NGOs Orchestrate Grandiose Show Of Suppport For KBR President
NGOs in the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic (KBR) convened a meeting in
Nalchik on August 6 under the slogan "For peace, for concord, for
unity," at which speakers proceeded to demonize the republic's Balkar
minority for allegedly seeking to destabilize the political situation.
At the same time, participants praised KBR President Arsen Kanokov's
success in galvanizing the republic's stagnating economy, and called on
the republic's 900,000-plus population to close ranks in his support.
The
meeting, which was reportedly attended by several thousand people, was
clearly intended as a riposte to one convened 10 days early by the
Balkar community of the KBR to protest years of perceived
discrimination. The most recent manifestation of that perceived
repression was the counterterror operation
conducted in the predominantly Balkar-populated extreme western part of
the republic in early July that reportedly inflicted considerable
economic damage, but in the course of which not a single suspected
militant was either apprehended or killed.
But speakers at the
August 6 meeting were quoted as condemning not only public
organizations formed on ethnic lines that "try to play the national
card" (a clear allusion to the unofficial Council of Elders of the
Balkar People), but also "the remnants of the armed underground " who
"continue to target police officers," meaning the
Kabarda-Balkaria-Karachai jamaat of the North Caucasus resistance
headed by Doku Umarov.
In some cases, the statements of
condemnation expressed at the August 6 meeting were phrased in such a
way that it was not clear whether the object of that criticism was
law-abiding Balkars who simply sought to air their grievances within
the existing political system, or die-hard Islamic militants out to
overthrow that system. Mukhamed Shikhobakhov, for example, chairman of
the republican war and labor veterans' council, affirmed that "we are
sick of hearing and seeing attempts by isolated destructive forces to
destabilize the situation in the republic and the south of Russia as a
whole."
True, the Balkars may account for a higher percentage
of the armed Islamic resistance compared with their share of the KBR
population (11-12 percent at the time of the 2002 Russian census). Of
the 58 young men currently on trial for their imputed participation in
the multiple attacks by the armed resistance on police and security
facilities in Nalchik on October 13, 2005, 10 are Balkars, one is
Russian, and the remaining 47 are Kabardians.
But the ambiguity
of Shikhobakhov's statement, whether deliberate or unintentional, is
disturbing insofar as it could be construed as implying contacts or
complicity between the Balkars as a whole and the Islamic underground,
and thus furnish a pretext for blanket reprisals against the Balkar
community.
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