From: MSN Nicknamepsychoteddybear24 (Original Message) Sent: 9/28/2007 7:17 AM
Chechnya Weekly - Volume VIII, Issue 37
September 27, 2007
IN THIS ISSUE:
* Ingushetia: More Attacks on Servicemen, Kidnappings by Security Forces
* Chechen Officials Threaten Kasparov
* Chechen Culture Ministry Will Regulate the Republic’s Entertainers
* Former Achkhoi-Martan Chief Charged with Complicity in Politkovskaya Murder
* Kremlin Adopts New Counter-Insurgency Methods in Ingushetia
By Andrei Smirnov
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Ingushetia: More Attacks on Servicemen, Kidnappings by Security Forces
Unidentified gunmen fired on an armored personnel carrier ferrying Interior Ministry Internal Troops between the settlements of Galashki and Alkhasti in Ingushetia’s Sunzha district on September 26. An Ingush law-enforcement source told Kavkazky Uzel that attackers apparently fired from automatic weapons and grenade launchers. “As a result of the attack several servicemen were wounded,” the source told the website. “The criminals escaped from the scene of the incident.” Kavkazky Uzel reported that according to other sources, two or three servicemen were wounded in the attack. On September 27, two militants were reportedly killed and one captured during a special operation in the village of Sagopshi in the republic’s Malgobeksky district. The Rosbalt news agency, citing the press service of Ingushetia’s Interior Ministry, identified one the two militants killed as Sait-Magomed Galaev, aka Abdul-Malik, who was the emir of the militants in the Malgobeksky district. According to the RBK news agency, all three militants – the two who were killed plus the one who was captured - were brothers. Two policemen were wounded in the shootout. On September 20, two servicemen were killed and two wounded when their automobile came under fire in Nazran, Interfax reported. Earlier that day, unidentified gunmen opened fire on a car carrying Interior Ministry troops on the Kavkaz federal highway near the village of Yandare. Two servicemen were wounded in that attack.
The independent Ingushetiya.ru website claimed on September 24 that Ingushetian Interior Minister Musa Medov had given verbal orders to police not to record incidents of gun attacks, explosions and other “terrorist acts.” By way of example, the website said that a pursuit and shootout which took place on the Kavkaz federal highway in the Nazran district on September 22 was never officially recorded. It also reported that “all the people of Nazran were awakened on the evening of September 23 by an explosion” caused either by a bomb or firing from a grenade launcher, yet the incident was not recorded by Ingushetia’s Interior Ministry. Ingushetiya.ru reported earlier this month that various rebel attacks had not been recorded by the republic’s Interior Ministry.
Kavkazky Uzel, citing Ingushetiya.ru, reported on September 25 that the previous day, security forces had seized two brothers, Musa and Adam Estoev, from their home in Barsuki, a village in Ingushetia’s Nazran municipal district that is the native village of Ingushetia’s president, Murat Zyazikov. The brothers were seized by ten armed men in masks who arrived at the Estoev family home in several armored vehicles and cars without license plates. Ingushetiya.ru reported that members of a federal Interior Ministry mobile unit and other power structures deployed to Ingushetia from Russian regions participated in the raid. Two local law-enforcement officers who also participated in the raid reportedly “expressed displeasure when the siloviki beat the Estoevs during their capture, clubbing the brothers with the butts of their automatic rifles.”
After several hours, relatives of the brothers managed to find out that they had been taken to the Nazran City Internal Affairs Department (GOVD), where they were thrown into the room for administrative detainees, known as the obezyannik, or monkey-house. “The brothers were individually taken to rooms where the siloviki covered their heads with plastic bags and taunted them, telling them to adhere to Islam and do the Namaz [Muslim prayer]. A request by the Estoevs to let them see a lawyer was rejected. No concrete accusations were made against them other than displeasure over their fulfillment of their religious obligations and some incomprehensible questions about one or another person whom they didn’t know.” The police then took the brothers to a magistrate, Batyr Toldiev, to get him to formally charge them with resisting arrest, but the magistrate decided only to fine them. Despite that, police continued to hold the brothers at the GOVD headquarters, with officers from other Russian regions stationed in Ingushetia “insulting them, taking them into rooms and subjecting them to humiliating procedures,” Kavkazky Uzel reported. “Again, polyethylene bags were placed over the guys’ heads, as a result of which they were suffocated and partially lost consciousness,” the website wrote, adding that local Nazran GOVD officers watched all of this without intervening.
