Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 26 – While the
world is focused on developments in Ukraine and on Vladimir Putin’s
increasingly aggressive approach to its neighbors, few have noticed that Moscow
is rapidly losing any chance of retaining the North Caucasus within the borders
of the Russian Federation, according to Israeli analyst Avraam Shmulyevich.
Shmulyevich argues that “over the
last 20 years, the Caucasus has been transformed into a typical colony,” one
that the post-Soviet Russian government has not sought to integrate as the
Soviets did but rather to ensure the metropole’s control of the region
primarily by force and violence (maxpark.com/community/politic/content/3182941).
Instead of pacifying the region,
Moscow’s approach has produced exactly the opposite. Across the North Caucasus,
anti-Russian attitudes have intensified, Russians have fled, and “a full-scale
partisan war under religious banners is continuing,” a war that the Russian
force structures show no signs of being able to win.
In many parts of the North Caucasus,
people now live “not according to the laws of the Russian Federation” but
according to Islamic shariat law. Chechnya under Kadyrov “does not have any
relation to the constitutional system of Russia,” Daghestan has shariat courts
almost everywhere.
Thus, Shmulyevich says, as in many
other colonies in the past, “during the day, power is in the hands of the
federal forces, but at night in those of the Muslim partisans.”
Despite being more powerful and more
clever than Russia has been, neither Great Britain nor France were able to
prevent such movements from driving them out of their colonies. “The process of
decolonization is objective.” In the past,
the Kremlin might have been able to stem things by promoting genuine federalism
and integration, but it has passed on those options.
Now, “even if they wanted to become
a federation,” the Russian authorities could not introduce it or make anyone
believe that it would have real content, the Israeli analyst says. “For the
last 20 years, the Russian hierarchy has talked a lot, but it has not carried
out a single major project in this regard.”
Many in the West still accept the notion
that Russia is a “stabilizing force” in the North Caucasus, but this “does not
correspond to reality,” Shmulyevich says. Instead, the situation is “exactly the
opposite: all the destructive processes there have been made worse by the
attempts of Moscow to resolve them.”
This is not to say that there are
not variations within the region. The situation in the Circassian republics,
Adygeya, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachayevo-Cherkesiya, is different than in
Daghestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia. In the latter group, “there is already no
Russian population” to hold thing together.
In the others, there is still a Russian anchor.
The economy of the North Caucasus is
in ruins, and ever more people in Moscow oppose sending good money after bad to
try to fix it, limited only by the fact that so many Russian officials profit
from skimming off funds intended to help people in the region. But their
willingness to do so will decline as financial stringency increases and
Russians flee.
And that will only accelerate the
process under which political Islam will become the unifying ideology of the region.
Young people there are now joining the militants in increasing numbers because
of the injustice and oppression they see all around them, just as their
counterparts in other colonies have done.
Consequently, those who speculate
about the possibility of a new war in the North Caucasus are behind the curve.
The partisan war there continues and “in its intensity, it is beginning to
exceed those in Iraq and Afghanistan.” And the best evidence that this is the
case come from the militants themselves, Shmulyevich says.
They have told him, he notes, that “they
are ready to take power, but they are not prepared to hold it.” They could not
withstand a concerted military action to drive them from office, and therefore
for the time being, they are “avoiding direct clashes,” seeking instead to
strengthen themselves with the population and driving out federal
representatives.
Again, as Shmulyevich points out,
just exactly as national liberation movements have behaved elsewhere in the colonial
world.
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