North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
On July 22, the election officials of Chechnya's pro-Moscow administration formally rejected the registration of Malik Saidullaev as a candidate in the republic's special presidential election scheduled for the end of August. The pro-Moscow authorities thus removed from contention the one serious competitor to Kremlin-anointed candidate Alu Alkhanov, who is now being given saturation, Putinstyle coverage by the state-controlled broadcast media.
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
A mine exploded in Grozny on July 13 just as a large, highly guarded convoy was passing which included the car of Sergei Abramov, who has of course been acting president of Chechnya's pro-Moscow administration since the assassination of Akhmad Kadyrov more than two months ago. Abramov, who was riding an armored Volga limousine, was not harmed—but one of his bodyguards in an accompanying car was killed and another wounded. Abramov's adviser Andrei Aleksintsev was also seriously wounded. An official of the republic's Interior Ministry told journalists that the mine was probably detonated by a remote control.
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
This evening (Wednesday, July 14), the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., is to host a panel of experts on the topic “Chechnya after a Decade of Destruction.” Featured speakers are Chechen medical doctor Khassan Baiev, author of The Oath: A Chechen Surgeon Under Fire; Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch; and photojournalist Stanley Greene, author of Open Wound: Chechnya, 1994-2003. The panel is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
Just how passive was the federal military during last month's rebel raid on Ingushetia? Issa Kostoev, who represents Ingushetia in the upper house of the federal parliament, provided further revelations in an interview with Sanobar Shermatova published by the weekly Moskovskie novosti on July 1. According to Kostoev, federal forces were summoned from neighboring Chechnya and Northern Ossetia, but halted at the Ingushetian border, just a few kilometers from the guerrilla attacks. “It's obvious even to someone with no military expertise,” he said, “that the guerrillas were going to have to leave [Ingushetia] in the direction of the Assa Gorge [in southern Ingushetia]; all other routes were closed to them. And that is just what they did. One group escaped to the gorge through the village of Nesterovskaya [near Ingushetia's eastern border with Chechnya], another through Surkhakhi and Ekazhevo [just southeast of Nazran]. It would seem that those were the places where they should have been blocked—but that was not done.
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
On June 27, a conflict surfaced between Ingushetia's president Murat Zyazikov and his former employer, the Federal Security Service (FSB). According to a report published that same day by the Newsru.com website, the Ingushetian branch of the FSB claimed it learned in advance that a guerrilla raid was being prepared and warned Zyazikov's Interior Ministry. Zyazikov denied the claim, telling the Interfax news agency that “we did not receive any advance information about preparations for an attack by the guerrillas.” The FSB, however, stuck to its position: According to report posted on the Grani.ru website later on June 27, Sergei Koryakov, head of the FSB's branch in Ingushetia, backed his deputy Andrei Konin's earlier claim that the agency received information about the impending attack half an hour before it started. Directly contradicting Zyazikov, Koryakov continued to insist that the FSB had shared this information with Ingushetia's Interior Ministry. Zyazikov, his turn, was quoted by Izvestia on June 28 as holding fast to his own version. He hinted that those who failed to share advance information—“you know who they are”—were guilty either of “treason, or carelessness, or disorderly behavior, or irresponsibility; I think that all of the above were present in equal measure.”
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
In what appeared to be a bold escalation in tactics and targeting by Chechnya's separatist guerrillas, the headquarters of Ingushetia's interior ministry in the republic's capital of Nazran was seized on the evening of June 21 by gunmen shouting an Islamic slogan popular among those guerrillas. Such a direct infantry assault on such a key central headquarters of the pro-Moscow authorities, as distinct from a suicide truck-bombing or the clandestine planting of a mine, had not taken place for a long time either in Ingushetia or in Chechnya.
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
On June 10 the last remaining tents of the last remaining Chechen refugee camp in Ingushetia were dismantled in a modest ceremony. According to a June 11 article by Ivan Sukhov for Vremya Novostei, the authorities decided not to make a grand spectacle of the occasion. Some 576 former residents of the “Satsita” camp returned to Chechnya, while another 90 decided to seek other living quarters within Ingushetia.
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
Yelena She sternina is not the first Russian journalist to do it, but she has performed a valuable service by bringing the figures up to date. The correspondent for Russky Kurier reported in that newspaper's June 3 issue on a simple exercise in arithmetic: adding up the cumulative total of rebel guerrillas which the federal forces claim to have killed in the various statements of their press spokesmen, and comparing that total with the number of guerrillas who, according to those same federal military sources, are still fighting. It turns out that if the numbers of those ostensibly killed were accurate, there would not be a single rebel fighter left.
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
The Russian and Ingush authorities are making what they apparently hope will be the final push in driving Chechen refugees out of their tent camps in Ingushetia. The sole remaining camp, Satsita, is due to be closed on June 10, according to the Federal Migration Service. The deputy head of that agency, Igor Yunash, told the Interfax news agency on May 27 that “there's no point in keeping the camp.” The recent upsurge of violence in Chechnya has apparently had no effect on the authorities' refugee policies.
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
In an obscure aside during an interview with the popular weekly Argumenty i Fakty, Ramzan Kadyrov said that he knows who it was who killed his father. He chose not to be more precise except to say that the mastermind of the May 9 assassination was neither Shamil Basaev (who has claimed responsibility) nor Aslan Maskhadov. “Maskhadov does not have enough strength or courage to do such a thing,” Ramzan said. “He was afraid of my father.”