The brothers were released around midnight on September 24 after relatives began to organize mass protests in Nazran and Magas and to send delegations to protest directly to President Zyazikov and Musa Medov, the republic’s Interior Minister. Kavkazky Uzel noted on September 25 that a third Estoev brother, Zurab, has been in the custody of the authorities for nearly two years on the basis of what relatives and friends considered to be “farfetched accusations.”
A protest in Nazran earlier this month over the detention of the Aushev brothers from the village of Surkhakhi escalated into a violent confrontation with police and other security forces, after which the brothers were released from custody (Chechnya Weekly, September 20). Following their release on September 20, Ingushetiya.ru quoted the two Aushev brothers as telling protesters in Nazran that after they were abducted while leaving the Chechen capital of Grozny two days earlier, they had been dumped in a basement filled with rats, whose floor was covered with dried blood. Their captors, who beat them and threatened to shoot them, spoke in Russian and occasionally used Ossetian words – something the brothers said they thought their captors did deliberately to make them think they had been taken to North Ossetia. The brothers said they thought they were kept in the basement either of the Ingushetian FSB headquarters or the North Ossetian FSB headquarters. They recalled that one of their captors said, “We will shoot Mutsolgov next” – referring to Magomed Mutsolgov, head of the Ingush human rights group Mashr. The Aushev brothers said that after being tortured for several hours, they were told that “it was their last night and they would be shot in the morning,” but instead were put in a car sometime later and dropped off outside a building. The brothers said they eventually wound up in Shatoi, Chechnya, where they were retrieved by relatives and taken back to Nazran the following morning.
Speaking to journalists in Moscow, Ingushetian President Murat Zyazikov called the Aushev brothers’ kidnapping “a murky story,” Agence France-Presse reported on September 20. Commenting on the protests in Nazran following the Aushev brothers’ abduction, Zyazikov said unnamed forces inside Russia were seeking to destabilize Ingushetia. “Qui bono? Primarily, the enemies of Russia, certain forces in Moscow and the small opposition,” Zyazikov said during a press conference at the offices of Interfax in the Russian capital. “They are pooling efforts and using certain techniques. They want Ingushetia to be unstable.” Noting that Ingushetia borders Georgia, he said that someone wants Ingushetia “to be unsettled.” Zyazikov refused to name who was doing this but added: “That would be done by law enforcement.” He once again insisted that the situation in Ingushetia is calm and does not need outside help to maintain order. Zyazikov also insisted that there is no “underground terrorist ring” in Ingushetia, Itar-Tass reported on September 20.
Dmitry Kozak, the former presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District who was elevated to the post of federal Regional Development Minister in this past week’s ministerial shakeup in Moscow, said prior to his promotion that the rising violence in Ingushetia would not force the federal center to take any “political decisions,” Itar-Tass reported. “I am firmly convinced that there are political forces that have embarked on this radical course towards destabilizing the situation, trying to put pressure on the federal authorities to take some political decisions,” Kozak told Vesti television on September 20. “And I would like to reiterate once again that whatever they do, political processes are not launched in this way. We are not going to take any decisions under this kind of pressure, under the pressure of these beastly crimes … Whatever the motives of these killings are, they … should not influence our policies.” The crime situation in Ingushetia “is a problem for the law-enforcement system only,” Kozak said, adding: “We are making every effort today to ensure that the law-enforcement system works much more effectively.”
Meanwhile, Kavkazky Uzel, citing the Memorial human rights group, reported on September 22 that Gypsies were continuing to leave the village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya following the September 11 murder of three members of a Gypsy family there (Chechnya Weekly, September 13). According to the website, ethnic Ingush living in Ordzhonikidzevskaya have started guarding ethnic Russian families living in the village, which has seen a number of attacks against non-Ingush residents in recent months. On September 6, two Russian-speaking ethnic Koreans were found shot to death in their home in the village (Chechnya Weekly, September 13). In July, Lyudmila Terekhina, a 55-year-old ethnic Russian teacher, and her son and daughter, both of them university students, were shot to death by unknown gunmen in their home in Ordzhonikidzevskaya. On July 18, ten people were wounded when a bomb detonated during the funeral for Lyudmila Terekhina and her two children at a cemetery in Ordzhonikidzevskaya (Chechnya Weekly, July 19).
