Last week here in the capital of the southern republic of Dagestan, the wind whipped uncollected garbage in every direction and tens of thousands of citizens lost heat, electricity and water.
The traffic police, fearful of another suicide bombing, sealed off the neighborhood before holding their routine troop reviews. The vice speaker of Dagestan’s parliament narrowly escaped an attack with automatic weapon fire from a passing car.
In other words, nothing out of the ordinary.
Pressure has been rising steadily in Dagestan, where clan wars intersect with a growing Islamic fundamentalism and a deepening sense of public alienation. All those threats factor into a choice the Kremlin has to make in the coming days: Who, in the labyrinth of Dagestani politics, will bring peace if he is named president?
Ten years ago, then-Russian president Vladimir Putin cemented his hold on Russian politics by showing he could bring the Caucasus to heel. The mechanism was force; after a second war against Chechnya’s separatists, he installed a strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, as president and granted him the power to crush internal opposition. But a year of rising violence in the region has made it clear that Moscow’s control is more tenuous than it seemed.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Dagestan, where militants have stepped up their attacks while clan groupings have fought, sometimes murderously, over the republic’s resources.
“With Chechnya, the main headache is a strong leader who is not controllable, but at least he is in charge,” said Pavel Baev, a senior researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, which is based in Oslo. “In Dagestan, the problem is that there is a loss of control that is moving toward violence of another kind, which is stronger and stronger, and spiced with Islamic fundamentalism.”
“There is no other kind of order,” Baev said. “Only the fundamentalists can present themselves as honest men.”
Dagestan, one of the most heavily subsidized of Russia’s regions, should be able to support itself. It has oil and gas reserves, like neighboring Azerbaijan, and once lucrative vineyards and fisheries. The sandy coastline itself, stretching 402km along the Caspian Sea, should be a moneymaker in a beach-starved colossus like Russia.
But the beaches around Makhachkala, a city of 466,000, offer a primer in what has gone wrong. Tycoons have chopped up much of the coast for private mansions, and local residents complain that the public beaches that remain are too dirty and ill kept to enjoy. As for tourists, Makhachkala Mayor Said Amirov — who now uses a wheelchair as a result of an assassination attempt — put it this way: “You can’t develop tourism when you have a murder every day.”
There has always been competition for power in Dagestan, which is cobbled together out of more than 30 ethnic groups, but with the Soviet collapse it turned violent. The first time an official was assassinated, in 1992, people were so outraged that thousands demonstrated to demand that the killers be punished. Over the next decade, though, killings of officials, religious leaders, lawyers, journalists and police officers became commonplace.
In a republic of 2.5 million people — roughly the population of Brooklyn — armored cars and bodyguards have become so standard that Magomed-Rasul Omarov did a double take recently when he noticed the agriculture minister walking down the street without a security detail. It was a sight he had not seen for years.
“He looks like a white crow,” said Omarov, who works as press secretary for the mufti of Dagestan, whose deputy died from a gunshot to the head last May.
“People have no hope in law enforcement or in other protection or in justice anymore,” he said. “If one case was brought to justice, you could say there was some hope.”
It falls to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to try to calm the waters. The first term of Dagestani President Mukhu Aliyev ends on Feb. 20. At the time of his appointment, Aliyev raised great hopes in a populace furious over corruption; a longtime Communist Party figure, he was known for steadfastly refusing bribes and lived, famously, in a modest three-room apartment.
But four years later, Aliyev’s critics say he has been too weak to control the factions beneath him. It is clear that the calm of his early presidency is gone. Three hundred people died in violent attacks in Dagestan last year more than in either the nearby republics of Ingushetia or Chechnya — and the number of attacks were more than double the 2008 figure, statistics compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies show.
“Everybody understands that his time is ending,” said Marko Shakhbanov, editor in chief of Novoye Delo, a newspaper that has been critical of Aliyev’s government. “He is a good person, but a good person is not a profession.”
Medvedev could reappoint Aliyev, 69, or choose a new face like Deputy Prime Minister Magomed Abdullayev, 48, who, like Medvedev, studied and lectured at the law department of St Petersburg University. Uncertainty over the question has gripped Makhachkala since mid-November, and some complain that it fueled a spike in violence in December and last month.
Medvedev “is making decisions on several governors, but this is one of the most complicated of all,” Baev said. “In Moscow, they cannot pay much attention to the fact that it’s destabilizing, it’s eroding, it’s getting worse. They don’t know what to do.”
The stakes are great, he said, because public disgust over corruption is driving young people to embrace fundamentalism.
Zaipul Osmanov, who works in a Makhachkala employment center, said he has watched in bafflement as his neighbor’s sons — children he has known since they were born — disappeared into “the forest,” as people here refer to underground militant networks. The oldest disappeared for a year. Osmanov heard he was studying abroad, and when he returned, “the second brother was infected.”
The first was killed in July, and his brother in October — Osmanov did not know how, but he said he assumed that they were killed in a suicide operation or a police raid. His neighbor has two more sons but he expects to hear the same news about them before too long.
“I don’t think they have a way to retreat,” he said. “There is no way back from the forest.”
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