For First Time Since March 2019, Ingush Protesters Clash with Police

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 30 – For the first time since the March 2019 protests that resulted in numerous arrests and continuing detentions, Ingush protesters clashed with silovik in Magas. This time, the protesters were a group of Ingush who had been forced to flee Chechnya and sought to make a video appeal to Vladimir Putin.

            The police asked them to move away from the building in which republic head Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov has his office, but the protesters refused to do so voluntarily and were pushed back by the siloviki with little ceremony (fortanga.org/2020/06/popytka-obratitsya-k-putinu-zakonchilas-potasovkoj-s-silovikami/ and https://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/351385/).

            The issue of the fate of those Ingush forced to flee Chechnya when the two republics divided or during the war is a sensitive and neuralgic one, with the authorities promising to do more than they have and the issue increasingly wrapped up with the question of the border change of September 2018.

            Today’s demonstration was relatively small – a few dozen protesters, pictures suggest – and did not result in detentions; but the fact that it happened at all shows that tensions between the Ingush and the siloviki remain high and that the former have no intention of backing down unless their issues are addressed or the authorities are willing to use superior force.

            Meanwhile, there were two other developments of note there. On the one hand, the much-detested ethnic Russian outsider who heads the bailiffs’ office in Ingushetia ordered prayer rooms in his institution closed, an action many say shows his complete lack of respect for Islam (doshdu.com/glavnyj-sudebnyj-pristav-ingushetii-shatin-zapretil-molelnye-komnaty/).

            Ethnic Ingush employed in the bailiffs’ office had earlier appealed to Moscow to have Maksim Shatin removed because of his drunkenness and attacks on Muslim traditions, including the wearing of the hijab. Closing the prayer rooms will only add impetus to these demands.

            And on the other, the day before the July 1 referendum, ever more Ingush public figures spoke out, denouncing the proposed changes, predicting massive falsification, and calling on Ingush either to boycott or vote no – and in the latter case to photograph their ballots (fortanga.org/2020/06/deputat-parlamenta-ingushetii-protiv-popravok-v-konstitutsiyu-strany/, fortanga.org/2020/06/nyneshnij-protsess-izmeneniya-konstitutsii-eto-fars/ and https://fortanga.org/2020/06/tsel-popravok-v-konstitutsiyu-perelozhit-otvetstvennost-na-narod/).