Commenting on the situation in Ingushetia, the separatist Daymohk website compared it to the events that preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia. “The conflict between the authorities and the people and the violence and degradation has reached their absolute limit,” Daymohk wrote, adding that the events could lead to Ingushetia breaking off from Russia. “The process of the collapse of
Russia is under way. More bloodshed along this path is inevitable for all the people of the Caucasus. And Ingushetia is just a link in this bloody chain.” The separatist website concluded: “So long as the Russians remain in our country, people shall forever weep.”
Chechen Officials Threaten Kasparov
Newsru.com reported on September 25 that the Chechen parliament had filed a lawsuit against Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and leader of the opposition United Civil Front, for putatively inflicting “moral damage” on Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov - in particular for “slander” and “insult.” The website reported that while answering questions from participants in “primaries” held by the Other Russia opposition coalition on September 23, Kasparov referred to Kadyrov as a “bandit.” Kommersant reported on September 26 that during the September 23 event, Kasparov recalled that the late Akhmad Kadyrov, the current Chechen president’s father who also served as the Chechnya’s president, was not only a Hero of Russia, but that Aslan Maskhadov, then-president of the separatist Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (ChRI), had earlier awarded the elder Kadyrov an “Honor of the Nation,” the ChRI’s highest decoration. In addition, Kasparov said he supported the idea floated by Andrei Dmitriev, leader of the National Bolshevik Party’s chapter in St. Petersburg, to hold a march against Ramzan Kadyrov in Grozny. Kasparov also called the president of Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov, “an absolute nobody.”
The Chechen parliament’s decision to sue Kasparov came during a special session that it held on September 25. Newsru.com quoted Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, the speaker of the parliament’s lower house, the People’s Assembly, as saying that parliamentary deputies and “the entire Chechen population” are “indignant at the escapades of Kasparov, who permitted himself to insult the president of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov.” “While Kasparov played chess and formulated his plans to make Russia ‘other,’ [to make] Russia for the West and not for Russia, Kadyrov was fighting for this Russia,” Abdurakhmanov said. “He proved on the battlefield that he is a true son of the Fatherland, a patriot of Russia. It is thanks to him and his father Akhmad Kadyrov that coffins have stopped arriving with the bodies of servicemen from all of the country’s regions. Thanks to him, what should have taken 15-20 years has been done in less than a year: Chechnya has been raised from the ruins. And Kasparov permitted himself to call this person a ‘bandit’.”
Abdurakhmanov accused Kasparov of trying to earn points in Russia’s presidential campaign – the Other Russia has picked Kasparov as its candidate for next year’s presidential election – and said that Kasparov’s campaign is based on “lies and slander.” Abdurakhmanov added: “He was born and grew up in the Caucasus and therefore should understand that in the Caucasus you have to answer for your words. I think that we will find legal methods to force Kasparov to do that.”
Newsru.com on September 26 quoted Abdurakhmanov as saying: “Garry Kasparov should be imprisoned. If we do not achieve the consequences we want [for Kasparov] through federal law, we will resort to other measures. The Caucasus allows this, the Caucasus has its laws, and Kasparov will be punished for such liberties. He should be imprisoned, and, if not, we will punish him all the same.” The website quoted Nurdi Nukhazhiev, Chechnya’s human right ombudsman, as saying that besides legal measures, Kasparov could be punished by “other measures that are permitted in the Caucasus.”
Newsru.com reported that Kasparov believes the comments of the Chechen officials amount to death threats. “I ask you to examine the given statements for corpus delicti, to give them a legal treatment and take measures of prosecutorial response,” Kasparov said in an official statement to the Prosecutor General’s Office. “I also ask that you provide me with … protection against threats by officials of the Chechen Republic.”
Kommersant, on September 26, quoted Kasparov as saying he refused to back down from his comments. “I am ready to repeat it once again: a person who is proud that he started killing ‘federals’ at age 15 is a bandit, and he remains one even if President Putin pins a hero’s star on him,” the former chess champion and opposition leader said.
