Ethnicity of Leaders Doesn’t Explain How They Treat Their Own, Ingush Activist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 19 – Magomed Mutsolgov, an Ingush activist, says the events of the last two months in his republic have disabused him of the widespread notion that an ethnic Ingush in a position of behavior will always behave well toward his co-ethnics while an ethnic Russian in an equally high position will behave badly toward non-Russians.

            In fact, he writes on his Kavkaz-Uzel blog, the reverse may often be the case, with someone who is nominally an Ingush mistreating other Ingush while someone who is an ethnic Russia will seek to play by the rules and prevent things from getting out of hand (kavkaz-uzel.eu/blogs/342/posts/35376).

            “I never thought that I would come to such a conclusion,” Mutsolgov says. He was “always certain that if an individual wasn’t linked to the region in which he worked, he would not do anything to show concern about the region entrusted to him … and on the contrary an individual considered part of this region would bring more good to his own people.”

            “But,” the blogger and activist continues, “the events of the last month and a half have shown a somewhat different situation.” On the one hand, Mutsolgov says, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, “who is considered an Ingush ethnically,” betrayed his people, repressed them, and acts like the worst kind of outsider.

            While on the other hand, General Sergey Bachurin, an ethnic Russian who heads the MVD administration in the North Caucasus Federal District, has done everything he could to keep the situation in Ingushetia from spiraling out of control and has shown consistent good will to the Ingush people.

            With “Ingush” like Yevkurov, the blogger says, the real Ingush don’t need any external enemy: they have one right in their own midst.

            Meanwhile, various experts have been discussing another aspect of the Chechen-Ingush border, the demining of the territory.  Work to remove mines there began only in 2012. Some 3,000 mines have been found; and officials say that if there are no delays, the project should be completed in 2022, a decade after it began (regnum.ru/news/polit/2521783.html).