Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 17 – In response
to attacks on Russian churches and commercial centers, ethnic Russians have
fled North Daghestan over the last two decades, creating countless human
tragedies for those who had lived there and reducing Moscow’s ability to influence
or even control that most Muslim of North Caucasus republics, Yury Soshin says.
But despite these costs and dangers,
the APN analyst continues, the Moscow media in recent years have with rare
exceptions not focused on the attacks Daghestanis have made on Russians and
Russian institutions or on the flight of Russians from places that had had
Russian majorities as recently as 1991 (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=38160).
An exception to this pattern came
when an Islamist fanatic attacked the Russian Orthodox church in Kizlyar and
shot five elderly Russian parishioners in February 2018 – on that event, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/02/daghestani-militants-attack-ethnic.html
– but attacks since that time have been ignored.
But other attacks by Daghestanis and
by Daghestani authorities on Russians have failed to get media attention and as
a result, they are intensifying given that both ordinary Daghestanis and those
in positions of authority feel they can attack Russians and Russian
institutions with impunity, Soshin says.
Last fall, for example, a Russian
cemetery in Khasavyurt was desecrated, something that the APN commentator
suggests cannot be called anything but “an act of terror.” Despite that, the Moscow
media did not report it at all and the local authorities tried to cover up the
crime rather than identify and bring to justice those responsible.
Now, this anti-Russian wave has
taken a new form, Soshin continues. The authorities there, on the heels of
popular attacks on Russian activists who are seeking to defend Russians, have
begun to use the powers of the state against such activists in the hopes of
silencing them lest they embarrass Daghestan.
The clearest example of this concerns
the persecution over the last decade of the Ilins, a Cossack family, that has
been subject to armed attacks that have involved gunshots and fire bombings but
has not gotten justice. Instead, the authorities have ignored the attacks brought
fake charges against members of the family and persecuted the family in other
ways.
Local officials have taken away part
of the land of the family, they have blocked the bank accounts of its members
so they can’t get their pensions (and even when courts overruled that action,
the accounts have stayed blocked), and they have detained without sufficient
evidence many of its members so they cannot support other members of the
family.
In the face of these attacks and
certainly one of the reasons they are continuing, Soshin continues, Viktor Ilin
has joined with his neighbors in preparing An Analytic Report on the
Effectiveness of Measures for Reducing the Outflow of Ethnic Russians and Cossacks
from the Republic of Daghestan (in Russian, text available at apn.ru/index.php?newsid=36820).
The authors have sent this to
officials in Moscow, and they have garnered support from other Russians and Cossacks
in the region in two petition campaigns. (One garnered 160 signatures; the other
250.) But again and at least so far, neither the Russian authorities nor the
Moscow media have paid attention.
Unless that changes, Soshin
suggests, Moscow may soon wake up to a situation in which it won’t have the
issue of ethnic Russians in Daghestan to deal with not because their rights
will be respected but because there won’t be any of them left. In that event,
the future of Russians elsewhere in the North Caucasus and of Russian control of
the region will be anything but bright.
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