Teips Call for Convention of an All-Ingush Congress as Republic Constitution and Laws Allow

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 12 – The teips of Ingushetia have called on republic head Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov to convene an all-Ingush congress to address the most pressing problems of the republic, an action sanctioned by Article 105 of the republic constitution and the republic’s law “On the Congress of the People of Ingushetia” (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/342287/).

            Kalimatov has not yet responded, but he is unlikely to respond positively because if such a congress were convened, it would add its voice to the other demands of the Ingush protesters and the teips: the annulment of border agreements with Chechnya and North Ossetia, the release of political prisoners, and the restoration of direct elections of the republic head.

            In reporting this development, the Kavkaz-Uzel news agency surveyed the opinions of four close observers of the Ingush scene as to what the teip meeting and its demands indicate about the changes among the Ingush people since former republic head Yunus-Bek Yevkurov yielded territory to Chechnya in September 2018 and sparked the subsequent protests.

            Ruslan Albakov-Myarshkhi, an Ingush publicist, says that over the last year, the Ingush people “have united still more tightly” because of “pressure and persecution.” At some point, when Russia becomes “a normal parliamentary democracy,” this unity will allow Ingushetia to reach agreements with all its neighbors.

             Irina Starodubrovskaya, a regional specialist at the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, points out that “of all the North Caucasus societies, the Ingush is the most traditional” and families and teips “play a big role in it.”  But Ingush society has been changing over the last several years; and the protests have been “a catalyst” for the most dramatic changes. 

            There is now a new unity broader than just among individual teips, she continues. Even though so many of the protest leaders have been arrested, Ingush “continue to provide them help and support. Such persistence is producing a strong impression” and speaks to the ways in which the Ingush have become a unified nation.

            Mikhail Roshchin of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies says that the protests “became the cause of the activation of Ingush social organizations.” This new activism “led to a political crisis in the republic and the retirement of Yevkurov.”  The teip meeting in fact is now a meeting of the entire Ingush people.

            And Izabella Yevloyeva, the editor of the embattled Fortanga news agency stresses that the meeting demonstrated that the Ingush protest movement is “alive” but “has passed into a new form.”  Earlier, it took the form of meetings and street demonstrations. Now, it involves work in the courts and the political system.

            “The Ingush Committee for National Unity is working. Lawyers, deputies, and representatives of society and the commission on the demarcation of the border are working. How effective this will be only time will tell,” Yevloyeva says. If this effort breaks down, more protests are likely simply because of popular frustration with the powers that be.

            So far, however, the leaders of the movement, both those in jail and those still in freedom, are convinced that they achieve more by less confrontational means and so do not want to put the Ingush who would come out to demonstrate at risk of official reprisals and persecution, the Fortanga editor concludes.