International Affairs / North Caucasus Russia’s Heavy-Handed Proxies Fail to Quell Caucasus Chaos by Nicholas Clayton This April, Russia proudly announced that its 15-year conflict in Chechnya was over and that all further counter-insurgency operations by federal troops would cease. Russia had struggled to control Chechnya, an autonomous republic in the south of the country, even after two wars and several handpicked local regimes. Finally, after empowering Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov to fight the insurgency with whatever means necessary, violence in the region slowly abated. “It would be difficult to describe Chechnya as peaceful. But Kadyrov has achieved ‘stability’ in the Russian and Chechen definition of the word,” Sergei Markedonov, of Moscow’s Institute for Political and Military Analysis, wrote in the Moscow Times in April. But within months of the announcement of the conflict’s conclusion, violence in Chechnya and its two neighboring regions, Ingushetia and Dagestan, had rebounded to the highest levels seen in years as assassinations of local officials and devastating suicide attacks pierced the relative calm. More recently, after a Chechen insurgent group claimed responsibility for a train bombing near St. Petersburg that killed 26 and wounded some 100 people on Nov. 27, it became clear the situation was no longer under control. Maria Lipman, a political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said the gradual deterioration of the security situation across Russia is a direct result of the Kremlin’s North Caucasus strategy. “This is a policy basically of neglect. The Kremlin does not deal with local problems, entrusting them with those rulers who are fully loyal to the Kremlin and who ensure the desired election results. Each time there is an election — whether local or federal — these leaders can be relied on that [the pro-Kremlin United Russia party] not just wins the election, but wins usually in those territories something like an 80 to 90 percent majority,” she said. Lipman added that while Moscow has been allocating vast amounts of federal funds to local governments in the North Caucasus, the Kremlin’s expectations for these governments have been merely to fix the elections and keep the violence from spilling into Russia at large. And up until recently, regional leaders had held up their end of the bargain. In 2004, Chechen militants seized a school in the town of Beslan and in the hostage crisis that followed at least 334 people were killed — many of them children. For five years following Beslan, there were no major acts of violence outside of the North Caucasus, ending a series of terrorist attacks that had killed more 1,000 civilians across Russia over a decade following the First Chechen War. Lipman called this ebb in violence an “important achievement,” but said it was clearly untenable in a region that is essentially a tinderbox of Islamism, clan feuds, poverty, separatist attacks and heavy-handed tactics by law enforcement. Indeed, although the Kremlin’s containment policy may have spared lives outside the North Caucasus, violent crackdowns by the regional governments’ strongmen and deadly reprisals by their populations now kill dozens on a nearly weekly basis. Many journalists and human rights activists investigating corruption and abuses of power in the region — such as prominent human rights activist Natalya Estemirova — have also been assassinated as Russia loosened the leash on local leaders like Kadyrov. Albert Adamov, a lawyer and journalist working in Russia, said that it has become practically impossible to work in Chechnya as a journalist because of personal safety issues. “You have to constantly watch yourself, control yourself and what you are reporting to the point where the work is meaningless,” he said. “Corruption kills.” Adamov said that one of the primary roots of the violence that has plagued the region is the sheer lack of opportunities afforded to the region’s youth. In one survey that he helped to coordinate in September, interviewing residents in the Chechen capital of Grozny, more than half of the respondents said they were unemployed. According to Adamov, the unemployment rate in Chechnya as a whole is probably close to 85 percent, and for young people it is practically impossible to find jobs. And as fares for public transportation have been raised, many residents — particularly young people — find themselves desperate and isolated in the mountain villages where weapons are prevalent and frustrations are raw, Adamov said. The conditions in the North Caucasus “breed this vicious cycle of punitive violence from the government and revenge from those who regard themselves as treated harshly and unfairly,” said the Carnegie Center’s Lipman. “And this cycle continues. But the Kremlin looks the other way.” Kadyrov himself took power from his father, Akhmad, who was assassinated as president of Chechnya in 2004. Ramzan Kadyrov has since himself been targeted by attacks several times — most recently in October. Next Page