Sunday, May 5, 2019

FSB Now Treating Ingushetia’s Mountainous Areas Like State Border Region


Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 4 – The FSB has announced restrictions on travel by Russian Federation citizens and foreigners who want to travel in Ingushetia’s Dzherakh district.  Citizens must have a passport and a pass; non-citizens must get FSB permission (http://zamanho.com/?p=7259 and gazetaingush.ru/news/pogranichniki-napomnili-turistam-o-pravilah-vezda-v-gornyy-rayon-ingushetii).

            Even ethnic Ingush who come from elsewhere must now get permission to enter this region, thus completing the transfer of a part of the republic that even Yunus-Bek Yevkurov has called on Ingush to visit to promote tourism into something like the restricted zone that the FSB has restored along Russian borders much as the KGB did along Soviet ones before 1991. 

            Meanwhile, the Ingush and Russian authorities continue to tighten the screws around Ingush opposition figures. A court in the republic has now imposed a fine on a local resident for posting critical comments on line (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/335095/), and Moscow police have arrested an Ingush family there for having taken part in protests (fortanga.org/2019/05/tselaya-semya-iz-ingushetii-stala-obektom-vnimaniya-so-storony-silovikov-za-proyavlenie-svoej-grazhdanskoj-pozitsii/).

                Nonetheless, Ingush activists continue to call on officials to do justice and obey the law rather than persecute citizens who are simply trying to express their opinions in legal ways (zamanho.com/?p=7254), actions that Ingush bloggers doubt will have any impact at all on the behavior of the authorities (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/335068/).

            And Ingush opposition groups took heart from the support they have received from Akhmed Zakayev, the head of the Chechen government in exile in London, who backs his fellow Vainakhs against Moscow-imposed officials like Yevkurov (fortanga.org/2019/05/ahmed-zakaev-podderzhal-ingushskij-miting-v-londone-video/).

No comments:

Post a Comment