Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 19 – The ways in
which the collapse of the social-economic system, the inactivity and
unresponsiveness of officials, and massive corruption have combined to make the
eastern portion of Russia’s Stavropol Kray into a seedbed of terrorism have
been documented in the course of a series of trials there.
In an article posted on the “Kavkazskaya
politika” site yesterday, Anton Chablin argues that it is these factors more
than anything else that are contributing to the emergence of terrorists and
terrorist activities in what was once one of the Russian Federation’s most
stable and profitable regions (kavpolit.com/vzryv-s-vostoka/).
Moreover,
the journalist says, people in the Neftekumsk district understand that even if
government officials do not. They have told him repeatedly that their region is
“a territory of the deepest social depression,” one with little or no economic
development and little or no government attention to their needs.
Half
of the enterprises registered there are farms and most of them are small and
unprofitable, and the larger enterprises that do exist, in their search for
cheap labor, are turning ever more often to outsiders “from the neighboring
republics of the Eastern Caucasus” to ensure corporate profits regardless of
the consequences.
The
largest enterprise in the district, Chablin points out, is Rosneft, but it has
been cutting production as a result of the exhaustion of oil reserves, and
cutting its local workforce as a result. More reserves exist, but they will
require expensive new technologies, something that will require outside
investment. But that won’t come because of the emergence of terrorism there.
The reasons for that, the journalist says,
have all come out at a series of trials over the last month which have led to
long prison terms for the terrorists who were convicted but which had the same
time have shown a bright light on the ways in which Islamist groups from
Daghestan, at the other end of the North Caucasus, have exploited the situation
in Stavropol.
Chablin describes each of these
trials and what they show in detail, underlining both the ideological
influences of Daghestanis, the most Islamic of the North Caucasus republics, on
Stavropol and the ways in which people from there have been able to fish in the
troubled waters of that kray and especially among the other North Caucasians
there.
The specifics of these cases show
that the terrorists are as yet not especially sophisticated – most of their
schemes fail less because of official opposition than because of their own lack
of skills – but that their number is increasing, not decreasing, in the face of
crackdowns carried out by Russia’s special services.
The fact that open court cases show
all that may be one of the reasons that the special services appear to prefer
to kill terrorists rather than bring them to justice, but unless Russian
officials act to address the problems these trials highlight, the problems they
and the residents of this region face will only increase.
On the one hand, in the absence of
official action to address both the terrorist threat and the underlying
social-economic problems, there will be more clashes between the indigenous ethnic
Russians and the arrivals from the North Caucasus and more militant actions by
the latter in the coming months.
And on the other, if officials do
not attend to these problems, there will be even more Russian flight from the
area, a development that will reduce still further Moscow’s hold on Stavropol
and force enterprises there to import more North Caucasian workers, a process
that threatens to become a vicious circle for the authorities.
No comments:
Post a Comment