Chechen Culture Ministry Will Regulate the Republic’s Entertainers
The Chechen Ministry of Culture on September 24 published a list of rules that local artists will have to follow in order to receive permission to perform. From now on, only artists whose repertoires “respond to the demands of artistic taste, and also the norms of the Chechen mentality and upbringing” will be allowed to perform and appear on television. Specially created art councils will be set up to monitor observation of these rules.
Kommersant reported on September 25 that according to the Chechen Ministry of Culture’s news rules, artists will have to present their repertoire for inspection by an artistic council set up under the Grozny Philharmonic Society. The final decision on whether repertoire is acceptable will be made by an artistic council under the Chechen Ministry of Culture. The new rules warn performers against doing “re-mixes” or contemporary “remakes” of traditional folk songs. In addition, in order to perform at venues in the republic or on Chechen television, artists must dress “in accordance with Vainakh culture.”
One of the authors of the new rules, Chechen Culture Minister Dikalu Muzykaev, told Kommersant: “Until now, God only knows what has been happening on the popular stage – anyone who wanted sang however and whatever they wanted.” He said the authorities were unhappy with the large number of popular performers “who are not ashamed of anything – neither plagiarism nor tastelessness nor open vulgarity.” Muzykaev added: “We could not tolerate this practice: first of all, it was creating a distorted picture of Chechen art and culture, and, secondly, it reflected on the novice artists themselves, who became accustomed to a lack of taste.”
According to Kommersant, Muzykaev said members of the art councils would not turn into censors and would not use their positions to settle scores with “disagreeable artists.” The councils, he said, consist of “expert and authoritative specialists in the area of culture, whose main task is to raise the level of culture of our variety entertainment.” Muzykaev also said that the new rules would not apply to entertainers on tour from other Russian regions. “We do not plan to interfere in the repertoire of artists on tour, although we are not indifferent to what they will be performing at republican venues,” he said.
Kommersant noted that the council of imams in neighboring Dagestan drew up a list of pop stars whose presence in Dagestan they considered to be undesirable. The list includes Verka Serdyuchka (the name of the female character played by Ukrainian singer and comedian Andriy Danylko), Russian pop singer Filipp Kirkorov, openly gay Russian pop singers Boris Moiseyev and Sergei Penkin, the pop group Guests from the Future and the girl group VIA-Gra.
Kommersant quoted veteran music critic Artemy Troitsky as saying: “I want to remind you that during the Soviet period many of the best artists fled abroad, not wanting to experience all the delights of ‘litovki’ (prior censorship of musical works in the USSR), art councils, censorship offices. The best Chechen artists may now do the same thing. However, it is possible that Ramzan Kadyrov will make it so that only those [artists] he personally likes will remain in the republic.” Last October, Kadyrov flew in Russian pop stars, including Filipp Kirkorov, for his 30th birthday party at his home outside the town of Gudermes (Chechnya Weekly, October 5, 2006).
Former Achkhoi-Martan Chief Charged with Complicity in Politkovskaya Murder
Russian news agencies reported on September 22 that Shamil Buraev, the former head of Chechnya’s Achkhoi-Martan district who was arrested on September 13 and accused of organizing the contract killing of Anna Politkovskaya (Chechnya Weekly, September 20) has been formally charged with complicity in the murder. Prosecutors claim that Buraev was given Politkovskaya’s home address by Federal Security Service (FSB) Lt. Col. Pavel Ryaguzov and then passed it to a group of Chechen brothers, the Makhmudovs, who carried out the murder. Interfax quoted Buraev’s lawyer, Pyotr Kozakov, as saying his client had nothing to do with the murder. “This is his clear position, and he is determined to prove it and to defend his honest name,” Kazakov said. Lawyers for the Makhmudovs have also denied their clients’ involvement in the murder.
Chechnya’s human rights ombudsman, Nurdi Nukhazhiev, told Interfax on September 21 that he was convinced Buraev was neither directly or indirectly involved in Politkovskaya’s death and that his arrest was “an attempt to find a non-existent ‘Chechen trail’ in this case.” Nukhazhiev added: “He never had any conflict with Politkovskaya. On the contrary, when Buraev was sacked as the head of the district administration in 2004, she wrote an article in his support. The main thing is to claim that Buraev and other Chechens are suspected of organizing the murder of the journalist.”
