Translated material
What they fought for
The Chechen leadership wrote a plan for the economic independence of the republic
Last Sunday, the Chechen Akhmat Kadyrov Foundation began restoring the village of Bamut in the Achkhoy-Martan region of Chechnya. Bamut was almost completely destroyed during two wars, and its inhabitants live mainly in tents, in dilapidated houses, in houses in neighboring villages, and even in Ingushetia. A few years ago, the local population was joined by refugees moved here from tent camps in the neighboring republic when Russian migration authorities decided that it was better to eliminate these unsightly signs of war. The destroyed Bamut, which once occupied the main place in the front-line reports of the first Chechen campaign, is located away from the roads, is not an eyesore and could live in tents for at least an eternity. But on Sunday, construction equipment was brought here, and workers began restoring the first ten houses.It is characteristic that the work was started by the Kadyrov Foundation, that is, it is actually paid not from the federal budget, but from the charitable “pocket” of the Prime Minister of the Republic Ramzan Kadyrov. The foundation has already brought communications to Bamut and is now taking on the housing stock. And this, apparently, is not the only facility in Chechnya where work is not related to funds allocated from the federal budget.
According to some Chechen experts, this can only be considered a political advertisement for Ramzan Kadyrov, who expects to become the full owner of the republic after reaching his 30th birthday, displacing Alu Alkhanov from the presidency. In this case, the residents of Bamut, apparently, can only hope that before the prime minister’s anniversary, builders will have time to repair more houses. But there is reason to believe that the so-called Kadyrov team, and the entire new Chechen elite belongs to it in one way or another, has set a course for economic independence.
Last week, the Chechen parliament approved and submitted to the State Duma, as a legislative initiative, the bill “On special conditions for entrepreneurial activity on the territory of the Chechen Republic.” Several Caucasian republics have already presented various investment programs in recent months, but most of them provided only lists of projects for hypothetical investors. The meaning of the Chechen project is that Chechnya wants to earn money itself to restore its destroyed economy, regulate investments and develop private business. It is private business that, according to legislators, should become the main source of republican income.
To achieve this, Chechen legislators propose to exempt targeted investment projects in Chechnya from taxation for 14 years (until 2020): in the first seven years the benefit will be 100% and will be reduced to 50% in the second seven-year period. Chechnya wants to be temporarily freed from customs duties, provide benefits to banks financing investment projects, and allow the maximum free entry of foreign specialists and workers. The government of the republic will maintain the register of investment projects independently. It would also like to be able to lease its own, and sometimes federal, facilities for long-term lease to private companies, as well as license most types of licensed activities.
Some State Duma deputies, even before the official receipt of the draft, commented on it very warily. In their opinion, the implementation of the project could mean the actual separation of the Chechen economy from the rest of Russia, and from here it is not far to another attempt at political separatism. Some of the provisions of the bill actually contain the republic's claims to the status of a subject of international relations: the federal government, for example, will have to coordinate with the government of Chechnya any economic agreements that in any way affect the republic.
Critics of the project, which most likely will not receive approval in the chamber, believe that there are no grounds for granting Chechnya an exclusive economic regime compared to other regions. They recall the deplorable experience of the economically favored zone in Ingushetia, which for several years became a money laundering platform for enterprises throughout the country, and the experience of Chechnya itself, which has already passed the stage of virtually complete, including economic independence from Russia.
In Chechnya, they categorically disagree with this: the Chechen parliament, and before that the administration of the republic, constantly insists on the need for an official legal and political assessment of the Chechen events of recent years. In other words, the Chechens are asking to honestly call the war a war and to treat reconstruction exactly as post-war. In addition, the “independent economy” of Dudayev’s Chechnya was tightly connected with the emerging economic system of Russia in the 90s. The new draft does not contain a word about independence, and its quality compares favorably with the legislative acts of Ichkeria.
In addition to radical proposals regarding the liberalization of the economic regime, the draft contains the traditional requirement to transfer to Chechnya the right to dispose of subsoil and the resources extracted from them, that is, simply put, oil and gas. This idea was key to the draft agreement on the division of powers between Chechnya and the federal center, which was proposed to Moscow by Akhmat Kadyrov. Moscow, which is quite happy with Rosneft, a company close to the Kremlin, maintaining control over oil production in Chechnya, stubbornly refuses to sign the project. A number of experts believe that now Grozny has simply decided to remind of this desire, giving it a new design, which is the unexpectedly liberal bill.
According to another version, the semantic core of the bill is shifted precisely towards the creation of a special economic zone - this requirement also appeared in the draft agreement. The difference is that the agreement was a “private” affair between Grozny and Moscow, while the current proposal has been given the public status of a legislative initiative. There is still a possibility that the Duma will accept the document for consideration - after all, it, in fact, contains a bonus in the form of removing the burden of Chechen reconstruction from the federal budget. At the same time, it is obvious that even a discussion of the Chechen project can arouse interest in other regions and theoretically become the beginning of a major revision of the relationship between the center and the subjects.