Window on Eurasia

Putin Policies Behind Rise in North Caucasus Tensions, Analyst Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 20, 2006 – President Vladimir Putin bears primary
responsibility for an increase in inter-ethnic tensions in the North
Caucasus. That is a striking change from the situation Boris Yeltsin faced 15 years when conflicts there were the product not of his policies but those of his Soviet predecessors, according to a leading Moscow specialist.

In an article posted online yesterday, Sergei Markedonov, an ethnic
specialist at Moscow’s Institute of Political and Military Analysis,
argues that Putin’s policies far from quieting the region as he has
promised and many Russians expect in fact are making the situation in
that region far worse
[http://www.politcom.ru/print.php?id=3090].

Despite Russian government insistence, especially in the wake of the
death of Chechen militant Shamil Basayev last week, that the situation
in that region is moving toward normalization, Markedonov argues that
“with each passing day, there are increasing signs of
destabilization” there.

In fact, he continues, “one ought to be speaking not so much about a
qualitative increase in the number of explosions, terrorist acts, and
extremist undertakings”as even Putin sometimes does but rather about
“a ‘rebirth’ of inter-ethnic tension [as a result of] the
failures and mistakes of the period of ‘the strengthening of the power
vertical.’” But instead of recognizing this trend and reversing
course, the Russian leadership is plunging ahead with a new set of
policies that Markedonov suggests will lead to more explosions not only
in Chechnya but across the entire region, including in ethnic Russian
portions of the country adjoining the North Caucasus.

As an example of this trend, Markedonov provides an extensive
discussion of the impact of the new law on municipal organization. Not only does
that measure increase the number of city and town political structures
from 11,500 to 23,000, but it imposes a common model of urban political
arrangements in all sections of the Russian Federation.

The first of these trends requires the drawing of new borders and the
holding of new elections, both of which have ethnic consequences
especially in poly-ethnic regions like the North Caucasus where the
absence of the institutions of civil society and political competition
guarantee that every change is viewed through an ethnic prism.

And the second means that the special arrangements that had been made
in the North Caucasus to adapt Russian legislation to local conditions are
being abbrogated, a step that creates new classes of winners and losers
and that recent experience suggests almost certainly will lead to new
ethnic clashes.

The “universal federalism” that Moscow offered in the early 1990s
entailed a variety of serious problems, including the parade of
sovereignty by non-Russian regions, the privatization of power by local
officials and enormous corruption, problems that discredited federalism
as such in the minds of many.

But the new municipal reforms that Moscow is imposing in the North
Caucasus may have even more negative consequences: they may discredit
not just federalism but strike at the very notion of administration at
the lowest levels. That could, Markedonov suggests, lead to expanded
challenges to pro-Moscow governments across the region.

Any change in the borders of administrative units or any new elections
in a region as ethnically diverse as the North Caucasus not only calls
into question the existing distribution of scarce land resources but
also leads people to ask whether their representation in government
institutions will decline and their economic status fall.

At first glance, of course, many in Moscow might assume that all these
potential “losses and problems are social and economic ones.” But
in the North Caucasus, “where the idea of ethnic rather than private
property in land predominates,” the situation is very different. And
those differences mean that changes are ethnically charged.

Consequently, the Russian government must move carefully and cautiously
if it is not to set off new explosions, ones driven by its own policies
rather than by the actions of its Soviet-era predecessors. But that is
not what Putin and his government have been doing up to now or continue
to do in the case of municipal reform.

What Moscow should strive for, Markedonov says, is the creation of a
broader civic identity, one that involves not just a region or a city
but the Russian Federation as a whole. To do that, he continues, the
Russian government should create entirely new urban districts rather
than expanding or contracting existing ones as it is doing now.

The crude application of “’universal’ reforms, which will provoke
a new wave of ‘the privatization of power,’ land conflicts and will
mobilize people in defense of ‘ethnic property,’” is exactly the
wrong direction to take, but that is what Putin and his government are
doing, whether they understand that or not.

Indeed, “the task of the Russian government is the achievement of the
maximum ethnopolitical stabilization not for regional clans and their
Kremlin protectors but for the state as a whole. For that to happen,
Moscow must take into account regional variations,” rather than
assuming that a common cookie cutter approach will work.

*****

If the Russian government does not understand the very real dangers
ahead in the North Caucasus, the results of a new poll released
yesterday suggest that a significant portion of the Russian people
already do.

After the death of Shamil Basayev, the All-Russian Center for the Study
of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) asked 1600 Russians across the country how
they thought that the departure from the scene of a man many of them
have come to view as “terrorist number one” would affect the
situation in the North Caucasus
[http://www.wciom.ru/], July 19.

Seventeen percent said that Basayev’s “liquidation” marks the
final defeat of the Chechen fighters, but almost an equal number said
that the death of Basayev may in fact only increase the resistance of
the separatists and terrorists to the efforts of the Russian
authorities to reestablish order there.

Moreover, some 39 percent said that they did not consider that the
destruction of Basayev would have an impact on the threat of new
terrorist actions, while 27 percent said it would reduce the number of
such incidents and 23 percent said that his death would lead to a new
round of terrorist activity.

Latest Window on Eurasia stories | Religion Archive | Islam in Russia and CIS Archive | Orthodox Church in Russia and CIS Archive | All Window on Eurasia Stories Archive |