Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 14 – Kamil Landa,
a professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of Economics and State Service,
says that the situation in Daghestan is deteriorating so rapidly that he
believes Moscow must and will intervene forcefully and soon there just as it
did in Chechnya in 1999.
Landa’s observations, which almost
certainly reflect the thinking of some circles in the Kremlin, came in an
interview published today jointly by the Kavkazskaya Politika and Chernovik
internet portals in the North Caucasus (kavpolit.com/dagestan-v-smertelnom-kolce/ and chernovik.net/content/inye-smi/kamil-landa-dagestan-v-smertelnom-kolce).
A
longtime specialist on nationality issues and federal relations, Landa said
that he believes it is absolutely essential to “investigate and identify the
reasons why with each year the situation in [Daghestan] has deteriorated” and
to that end he has conducted a poll of 160, mostly university educated,
Daghestanis in Moscow and in Daghestan itself.
He
said that only 3.5 percent of his sample thought Moscow’s assistance to
Daghestan was reaching the people it was ostensibly for, while 75 percent said
that the funds were being diverted into the pockets of officials and the well-connected.
Given that many of the 160 were members of that category and “know things from
the inside,” that is damning, Landa said.
What
is especially worrisome, the Kremlin-based scholar continued, is that Daghestan
historically was a region of high productivity, so high that one of its
Communist Party secretaries once asked Moscow to make it a union republic
because it contributed more to Moscow than “Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and
Estonia” in Soviet times.
Corruption is eating away at the
institutions of the republic, he continued, and people are ever more accustomed
to equating the authorities and corruption rather than seeing them as should be
the case as antagonists. Landa said he
agreed wth Ibragim Yaganov of Kabardino-Balkaria that now “Moscow is feeding
not the Caucasus but its own bureaucrats in the Caucasus.” That, he said, needs
to change.
Daghestani bureaucrats, he continued,
are “enmeshed in a clientalist-corrupt system” that guarentees them “a piece of
‘the pie’” because they have “protected their rear in advance by working with
officials in Moscow offices.” That has
led to the greatest level of alienation of the population from the authorities
of any federal subject in Russia.
Although there has always been
corruption, “the degradation in the social, economic and political life of
Daghestan is growing with each year, and there is the prospect that at some
point it will lose its political independence and be dismembered into petty
national-territorial formations which will be divided among the classical
conquerors of the Caucasus.”
“Remember the eample of Chechnya,”
Landa continued. “In the ‘pre-Ramzan’ period, one group of top bureaucrats in
Moscow supported Zavgayev, another Dudayev, and yet another, Khadzhiyev or
Gantemrov … But in Chechnya this anti-constitutional clan system came to an end
in the first term of the presidency of Vladimir Putin.”
Moscow should put a similar end to
what is taking place in Daghestan now, and Landa said that he “places enormous
hope on the present leadership of Russia” to do what is necessary once again.
The time for that is now: 75 percent of his sample say that under the new
leadership in Makhachkala the situation will only get worse.
Indeed, the evidence suggests that
in Daghestan there has emerged a kind of “Italian syndrome” in which the
bureaucrats and police behave in ways that lead to the rise of mafia
structures.” As Landa points out, “over the last 15 to 20 years, not a single
major political murder has been solved.” And 61 percent of his sample say they
are convinced that the authorities in most cases wanted these people out of the
way.
Asked if Daghestan is now in a civil
war, Landa says that he agrees that “there are clearly expressed elements of a
civil war” in the republic. There is not a single village or population point
where people cannot be killed with impunity or made to disappear. Some of this
may be ideological, but two thirds of his sample say it is mostly a reflection
of criminal calculations.
And both they and he agree that the
nature of conflict in Daghestan over the last several years has been “transformed
from an inter-national to a ‘local’ one” because “there are within Russia
forces that are interested in preserving in Daghestan a situation of ‘stable
instability’” because they can profit from it.
But this “party of war” is not prepared
to do what is necessary to end the conflict because it really does not see how
it benefits from that. The task of those
who care about the future of Daghestan and of the Russian Federation is to
convince the authorities that they need
to take the kind of action that will invalidate such calculations.
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