Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 15 – Lawyers for Ingush
detainees who have had their scheduled trials shifted from Ingushetia to other
federal subjects are appealing that Russian Supreme Court decision to the full
court and may turn to the European Court for Human Rights if they do not
succeed in overturning that ruling (kavkazr.com/a/30273707.html).
Meanwhile, Chechen scholars and
lawyers have dismissed claims by Ingush activists to various territories,
including those transferred to Chechnya by the September 2018 accord between
former Ingush head Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov (kavkazr.com/a/30273111.html and
kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/342379/).
The Chechens say that Ingush use of
historical documents to make their case is inappropriate and unconvincing because
borders have changed not only their location but meaning and population shifts mean
that an area that may have been populated by one group in the past is now the home
of those who have moved in.
As far as the claims to the Sundzhe
district are concerned, one Chechen said, the Ingush have adopted the strategy
that is captured in an old Chechen saying: “If you want to defend something
nearby, dispute something far away,” a possible indication that Grozny
considers that Chechen borders with Ingushetia should be changed yet again.
There were two other articles today addressing
some key issues. In the first, Ayup Gagiyev, the head of the Ingush section of the
Association of the Lawyers of Russia, said that a major cause for Yevkurov’s
mistake with Chechnya was the absence of a serious historical and legal
assessment of the 1992 conflict with North Ossetia over the Prigorodny district.
Had such an assessment been
available, he suggests, Yevkurov would have known better than to make
concessions to Kadyrov; and there would not have been the wave of protests that
have roiled Ingushetia since. Gagiyev thus calls for the preparation of such an
assessment in the coming months (6portal.ru/posts/пробелы-историко-юридической-оценки/).
In the second, Murad Daskiyev, acting
president of the Union of Teips of the Ingush People, says that the authorities
have always put pressure on the Union but that “we always declare in our
appeals that we are not the opposition: we say that we are a bridge between the
authorities and society and defend the rights of citizens” (kavkazr.com/a/30273612.html).
The Union includes representatives of
112 teips and more than 200 Ingush families, he continues. It was established
in 2015 and officially registered in 2017.
Yevkurov initially supported the idea but rejected it when the leaders
of the teips insisted on their right to speak and act independently of the powers
that be.
“Our protests are sometimes compared
with the Bolotnaya Square meetings in Moscow,” and some in Moscow and Magas
have spread lies that we too receive money from abroad in order to “destabilize
the situation in the North Caucasus and undermine Russian statehood.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
We oppose being called “’the Ingush
Bolotnaya.’ We have different goals and are for the solution of concrete
problems. We do not have as our goal the overturning of the system or the
authorities. We are against the illegal, in our view, transfer of land and against
the violation of the laws of the Russian Federation and of Ingushetia.”
Magas’ repressive policies have
continued unchanged under Yevkurov’s successor, Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov, Daskiyev
says. The Ingush people will not retreat
from their opposition to the handing over of Ingush land to Chechnya. For the
Ingush, he says, “this isn’t politics; for them, it is life itself, the present
and future of their children.”
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