Russian President Vladimir Putin made constitutional changes on Monday designed to increase his personal control of the regions and parliament, saying the government needed "strengthening" because it had failed at Beslan in its fight against terrorism.
He told regional governors, Cabinet colleagues and senior bureaucrats: "We have not achieved visible results in rooting out terrorism and in destroying its sources.
"The organizers and perpetrators of the terror attack are aiming at the disintegration of the state, the break-up of Russia."
But some analysts said his changes, which amounted to the biggest single shakeup of his four years in power, would not help fight terrorism, but further strengthen his already tight grip on power.
Putin said he wanted to appoint the currently elected regional governors himself, subject to vetting by the weak regional assemblies, and he wanted all members of parliament elected by proportional representation.
At present half the Duma, the lower house of the federal parliament, is directly elected by constituencies, the rest according to the party vote. The new system could in theory give smaller parties seats in in parliament, but the current rules let only parties with more than 7 percent of the vote take seats, disqualifying most.
Putin made two other announcements of more apparent relevance to the Beslan disaster.
He made his head of administration, Dmitri Kozak, his personal envoy to the North Caucuses region, which includes North Ossetia and Chechnya, and appointed Vladimir Yakovlev as minister for reconstructed nationalities, a post designed to ease ethnic tension in the south which he abolished when be became president.
Putin hinted at plans for a Russian version of the US Department of Homeland Security, established after Sept. 11, saying: "We need a single organization capable of not only dealing with terror attacks but also working to avert them, destroy criminals in their hideouts, and if necessary, abroad."
In a rare mention of the social causes of terrorism, he hinted at the huge amount of unemployment and poor health of the North Caucuses.
He said terrorism's roots lay in "unemployment, in insufficiently effective socio-economic policy, and in insufficient education ... The district's unemployment rate is several times higher than Russia's average ... All of this provides fertile soil for extremism to grow."
Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment, said the changes were the "logical extension" of Putin's desire to have vertical control of the regions.
"The Constitution still says that the Russian people are the source of power, but [now] there is nothing left in the Constitution to that effect," Shevtsova said.
The changes would not make him a dictator, however, since he valued his invitations to the Group of Eight industrialized countries, and Russian authorities were too corrupt to be authoritarian.
Vladimir Pribyovsky, head of the think tank Panorama, said: "Terrorism is being used as a pretext to change the federal structure of the country."
He said that the planned change to the Constitution might lead to Putin trying to alter the Constitution to allow himself a third term at the elections in 2008.
Before re-election in March, Putin ruled out constitutional change.
Also See Story:
Covering the Beslan hostage drama an exercise in frustration
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the Pentagon on Monday said that some North Korean troops have been killed during combat against Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk border region. Those are the first reported casualties since the US and Ukraine announced that North Korea had sent 10,000 to 12,000 troops to Russia to help it in the almost three-year war. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said that about 30 North Korean troops were killed or wounded during a battle with the Ukrainian army at the weekend. The casualties occurred around three villages in Kursk, where Russia has for four months been trying to quash a
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
ROYAL TARGET: After Prince Andrew lost much of his income due to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, he became vulnerable to foreign agents, an author said British lawmakers failed to act on advice to tighten security laws that could have prevented an alleged Chinese spy from targeting Britain’s Prince Andrew, a former attorney general has said. Dominic Grieve, a former lawmaker who chaired the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) until 2019, said ministers were advised five years ago to introduce laws to criminalize foreign agents, but failed to do so. Similar laws exist in the US and Australia. “We remain without an important weapon in our armory,” Grieve said. “We asked for [this law] in the context of the Russia inquiry report” — which accused the government
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
RSS