Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 3 – Ingushetia is
the poorest republic in the North Caucasus but the one with the liveliest NGO
sector, but instead of working with those groups to address problems, many of
which are far from politics, the powers that be view them as a threat and seek
to close them down, Mila Tsvinkau says (fortanga.org/2020/08/tretij-sektor-v-ingushetii-initsiativa-nakazuema/).
That is because the NGO's focus on problems in Ingush society, no matter how distant from politics including such things as special education and access for the handicapped, is invariably viewed as an implicit criticism of the powers that be, something the latter cannot tolerate, according to the Fortanga journalist.
Moves
against NGOs began a decade ago, she continues. In
2012, the Russian FSB accused Ingushetia’s third sector of being the agent of
foreign intelligence services, using support for democratic change as a cover
for gathering information their paymasters want (magas.bezformata.com/listnews/ingushetii-nedoumevayut-v-svyazi-s-resheniem/7148879/).
After
protests against the 2018 deal in which Yunus-Bek Yevkurov gave away ten
percent of the republic’s territory to Chechnya, official repressive against
NGOs of all kinds in Ingushetia intensified, with more than 20 of them
subjected to unannounced inspections and many brought into court and ordered
disbanded as “foreign agents” in violation of Russian law.
Toward
that end, the powers that be suborned witnesses and posted fake interviews with
NGO leaders on fake news websites and then used both of these as “evidence” of
their political perfidy and demanded, successfully, that the courts close these
organizations down, the journalist continues.
Even
when the powers did not close an NGO, labelling one a foreign agent made it far
more difficult for those involved to continue to work because many in the
population and even more in the government with which the NGO in question had
to work refused to have anything to do with it.
Two
government efforts to shutter the third sector have been especially noxious and,
it must be said, counterproductive. The first involves the efforts to close
down the Council of Teips. The authorities got the courts to ban it under one
name, but the group simply renamed itself and continued to operate.
The
powers that be are trying to close it as well, but there are two problems:
There is no limit to the names that the organizations that form the basis of
Ingush society can choose and continue to operate, one step ahead of the powers
and the courts; and if the teips are shut out of public life, they will still
exist but be increasingly independent of and at odds to the regime.
The
new teip organization already has signaled its willingness to move in that
direction by refusing to register, arguing that there is no requirement for such
a group to do so. As a result, the regime has cost itself an interlocutor, and
society has a new center of power to look to, not exactly what the government
had hoped for.
The
case of the Ingush Committee for National Unity is similar. The group didn’t
register because it was only a temporary coordinating committee to help prepare
meetings against the border change. Nonetheless, the government has banned it
and arrested its leaders, viewing them as extremist.
But
in response, Tsvinkau says, the committee has taken on new tasks and a more
permanent form: Its most immediate goal is the liberation of Ingush political
prisoners and the return from exile those of its members, like Izabella
Yevloyeva, who have been forced to flee abroad.
Yevloyeva,
the founder of the Fortanga site, says that ICNU will continue to function
under one name or another or even without a name at all. “People have a goal,
and they will seek to achieve it by those means which they now have access to.”
The powers that be don’t seem to understand that.
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