In Ingushetia, police disrupted a clean-up day at ancestral towers on lands transferred to Chechnya. Two activists were beaten, detained and arrested

Ingush activists organized a cleanup day at the request of representatives of teips whose clan towers were in the territories transferred to Chechnya . As the head of the local Yabloko, Ruslan Mutsolgov, told Meduza, several days ago armed men did not allow people from these teips to enter, after which they appealed to the presidium of the World Congress of the Ingush People. The body scheduled the cleanup day for the morning of November 17; the meeting was announced at eight in the morning near the Memorial of Memory and Glory in Nazran. “A completely peaceful action. We bought garbage bags and gloves,” journalist Izabella Yevloyeva told Meduza.

The police were waiting for the participants at the gathering point. According to Yevloyeva, there was a “huge number of law enforcement officers, cars, paddy wagons, buses” at the memorial; the police were “aggressive” and forbade the participants, who numbered about 30 at the time, from parking in the area of ​​the memorial. Yevloyeva filmed a video in which the police did not allow her to approach the memorial, explaining this by the “counter-terrorist operation regime,” and also asked about her position on the Chechen-Ingushetia border agreement.

Two people were beaten and detained. According to Yevloyeva, one of them, Magomed Mutsolgov, drove away from the memorial at the request of the Interior Ministry officers, after which he got out of the car and was “pushed” and beaten. When blogger Ruslan Yandiev started filming the events on his phone, he was also beaten; later, they were both taken away. Izabella Yevloyeva was broadcasting on Facebook at the time and noticed the scuffle; she managed to film the detention and beating of the activists up close. In the end, her phone was taken away, despite her claims that she was a journalist.

The court arrested Mutsolgov and Yandiev for five days for disobeying the police. Lawyer Kazbulat Algiev told MBKh Media that they are going to open a criminal case against Mutsolgov for using violence against a government official, allegedly for tearing a police officer's jacket. There has been no word yet on whether the case has been opened.

Several activists managed to reach the border with Chechnya; two of them were also detained. The Ingushetia 2018 Telegram channel published their video address to the Russian president, filmed, as follows from the words of one of the protest leaders, the chairman of the Opora Ingushetia movement, Barakh Chemurziev, at the “new border of Ingushetia and Chechnya.” The activists asked Vladimir Putin to take personal control of the process of considering the border issue in the Constitutional Court and “not allow” the adoption of an “illegal agreement.”

Later, Barakh Chemurziev and Akhmed Pogorov (former head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ingushetia, now co-chairman of the World Congress of the Ingush People) were detained. According to Izabella Yevloyeva, they were taken to Magas to the Center "E"; they were later released without protocols being drawn up .

The remaining activists, as Yevloyeva reported, nevertheless set off from the memorial in Nazran towards the place where the clean-up day was taking place, but ultimately decided to cancel the action in order to avoid provocations and for security reasons.

The head of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov , promised that residents of Ingushetia would be able to freely visit the ancestral towers after the border with Chechnya was drawn. “We agreed that there would be no checkpoints between us, all roads would be open, repaired and paved. The most important thing is that we managed to avoid conflicts, possible bloodshed and blood grudges,” he said in September. On November 12, Islam Dzangiev, a resident of Ingushetia, reported that Chechen security forces stopped a group of Ingush on the road to the tower complex in Egi-Chozh on the bridge over the Fortanga River (the new border partially runs along it) and said that they had “orders not to let anyone in.”

Victor Davydov, Sasha Sulim