Yevkurov’s Border Deal a Year Ago Today Unified Ingush Society, Three Commentators Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 16 – When former republic head Yunus-Bek Yevkurov a year ago today secretly signed a deal with Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov giving away 26,000 hectares of Ingush land, commentator Anton Chablin says, he achieved two things, neither of which he anticipated or wanted (6portal.ru/posts/консолидация-общества-главный-итог/).

            On the one hand, he unified Ingush society as never before against him and that decision; and on the other, he signed his own political death sentence, something even Moscow could not avoid carrying out given the unity of the Ingush people with regard to the criminal deal and Yevkurov’s participation in it.

            A second commentator, Akhmed Buzurtanov of Fortanga, agrees and agues that “despite the fact that the majority of the demands of the Ingush protest remain unfulfilled and dozens of activists are still under arrest, the Ingush people has achieved much.” He lists the following victories over the last 12 months (fortanga.org/2019/09/chego-dobilsya-ingushskij-narod/):

·         “We have shown the entire world that we are able to come together in difficult moments for our people.”

·         “At the highest organizational level, we conducted a two-week-long meeting, something unprecedented in the contemporary history of Russia, in which took part more than 100,000 people. And during the entire time of the meeting did not occur a single violation of the law or excess.”

·         “Ingush law enforcement personnel, ensuring order at the place of the meeting, displayed solidarity with the people and did not allow any force operations against the protesters.”

·         “Over the course of the year, we supported protests and conducted numerous meetings both in Ingushetia and throughout the entire world and an enormous number of actions and measures to defend our right to territorial integrity and statehood.”

·         “The Constitutional Court of Ingushetia, despite colossal pressure from Yevkurov and his minions, held the law  about the approval of the agreement on the border to be in contradiction with the Constitution of the Republic of Ingushetia and declared that a referendum must be held on this accord.”

·         “The initiative group three times appealed to the Election Commission of Ingushetia about the holding of a referendum but on the basis of invented pretexts, their appeals were rejected, thereby showing that the powers that be were afraid of the opinion of the people.”

·         “We collected 51,000 signatures on an appeal to Russian President V. Putin with the demand that the anti-people agreement by annulled and Yevkurov retired, an action which albeit with a delay and only partially was nonetheless satisfied.”

·         “Our activists conducted a social investigation into many cases of corruption in Yevkurov’s command and publicized them.   As a result, many criminal cases were opened.”

·         “We blocked the scenario of the powers to define the borders with out Western neighbors according to which it was planned that Ingushetia would concede the Prigorodny district” to North Ossetia.

·         “As a result of the protest, the possibility of uniting Ingushetia with the Chechen Republic under the leadership of Kadyrov was put off for a long time.  That unification was supposed to occur immediately after the signing of the agreement about the border with Ossetia.”

·         “And we did not allow Yevkurov and Kadyrov to transform the Ingush into a society with out rights and with a slavish way of thinking. Instead, we defended our freedom which we value most of all.” 

And a third commentator, Akhmed Pogorov, the vice president of the Union of Teips of the People of Ingusheetia who remains free despite being on a Russian most wanted list, adds that the Ingush people can take pride in the fact that they have declared September 26 to be the Day of the National Traitor (fortanga.org/2019/09/pogorov-a-obratilsya-k-ingushskomu-narodu-v-svyazi-s-godovshhinoj-podpisaniya-antinarodnogo-soglasheniya/).

“The Ingush people,” he says, “will never forget the names of the national traitors who were involved with giving up its territory and never will come to terms with the illegal change of its territory.” Instead, they will continue to struggle “with all legal means to restore the territorial integrity of Ingushetia and the freeing of all illegally arrested participants in peaceful protests.”

Meanwhile and in another indication that the authorities are increasing rather than reducing repression, siloviki raided the offices of the Ingush Institute of Social Change in Nazran saying that they were inspecting all NGOs which reportedly receive money from foreign sources (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/340572/).