RFE/RL: Is Ingushetia Heading For a New Political Standoff?
posted by circassiankama on August, 2009 as INGUSHETIA
August 10, 2009
Is Ingushetia Heading For A New Political Standoff?
Ingushetian President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was discharged from hospital
in Moscow today, exactly seven weeks after sustaining serious injuries
in a suicide-bomb attack. He is likely to resume his duties by the end
of this month, by which time political tensions may be on the rise in
the run-up to the municipal elections scheduled for October 11.
Since
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev appointed him president in late
October 2008, Yevkurov has made a valiant effort to win back the trust
of a population alienated and disgusted by the corruption,
mismanagement, injustice, economic decline, and arbitrary police
violence that had become a byword under his predecessor Murat Zyazikov.
Yevkurov dismissed some of the more compromised members of the previous
government, and won over some opposition political figures. But within
a couple of months, he was faced with a new political challenge in the
face of orchestrated opposition to the planned legislation on local
government that would have formalized the republic's current borders
and territorial-administrative structure.
Radical oppositionists
protested that the passage of that legislation would be tantamount to
abandoning any claim to territory in neighboring Chechnya and North
Ossetia that in the early Soviet period was administratively part of
Ingushetia, and that they have lobbied for years to have returned to
Ingushetia's jurisdiction.
In early January, Yevkurov scheduled
for January 31 an "all-national congress of the Ingush people" to
discuss the election law and other pressing issues. Then in what some
oppositionists construed as a blatant bid by Moscow to buy them off, on
January 20 President Medvedev made a surprise visit to Nazran where he announced 29 billion rubles ($832.6 million) in economic aid over the next six years.
Also
on January 20, Yevkurov met for two hours with 10 delegates to the
upcoming all-national congress but failed to reach a consensus over the
draft law. Yevkurov continued to insist that it should be adopted in
the original form, which stated that the Republic of Ingushetia (RI)
consists of three municipalities -- Nazran, Sunzha, and Malgobek -- but
which also contains the proviso that the law does not extend to the
territories that in accordance with the April 1991 Law on the
Rehabilitation of the Repressed Peoples should be incorporated into the
RI.
In other words, it left the door open for amending the
composition of the RI in future to incorporate more territory. The 10
congress delegates for their part argued without success that the draft
law should be amended to stipulate that Prigorodny Raion, currently
part of North Ossetia, and other territories regarded as historic
Ingush land are part of the RI. Both sides did agree, however, on the
need to delineate formally the present administrative border between
the RI and the Chechen Republic.
The all-national congress
took place as planned, but delegates did not amend the draft law to
take into account the opposition's objections; parliament adopted the
law in its original wording three weeks later. A small group of radical
oppositionists issued an appeal in
March, calling for a referendum on whether the existing borders between
Ingushetia and its neighbors should be changed, but to no avail.
The
local election campaign opened on July 29. Ingushetian Prime Minister
Rashid Gaysanov, who in line with the Ingushetian constitution took
over as acting president while Yevkurov was incapacitated, told "Vremya novostei"
that the republic's leaders have told local political parties they
should include on their respective lists of candidates for election to
municipal councils representatives of different extended families,
religious faiths, and ethnic groups, women, and younger people.
Candidates should, he continued, be known and respected outside their
immediate families.
Such affirmations are unlikely, however, to allay the skepticism of the radical opposition, which has released a statement
accusing the authorities of preparing to rig the outcome of the
elections. That statement claims that relatives and close friends of
leading officials, including Gaysanov, Deputy Prime Minister
Magomed-Sali Aushev, and parliament speaker Makhmud Sakalov, are
prominently represented on the lists of potential candidates.
The
statement recalls the March 2008 elections to the republic's
parliament: one month before that vote, the opposition posted on the
website ingushetiya.ru what it claimed was the list of candidates to be
"elected" whom Zyazikov had hand-picked in advance.
Many of them were indeed subsequently elected in a ballot in which the
turnout figure was almost certainly artificially inflated.
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