''Political road signs in the Caucasus are no more directed towards Moscow''

A Hamburg-based influential German paper, Die Welt, published an article about the North Caucasus entitled "Helpless Russia" by its journalist, Michael Sturmer, who recently visited the Province of Nokhchicho (AKA Chechnya/Ichkeria) in the Caucasus Emirate. The German journalist writes:

"It was a cruel joke to name the capital of Chechnya Grozny (Terrible) after Ivan the Terrible. Today, Grozny is still an eerie place, which you can only visit with a special permit.

When I was there, and it was not so long ago, I was assured that there is no danger there and everything was under control. The fact that there were armed gunmen dressed in black with a Kalashnikov denied the beautiful words.

Chechnya's neighborhood is uneasy, the power over land and people controversial. Moscow-installed officials and military leaders in Ingushetia and Dagestan live dangerously.

The boundaries are Czarist-Soviet legacy, nothing more than imaginary lines.

It is not so long ago that the Majlis al-Shura (Council of the Mujahideen - KC) proclaimed a regional guerrilla leader as the future leader of the North Caucasus, with the intention to found an Islamic state.

The Kremlin, however, wants to cope with a new wave of violence. For Medvedev, who remembers Putin's ascension to power with the Chechen war, this is the future mode of governance in the Russian South. So he tried it this time via trade and commerce to go to the root causes of unrest.

A few weeks ago he appointed a businessman, Alexander Kloponin, who made successes in the Siberian town of Krasnoyarsk, as the Russian governor-general in the Caucasus. At the same time, he strengthened Moscow's security forces that operate outside the law, thus extending the "vertical of power" to the south.

The Russians are perplexed, not only because the number of reported attacks in the southern provinces increased from 124 in 2007 to 460 in 2009 - but also because of demographic shifts between ethnic Russians and Muslims.

Since the mighty Soviet Union was defeated in the Afghanistan war, they are no longer docile.

The most spectacular attack happened nevertheless not in the freedom-fighting provinces of the South, but in a November night 2009 against the Nevsky Express train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The luxury train derailed, with more than 100 dead and wounded.

The political road signs in the Caucasus are no longer directed towards Moscow", the German journalist concludes in his article.

Department of Monitoring,
Kavkaz Center

Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2010/02/27/11514.shtml.