Ingush Petition Putin to Annul Border Accord with Chechnya and to Return District in North Ossetia to Their Republic

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 18 – Ingush activists today handed into the Russian Presidential Administration a petition with more than 51,000 signatures calling on Vladimir Putin to annul the border accord between Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov and to give back to Ingushetia the Prigorodny district it lost to North Ossetia earlier.   

            The petition, which began to be circulated in Ingushetia in early December, has 51,319 signatures.  What is important is that the demands of the Ingush have now grown from the reversal of the September 26 accord with Chechnya to a reversal of the outcome of the bloody conflict with North Ossetia in 1992 (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/330505/).

            That expansion in demands is yet another consequence of the border accord between the two republic leaders that the Russian Constitutional Court has ruled legitimate and an indication that as the fight to defend the smallest federal district other than cities from any loss of territory is going to continue and even grow. 

            Three other developments also ensure that the political situation in and around Ingushetia is going to deteriorate further in the coming days:

·         First, the Ingush government convened a rump meeting of the republic parliament, rump because those deputies who earlier voted against the border accord were not informed that the meeting would occur, thus denying them a chance to speak and allowing the government to ram through some unpopular changes (fortanga.org/2019/01/deputatskie-igry-v-ryadah-parlamentariev-neingushskogo-narodnogo-sobraniya-ingushetii/).

·         Second, in an indication that the Council of Teips of the Ingush People is going to remain politically active, its chairman Malsag Uzhakhov said that his group would convene a mass meeting if the government didn’t meet its promises to provide compensation to hard pressed residents so that they could deal with rising housing costs (fortanga.org/2019/01/sovet-tejpov-planiruet-miting-iz-za-zaderzhki-vyplat-grazhdanam/).

·         And third, Grozny announced that it was organizing an excursion on January 26 for Chechens to visit the regions the republic recently annexed from Ingushetia, an action that many Ingush will view as a provocation and may seek to interfere with (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/330451/).