Russian President Dmitry Medvedev today
dismissed
Ingushetia's acting interior minister, Colonel Valery Zhernov, thereby
calling into question Ingushetian President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov's
assertion in an
interview earlier this year that the work of the police is improving, and popular trust in them is growing.
Medvedev
simultaneously named to head the ministry Major General Viktor Pogolov,
whose most recent post was head of the criminal police in Saratov
Oblast. Pogolov has previous experience of the unique conditions and
problems the police face in the North Caucasus: He was part of a team
that successfully freed a Saratov woman taken hostage in Chechnya in
2005.
Pogolov's new job will not be an easy one. For the past
several years, Islamic insurgents have regularly and ruthlessly
targeted police officers in Ingushetia in retaliation for
indiscriminate reprisals by police and other security personnel against
peaceful civilians, especially young men known to be practicing Muslims.
The
pressure, compounded by the systematic withholding of wages and
hazardous-duty allowances, became so intense that in the early summer
of 2008, over 1,300 police officers reportedly
submitted their resignation.
More
recently, 25 people, most of them police officers, died and over 100
were injured when a militant suicide bomber drove a truck into the main
compound of the Interior Ministry headquarters in Nazran last August.
Yevkurov attributed that attack to negligence and fired Interior
Minister Ruslan Meyriyev. Yevkurov subsequently
lambasted
police for lacking "professionalism" and announced a reassessment of
the level of competence of all ministry personnel, warning that
officers deemed incapable of performing their duties would be fired.
Former Deputy Interior Minister Mukhtar Buzurtanov, now a deputy speaker of the Ingushetian parliament, recently
attributed
the growing strength of the Islamic insurgency over the past five-six
years to a lack of both coordination and trust between the various law
enforcement agencies. He said the police themselves sometimes violated
the law.
Buzurtanov further claimed the police were interested
primarily in creating the impression that they are combating the
insurgency efficiently -- "in reporting to those higher up that they
have liquidated however many militants."
Yevkurov has admitted,
however, that some police and security forces personnel secretly abet
the insurgents, providing them with arms. Five of the 16 suspected
militants taken into custody in the wake of the counterterror
operation in Ekazhevo on March 2 were police officers.
http://www.rferl.org/content/Medvedev_Names_New_Ingushetian_Interior_Minister/1985457.html