Russia could take revenge with assault on Caucasus
Mon, Nov 30, 2009
OPINION: Suspicion over Friday’s train bomb is focused on militants from the strategic region, writes
DANIEL McLAUGHLIN
THE SHOCK-WAVES from Friday
night’s bomb attack on the Moscow-St Petersburg express will be felt
far beyond Russia’s two main cities.
Twenty-five people were
killed, almost 100 injured, and many more are still missing, feared
dead, after the Nevsky Express was hurled from the rails in remote
woodland as it sped north from Moscow to Russia’s old imperial capital.
Investigators
have found traces of explosives at the site, and another smaller device
blew up on Saturday while rescue teams were still working on the
wreckage of the train, which is the most luxurious of its type in
Russia and regularly carries politicians and business executives.
No
group has claimed responsibility for the atrocity, but suspicion is
already focused on militants from the North Caucasus region, whose
attacks on Russian targets are becoming more frequent and more
audacious.
In the first nine months of this year, more than 420
people were killed in rebel attacks in the neighbouring republics of
Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, four times the number killed in the
same period last year.
This year’s victims include senior police
and army officers, local politicians and judges, and the militants came
close to killing the Kremlin-appointed president of Ingushetia,
Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, in a car bomb attack in June.
Chechnya, the
main Caucasus battleground of the last decade, is arguably now calmer
than Ingushetia and Dagestan, but security service personnel and rebels
are now dying daily across the region in clashes that make a mockery of
previous Kremlin claims to have full control over the republics.
After
prematurely declaring anti-terrorist operations over this spring,
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev admitted in this month’s
state-of-the-nation address that the situation in the Caucasus was the
“most serious domestic political problem for our country”. “The level
of corruption, violence, and clan dominance in North Caucasus republics
is simply unprecedented,” he said.
The candour of Medvedev’s
comments fuelled talk of an impending crackdown in the Caucasus, as did
a sudden hardening of the mild-mannered lawyer’s rhetoric. He has
called the rebels “terrorist scum” who must be eliminated “without
emotion or hesitation”, words that called to mind the order of his
predecessor, Vladimir Putin, that Chechnya’s militants be killed
wherever they are hiding, and even “whacked in the outhouse”.
Putin,
now Russia’s prime minister, made that demand 10 years ago, shortly
after a series of devastating apartment bombings in Moscow and southern
Russia killed more than 200 people in their homes.
The attacks
spread fear throughout Russia and brought the insurgency on its
southern, mountainous fringe into the “heartland” of the country,
convincing people that Chechnya’s separatists had to be crushed and
that the tough-talking Putin was the man to do it.
The myriad
unanswered questions about the apartment bombings prompted allegations
they were carried out by Russia’s security services to provide a
pretext for a new Chechen war, which Putin was in the process of
launching when the bombs exploded. Several people who made such claims,
or investigated the attacks, have been jailed or have died in
mysterious circumstances, including agent-turned-whistleblower
Alexander Litvinenko.
While there is no suggestion of state
involvement in Friday’s Nevsky Express explosion, it could have a
similar impact to the apartment bombings of a decade ago.
Russia’s
most prestigious train was targeted because it carried some 700
passengers between the nation’s biggest and most important cities, its
political, economic and financial powerhouses, the home of its elite.
Putin and Medvedev both hail from St Petersburg, and they have brought
many allies from their home town to rule with them in Moscow.
The
Nevsky Express was a soft target that carried considerable symbolic
weight for Russians, and its destruction will feed political and public
calls for severe measures against those responsible.
Ultranationalist
groups have been mentioned as possible suspects, but they have never
launched an attack on this scale. If, as expected, Caucasian rebels are
ultimately blamed, then we may soon see Russian forces surging back
into the region to crush them.
Earlier this month exiled Chechen
rebel leader Akhmed Zakayev said Moscow was preparing to deploy an
“enormous” number of troops to the North Caucasus, to establish an iron
grip on the region before the nearby resort of Sochi hosts the 2014
Winter Olympics.
“They want to solve the Caucasus problem before
the Olympics and tell the world they have eliminated terrorism,” he
said. “This will also put the North Caucasus in their hands.”
Renewed
large-scale military operations in the region would be a disaster for
its people, thousands of whom have died and disappeared in fighting
between Islamic militants, clans, organised crime groups, separatist
rebels, Russian security forces and local Kremlin-backed leaders whose
militias are infamous for their brutality and corruption.
The
Kremlin is determined to remain the dominant player in the Caucasus,
which is a vital route for exports of oil and gas from the Caspian Sea
and Central Asia.
Russia strengthened its hand considerably last
year by crushing Georgia in a six-day war and by recognising the
independence of two breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Georgians
now fear Moscow will use trouble in the North Caucasus as a pretext to
launch a new offensive, and senior Russian security officials recently
accused Georgia of harbouring rebels in its remote Pankisi Gorge
region, which borders Chechnya and Dagestan.
Another war between
Russia and Georgia would further damage the latter’s reputation as the
West’s most stable and solid partner in the Caucasus, and undermine its
place at the centre of US and European Union efforts to create an
energy pipeline network that bypasses Russia. For Russians facing a
renewed terror threat, the people of the Caucasus who fear a backlash,
and western powers with major strategic interests in the region, the
fate of the Nevsky Express may be a grim portent of even worse to come.
© 2009 The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1130/1224259708072.html