Translated material
Resignation before mourning
On the eve of the anniversary of Beslan, the Prime Minister of North Ossetia is fired
As expected by the Vremya Novostey newspaper (see No. 120 of July 11) , Prime Minister of North Ossetia Alexander Merkulov left his post yesterday. Along with him, by order of the head of the republic, Taimuraz Mamsurov, the entire cabinet of ministers resigned. Members of the government will remain in their previous positions until parliament approves a new cabinet. Former First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Khatsaev has been appointed acting prime minister, but some knowledgeable North Ossetian observers believe that Taimuraz Mamsurov will submit to parliament the candidacy of Nikolai Khlyntsov, deputy head of the republican customs, who worked in the republican administration under the first president Askharbek Galazov.Taimuraz Mamsurov's press secretary, Ksenia Gokkoeva, said that the head of North Ossetia thanked the retired ministers for their work. At the same time, Mr. Mamsurov noted that the government has failed to become “a truly collegial body expressing a single will and working for common goals with everyone personally responsible for achieving results.” “The complexity of the situation in which we find ourselves requires more organizational experience, decisiveness in action and demand from subordinates,” said the head of the republic.
North Ossetia indeed faces a number of very difficult problems. The most obvious of them are the threatening situation in the neighboring conflict zone between Georgia and the unrecognized South Ossetia and the return of Ingush refugees who left the Prigorodny district as a result of the Ossetian-Ingush conflict in the fall of 1992 and, at the request of the Russian President, must return to their homes by the end of 2006. th. If the development of the situation in the zone of the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict actually depends little on Vladikavkaz, then it plays a crucial role in solving the migration problem. There are, however, reasons to believe that the authorities of the two interested republics and the federal officials helping them may not meet the deadline allotted by Vladimir Putin.
A less obvious, but no less important problem for North Ossetia is the investigation being carried out by the investigative team of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation in connection with financial abuses identified in the republic. The work of investigators was most active at the end of 2005 and the beginning of this year. The formal reason for the inspections was problems with the financing of the local football club - Vladikavkaz Alania. In the spring, the prosecutor's office promised to transfer the first cases to court, but then the pace of the group's work slowed down somewhat. Nevertheless, the work continues, and some high-ranking officials, in particular the head of the administration of the head and government of the republic, Sergei Takayev, as well as Finance Minister Konstantin Urtaev, still remain under house arrest. The July resignation of Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov, who led the work of the investigative team, did not change the state of affairs.
Some Ossetian officials believe that the initiator of the prosecutor’s attack could have been Taimuraz Mamsurov himself, who tried to get rid of influential members of the team of his predecessor Alexander Dzasokhov, who retired early in the summer of 2005, but for one reason or another could not fire them of his own free will. The disagreement with Alexander Merkulov, due to which rumors about his imminent resignation appeared in mid-summer, in their opinion, could also be connected with the prosecutor's scandal. The resignation of the cabinet, by the way, also terminates the powers of the arrested officials, who until now formally remained in their positions.
Other experts admit that prosecutorial checks were launched precisely against the will of the head of the republic. Many in the republic believed that the investigation team would pay more attention to finding out the details of the Beslan tragedy of September 1-3, 2004, for which Mr. Kolesnikov, in fact, was sent to Ossetia after Vladimir Putin’s meeting with the victims on the anniversary of the tragedy last year . There is even a version that the troubles for the head of the presidential administration, Mr. Takoev, began precisely in connection with his increased attention to the Beslan investigation.
Beslan, because of which the former leader of North Ossetia, Alexander Dzasokhov, was forced to resign, continues to cast a shadow on both republican and Russian politics two years later. And the investigation into the circumstances of the death of the hostages, even after the end of the trial of the only detained militant, Nurpashi Kulaev, leaves more questions than answers. On Monday, a detailed report by a member of the parliamentary commission investigating the terrorist attack in Beslan, Yuri Savelyev, was published on the Internet; on 700 pages he outlined his dissenting opinion, radically different from the official version of the investigation. Mr. Savelyev, an expert in the field of combustion and explosions, believes that the main cause of the mass death of hostages could have been the actions of federal forces. In his opinion, the explosions in the hall were caused by shooting at the school from neighboring houses, the headquarters leadership was two and a half hours late with the order to extinguish the fire in the building, and about 300 hostages, after the fire started in the gym, were taken by militants to another wing of the school, where almost a third of the people died, again as a result of shooting from outside. The author of the report believes that the investigation into the circumstances of the tragedy is incomplete and should be continued.
Meanwhile, Taimuraz Mamsurov signed yesterday a plan for mourning events on the occasion of the anniversary of the tragedy. The head of the republic himself had two children among the hostages in a school seized by terrorists.