Ingush Boycott Won’t Prevent Magas from Claiming ’99.9 Percent’ Back Putin’s Amendments, Mokhoy Teip Leaders Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 19 – The leaders of the more than a dozen families who are members of the Mokhoy teip says that the boycott of the April 22 referendum it and other teips have called for won’t prevent the republic government from declaring “as always” that 99.9 percent of Ingush support the Kremlin.

            ”We know that nothing depends on our voting,” the teip council says; but we also know that “we do not have the moral right to take part” in this fraud coming as it does on top of 250 years of Russia’s betrayal of the Ingush people (fortanga.org/2020/03/otkrytoe-pismo-tejpa-mohloj-k-prezidentu-putinu-o-bojkote-golosovaniya-po-popravkam-v-konstitutsiyu-rf/).

            “The Ingush people have never violated the oaths their ancestor gave to Russia” 250 years ago, “but the Russian authorities have repeatedly violated the rights and lawful interests of the Ingush people,” destroying their villages, forcing many into emigration, deporting them, and supporting their loss of land in 1992 and 2018.

            Meanwhile, lawyers for Bagaudin Khautiyev whose detention has just been extended detailed the substantive rights and procedural rules the Russian courts have violated in his case as well as in those of other Ingush detainees, including in particular failure to announce decisions in a timely manner to defense teams (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/347275/).

            And Magas continued to tighten its control over civil society institutions by replacing Layla Amerkhanova of the Mothers of Russia as Ingushetia’s representative to the Russian Social Chamber with Magomet Batyrov, a longtime employee of the Ingush government (fortanga.org/2020/03/izbran-novyj-predstavitel-ingushetii-v-obshhestvennoj-palate-lejla-amerhanova-pokidaet-svoj-post/).