From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 6/25/2006 8:46 AM
Article published Sunday, June 25, 2006
Chechen figure exploits alliance with the Kremlin
The Kremlin is trumpeting a purported big victory over terrorism.
The occasion was provided by Ramzan Kadyrov — a Kremlin-installed Chechen prime minister whose private army rules by terror — kidnappings, hostage taking, torture, and murder of anyone suspected of disloyalty to Mr. Kadyrov.
This time his troops killed what Mr. Kadyrov, 29, argues is a legitimate target — Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, Chechnya’s secessionist president accused by Mr. Kadyrov of planning a terrorist act at the upcoming G-8 summit in St. Petersburg.
The assassination, however, aggravates the situation in Chechnya and the neighboring provinces of southern Russia already grave enough to threaten the country’s territorial integrity.
First, the slain president was more moderate than his successor Doku Umarov, a warlord the Russian government has accused of being involved in Russia’s worst hostage crises that killed hundreds.
Second, Mr. Kadyrov, whose allegiance to the Kremlin will likely last only as long as he can bilk it, has been casting himself as the only force in southern Russia that can quell ethnic independence movements there.
For example, he has volunteered to lead an invasion into the neighboring Dagestan, a largely Muslim breakaway mountainous province of 2.5 million, where Russian casualties are currently higher than in Chechnya.
Such a move may lead to an uncontrollable spread of war in southern Russia. It was in Dagestan that Russia suffered its worst casualties in the 19th-century Caucasus War.
So far, Mr. Kadyrov has not received a go-ahead from the Kremlin. But the danger is that he uses the Kremlin’s public relations campaign casting him as a “strong leader” as carte blanche.
Should Mr. Kadyrov invade Dagestan, the momentum of the Kremlin’s campaign casting him as an effective peacekeeper in the region may be too great for the Kremlin to denounce him as a thug.
Moreover, Mr. Kadyrov’s value to the Kremlin is primarily his cooperation with whatever lies the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin comes up with to create an illusion that things in Chechnya and the neighboring provinces in southern Russia are under control.
The Putin administration’s primary concern is maximizing energy export windfalls and keeping infighting of the rival groups of Kremlin insiders over the control of cash flow under wraps.
That infighting has been hard to conceal recently with those groups at each other’s throats to get their representatives to succeed Mr. Putin, whose last constitutionally allowed term expires in 2008.
Usually kept secret from the public to hide the Kremlin’s involvement in money laundering, this infighting recently resulted in the reopening of an old high-profile money-laundering case and the swap of jobs between Russia’s justice minister and prosecutor general.
A democratic society could deal with such scandals. Russia, however, has hardly any viable democratic institutions left after six years of Mr. Putin’s rule, so the scuffle at the top is a significant threat to the country’s very existence.
As rival Kremlin clans and the state power institutions they represent get discredited in money-laundering scandals, outsiders like Mr. Kadyrov may emerge as the strongest presidential hopefuls.
True, Mr. Kadyrov as a nonethnic Russian is a tough sell to the increasingly chauvinistic Russia. But any high-profile ethnic Russian populist in the Duma ready to adopt Mr. Kadyrov’s “leadership” methods would do.
The bottom line is Mr. Kadyrov is a cure that’s worse than the disease.
Mike Sigov, a Russian-born journalist, is a staff writer for The Blade.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060625/COLUMNIST25/60625017/-1/COLUMNIST