Paul Goble
Staunton, May 14 – The creation
of the Southern Federal District strengthened an all-Russia identity in the
region, but the establishment of the North Caucasus FD “seriously harmed” that
process by unintentionally promoting a “North Caucasus” regional identity
rather than “a southern Russian one, according to a Russian specialist on the
region.
In an interview posted online
yesterday, Viktor Chernousov, a researcher at the Black Sea Center of the
Russian Institute of Strategic Studies, argued that the North Caucasus FD had
not solved any of the existing problems Moscow intended it to and had created
new ones as well (riss.ru/index.php/analitika/1791-perspektivy-administrativno-territorialnogo-pereustrojstva-yuga-rossii#.UZIqL8o0EUN).
Despite some successes in
anti-terrorist work, he says, “terrorism in the North Caucasus remains the main
problem of the region.” There has been some economic improvement, but the
region still requires enormous outside funding. And some of the models of
economic development that have been used have “exacerbated many inter-ethnic
problems.”
All of these problems could have
been addressed just as well in the pre-existing Southern FD, Chernousov
insists. Moreover, the carving out of the North Caucasus FD helped Georgia’s
Mikhail Saakashvili and “radical ethno-nationalists” to set “the common-Caucasian identity of the peoples of the
North Caucasus against Russian identity.”
That in
turn, the researcher continued, made the ethnic Russian population of the area
even more uncomfortable than it had been and contributed to the exodus of the
ethnic Russian and Russian-language population and “to the further weakening of
[non-ethnic] Russian identity.”
In
Stavropol kray, the creation of the North Caucasus FD exacerbated Russian
concerns, he observes, and has sparked demands that that multi-national
territory be transformed “into a Russian or Slavic Republic or Terek oblast
with a compact ethnic Russian, including Cossack, population.”
It is
now common ground that the North Caucasus FD was created primarily to deal with
“the problem of security” at the upcoming Sochi Olympiad. But the problems with
this FD make further administrative-territorial transformations “practically
inevitable,” despite the fact that changes will create new difficulties and
thus won’t happen until after Sochi.
Meanwhile,
various proposals are circulating, many of which would entail real dangers. In
particular, there is a proposal to put Daghestan, Ingushetia, and Chechnya in a
single Northeast Caucasus FD so as to deal with the terrorist challenge. But that
would make the situation worse by “transforming this region into ‘an internal
abroad of Russia,’” something that would promote further Islamization and
Russian flight.
Another
idea being floated, Chernousov says, would include in a single district
Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia and North Osetia. That would not
resolve the Circassian problem but rather increase calls for “the establishment
of a single Circassian federal subject and a single Karachayevo-Balkar subject”
as well.
And yet
a third would fold into one FD Stavropol kray, Krasnodar kray, and Rostov
oblast. Such an entity would be
functional but its creation would weaken the influence of these “more developed”
regions on the rest of the North Caucasus and make them even more attractive
for immigrants from the North and South Caucasus.
All too often, the researcher says,
Moscow draws lines on the basis of economic calculations alone failing to see
that what it does will be affected by the ethnicity of the populations
involved. It is important that the
center not make that kind of mistake in the future especially in the current
environment
“The
disintegration of the USSR led to the segmentation of the region,” Chernousov
says. “To give a new impulse to integrative processes, to defeat separatist
Ichkeria, and to destroy the nest of international terrorism,” Moscow set up
the Southern FD. It was relatively successful and would have been even more so
had its leaders not been changed so often.
That
is something the Russian government needs to recognize, he continues, along
with a fact many in Moscow are not yet willing to: “market fundamentalism” as
state policy means that “there are no administrative levers” to address many of
the problems in the North Caucasus whatever borders are ultimately drawn.
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