Date: Tues 16 Sept 08
From: Robert Bruce Ware (ississ@ymail.com)
Subject: After South Ossetia, Time to Restore the Prigorodny District
(Robert Bruce Ware is a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His book on Dagestan: Russian Hegemony and Islamic Resistance is forthcoming from M. E. Sharpe.)
As measured in terms of their waning rhetoric, leaders in the EU and the United States are just beginning to grasp their current Caucasian circumstances. Over the past 15 years, the West has so bungled its relations with Russia that it can presently aspire to little more than irrelevance. Other Americans have noted that Vice President Cheney has promised USD 1 bn in aid to the Georgia that lies between Russia and Turkey, while the Georgia that lies between Florida and Tennessee languishes in disrepair.
On the other hand, and despite the fact that it has bungled its relations with the Caucasus over the same 15 years, Russia still has plenty of options. Among the best of these is the return of the Prigorodny District to Ingushetia. There is a remarkable symmetry between the fates of South Ossetia and the Prigorodny District. Prigorodny is now a part of Russia’s North Ossetia, and this is the time for Russia to take note of that symmetry.
Both of these districts are the arbitrary detritus of Russian expansionism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Russia annexed South Ossetia along with Georgia in 1801. There followed a series of Ossetian rebellions that variously pitted Ossetians against Russians and Georgians. During the Soviet period, South Ossetia remained a part of Georgia, but was granted broad autonomy that included recognition of the Ossetian language. A series of Ossetian uprisings began in 1989, culminating in warfare between Ossetia and Georgia in 1991. About 1,000 Ossetians died, and ten times as many fled across the border into Russia’s North Ossetia. Many of these refugees settled in the Prigorodny District.
The Prigorodny District had been part of the neighboring Checheno-Ingush Republic until 1944. In that year, Stalin brutally deported the entire Chechen and Ingush populations to Central Asia. In the 1950s and 1960s many of the Ingushis returned to their homeland, but they found Ossetians living in their homes and occupying their lands. Though the Checheno-Ingush Republic was partially restored, the Prigorodny District remained a part of North Ossetia. In 1991, the Ingush declared their right to Prigorodny under Soviet law. Occasional skirmishes erupted into a brief-but-bloody war between the Ingush and the Ossetians in 1992. Russian troops backed the Christian Ossetians against the predominantly Muslim Ingush, just as they supported the Ossetians against the Georgians.
Earlier in 1992, the Ingush separated from the Chechens in order to avoid the radicalism that was overtaking the latter group at the time. Torn between Chechnya and Ossetia, Ingushetia now became a narrow splinter of a North Caucasian republic without a real urban center or an intellectual culture to call its own. Yet the loss of the Prigorodny District remained a bitter pill for the Ingush. Many of the Ingush who were forcibly ejected from this land have spent two generations as political refugees, often inhabiting miserable squatters' settlements.
The failure of Ingushetian President Murat Zyazikov to address the Prigorodny issue has done more than anything else to leave him without a local political base. Without the loyalty of his people, Zyazikova former security service colonelhas depended upon the law enforcement apparatus to maintain control. Since 2004, the result has been a vicious cycle of police brutality, political alienation, and radicalism. Attacks on security personnel have become near-daily events in Ingushetia. On August 31, the Ingushi opposition leader, Magomed Yevloyev, died “accidentally” from a bullet in his temple while he was in police custody.
The Prigorodny District is nearly identical in its size to South Ossetia. The latter is now irrevocably restored to the Russian sphere of influence. Since the North Ossetians now stand to gain South Ossetia in one form or another, they finally should be asked to give up Prigorodny. Doing so would restore justice to the Ingush, reduce violence, and improve stability in the Caucasus over the long term.
Clearly, this is in Moscow’s interest. Indeed, it would also be in the interest of the EU or the US to gain the high ground by proposing it now.