Russian President Dmitry Medvedev fired Kabardino-Balkaria Interior Minister Lieutenant General Yury Tomchak on November 18,
replacing him with Sergei Vasilyev, a career Russian police officer from Kemerovo with no previous experience of the North Caucasus.
Tomchak is apparently being held responsible for the
spike in militant attacks in the republic
since Balkar fighter Asker Djappuyev (aka Emir Abdullakh) succeeded
Anzor Astemirov in the spring as commander of the
Kabardino-Balkaria-Karachai (KBK) wing of the North Caucasus
insurgency.
Speaking in Pyatigorsk on November 18, Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev
singled out
Kabardino-Balkaria and Daghestan as the two North Caucasus republics
with the highest level of terrorist activity. Interior Ministry Colonel
Valery Zhernov
gave
the number of "terrorist acts" in Kabardino-Balkaria during the first
nine months of this year as 117, compared with 21during the same period
in 2009.
Those statistics are at odds with data compiled by
the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor-General's Office, which
in the four months from May 1 to August 31
recorded
just one terrorist act in Kabardino-Balkaria, 40 attacks on police
officers, four attacks on Federal Security Service personnel, and two
on prosecutor's office staff.
There are two interconnected
reasons why the KBK insurgents target police and security personnel so
relentlessly and single-mindedly, while at the same time seeking
wherever possible to avoid inflicting any civilian casualties. The
first is that the police and security forces are among the most visible
and vulnerable representatives of a regime the insurgents consider
anathema and are determined to destroy. The second is that in
Kabardino-Balkaria, as in Daghestan, arbitrary police brutality against
law-abiding and peaceful Muslims has been one of the primary factors
that impel victims of such abuse to "head for the forest" to join the
ranks of the insurgency.
Of the two men whose names became
synonymous with that strategy of blanket reprisals, Daghestan's
Interior Minister Lieutenant General Adilgirey Magomedtagirov was
killed by a militant sniper in Makhachkala in June last year. Khachim
Shogenov, Tomchak's predecessor, narrowly missed death in a terrorist
bombing in early May.
Kabardino-Balkaria President Arsen Kanokov claimed in a
recent interview
that "we no longer permit arbitrary violence against devout Muslims."
At the same time, he admitted that the police still resort on occasion
to "dirty" methods, and they still maintain lists of practicing Muslims
suspected of links with the Islamic insurgency.
In the past
week alone, lawyers in Kabardino-Balkaria who represent the victims of
police harassment and reprisals have gone public with the details of
five such cases. Three
concerned women
who were practicing Muslims and wore the hijab. Two were men who worked
in a butcher's store in the small town of Dugulubgey north of Nalchik;
they were detained last week after police planted a grenade and
ammunition on them. Both were
beaten in detention.
Kanokov
in his interview went on to complain that senior Interior Ministry
personnel ignore his protests at such methods, sometimes even
denouncing him to their superiors in Moscow behind his back.
It
is not clear whether Tomchak can take credit for two recent operational
decisions intended to curtail the insurgents' activities. The first is
the installation of video cameras in the town of Baksan, north of
Nalchik, the scene of
several attacks
by militants in recent months. The second is sealing all entrances to
the abandoned molybdenum mine at Tyrnyauz, which is believed to serve
the
insurgents as a base.
In
addition, Interior Ministry Lieutenant General Yury Demidov, who
visited Nalchik earlier this week, told the republic's leadership that
the ministry has no plans to
reduce police manpower either in Kabardino-Balkaria or elsewhere in the North Caucasus Federal District.
http://www.rferl.org/content/kremlin_kabardino_balkaria_interior_minister/2229526.html