Kremlin Adopts New Counter-Insurgency Methods in Ingushetia
By Andrei Smirnov
The continuing rebel attacks in Ingushetia are forcing the Russian authorities to look for new ways to pacify the region. Russian officials repeatedly vowed over the past summer that the situation in Ingushetia would soon be normalized, but the only thing that has changed since then is that the Ingush rebels have started to conduct their combat operations in an almost non-stop regime. Now, there are sometimes several attacks on police and military forces per day.
The situation has become so humiliating for the authorities that they are trying to cover up the attacks conducted by the rebels, especially if no one was killed or wounded. According to the independent Ingushetiya.ru website, Ingushetia’s Interior Minister Musa Medov ordered his subordinates not to count attacks on policemen and the military if no casualties occurred.
The authorities made their first attempt to change the situation in Ingushetia for the better on July 21, when they launched a special “preventive” operation in the republic. Officers from the Russian Interior Ministry’s central directorate were sent from Moscow to Ingushetia to take charge of the operation (Agentura.ru, September 19). At the same time, Musa Medov was named Ingushetia’s new Interior Minister.
On August 9, an additional 2,500 troops were deployed to the region. However, attacks continued. On August 22, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Commission and the Operational Anti-Terrorist Headquarters in the North Caucasus held a special joint meeting in the republic to discuss additional alternatives to neutralize rebel activity in Ingushetia.
On September 9, rebels attacked a military and police base in the town of Malgobek. The next day, on September 10, federal Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev declared that General Iskandar Galimov, head of the ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department, had been sent to Ingushetia along with a group of senior police officers, so that the situation would soon improve. On September 13, Dmitry Kozak, presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District [Kozak was subsequently promoted to the position of federal Regional Development Minister], Arkady Yedelev, the supreme commander of the Russian anti-terrorist forces in the North Caucasus, and Ingush President Murat Zyazikov met in the city of Nazran to talk again about possible ways to stop the rise of the regional insurgency. At the meeting, Kozak assured Zyazikov that the Kremlin did not want his resignation because “no political decision should be made under pressure.” Kozak called on Yedelev to improve the coordination between the various security bodies in Ingushetia, especially between the local police and the Federal Security Service (FSB). In an interview with Russian media following the meeting, Kozak criticized the head of the police department of the city of Karabulak, who had ordered the arrest of a group of FSB commandos who had kidnapped several Ingush youngsters and killed one of them.
Nevertheless, the insurgents’ reaction to the decisions made at the meeting was immediate. Over a span of two days - September 15-16 - militants twice attacked the Nazran police department, where the best-qualified Ingush police officers work.
The FSB leadership decided to form a special operational group in Ingushetia headed by an Ingush FSB officer, Colonel Alikhan Kalimatov, who is a member of the Central Directorate of the FSB in Moscow. As soon as Kalimatov arrived in Ingushetia, he was shot dead near the village of Gazi-Yurt.
On September 26, Magas, the “amir” or commander of the Ingush rebels, issued a statement saying that Kalimatov had been tasked with forming a special anti-insurgency group consisting of former Ingush rebels similar to the Chechen Vostok battalion headed by a former Chechen rebel field commander, Sulim Yamadaev.
Magas said in his statement that Kalimatov wanted to recruit candidates for a newly armed formation from members of the insurgency, offering them amnesty and a significant amount of money. In other words, if what Magas says is true, the Russian authorities are trying to use Chechenization methods in Ingushetia.
However, all of the attempts by Russian security officials to change the situation are being thwarted by the fierce and well-calculated resistance of the insurgency. During their summer campaign, the rebels lost only three militants and none of their field commanders, while the Russian side lost several senior officers and their intelligence network in the republic was completely destroyed. It will not be easy for the FSB to collect sufficient information about the rebels in Ingushetia in the near future, with local policemen being terrorized and any new kidnappings by security forces threatening to provoke mass street protests.
Andrei Smirnov is an independent journalist covering the North Caucasus. He is based in Russia.
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