the struggle against Murat Zyazikov and was only partially involved by President Yevkurov in government structures. Opposition leader Magomed Khazbiev promised to convene an emergency congress of the Ingush people, which will determine who should govern the republic during the illness of Yunus-Bek Evkurov. The oppositionists emphasized that they would not allow power to fall into the hands of functionaries from North Ossetia or Chechnya. The Ingushetia prosecutor's office immediately issued a warning to Mr. Khazbiev, reminding him that according to the constitution, only the current president can convene a congress of the people. The situation, therefore, is beginning to resemble the crisis from which President Yevkurov managed with such difficulty to avert the republic during the nine months of his rule.
However, acting President Rashid Gaisanov assured that he was not going to transfer the constitutional powers entrusted to him to anyone. Ramzan Kadyrov himself, whose fraternal impulses are especially wary in Ingushetia, admitted that there are legitimate authorities in the neighboring republic. And the speaker of the Chechen parliament, Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, tried to cool emotions by announcing that no one was going to recreate Checheno-Ingushetia.