Republic Supreme Court Hands Ingush Opposition a Major Victory

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 2 – The Supreme Court of the Republic of Ingushetia has set aside the decision of a lower court which had held that searches in the offices of the Red Cross, the Defense of Ingushetia organization and the Ingush Committee on National Unity were entirely legal.

            The ruling represents a major victory for the Ingush opposition, and its lawyers say they plan to invoke this decision to overrule other rulings backing the intrusive actions of the Yevkurov regime.  How far they will be able to do that, however, remains very much an open question (zamanho.com/?p=10030 and kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/337371/).

            But the dominant events of the day were two articles, one by Anton Chablin in The Caucasus Post about what experts think the new republic head Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov will do next (capost.media/special/sobytiya/kto_teper_budet_rulit_ingushetiey/), and a second by Artur Priymak in NG-Religii on whether the new man can overcome the divisions between the civilian government and the Muslim community (ng.ru/ng_religii/2019-07-02/11_467_aksakal.html).

            Emiliya Slabunova, head of Yabloko, tells Chablin that there is no indication that Kalimatov plans a wholesale changeover among members of the Ingush government or to open up the media so that issues could be discussed there rather than on the street. His failure to do either, she says, is not encouraging as far as what is likely to happen in the near term.

            And Kirill Markelov, a professor at the Stavropol branch of Moscow State University, says that Kalimatov’s lack of deep ties with the republic may very well mean that he will do what Moscow wants and as a result lose support from the Ingush people and suffer the same fate as his predecessors. Unless he breaks free and defends the republic, Kalimatov will not have a happy or long tenure.

            Meanwhile, Priymak addressed the question as to whether the new republic head will be able to restore reasonable ties with the Muslim leadership in Ingushetia. Yunus-Bek Yevkurov had made those leaders his enemies both by his proclivity to set one Muslim group against another and his open hostility to the republic mufti (ng.ru/ng_religii/2019-07-02/11_467_aksakal.html).

            The muftiate in response backed the protesters both last fall and this spring, and  yesterday it announced that it will appeal to the procurator general of the Russian Federation regarding the legality of recent searches in the muftiate and the homes of the mufti and kady, actions that would appear to violate the principles the republic supreme court has now followed.

            Yevkurov’s policy of playing one Muslim group against another in the hopes of undermining the protest movement was one of his most offensive actions, Ruslan Mutsolgov, the head of the republic branch of Yabloko tells Priymak. “We are all Ingush, all Muslims, all one people with a common history religion and language,” he says.

            It was “abnormal,” the activist says, when Yevkurov tried to divide Ingush along religious lines such as Salafis and Sufis.

            Aleksey Malshenko, a Moscow scholar who specializes on Islam and the North Caucasus, adds that the problems Yevkurov had with the Muslim community will be almost as much a challenge to Kalimatov as the issue of the borders with Chechnya and North Ossetia. If the new man gets things wrong, he will like Yevkurov, suffer “a fiasco.”