Window on Eurasia: Russia is Losing the North Caucasus, Moscow Analysts Say
Paul Goble
Tartu, August 9 – Despite Moscow’s repeated claims of progress in Chechnya, the Russian government is quickly losing control of the northern Caucasus as the other non-Russian republics there increasingly acquire the attributes of independent countries, according to a group of analysts in the Russian capital.
Moreover, Moscow’s position in that region, they say, is likely to deteriorate further in the near future because the remedies the Kremlin currently favors – greater use of military force and spending more money through existing political structures – do little to reverse that trend and may in many cases even be making the situation worse.
As a result, these analysts suggest, the situation across the northern Caucasus ever more recalls „the parade of sovereignties” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a development that contributed to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the serious weakening of the Russian Federation as well.
These analysts, who are grouped around the Institute for National Strategy, do not argue that a similar outcome is inevitable, but they do suggest that the Russian government must stop denying to itself and others how serious things are and change its policies as well.(http://www.apn.ru/?chapter_name=advert&data_id=599&do=view_single).
The INS analysts draw most of their examples from Daghestan because they argue the situation there is the most critical. But they insist that Russia’s position is declining across the region as a whole because of the coming together of a set of seven increasingly inter-related factors.
First, they note, in the years since 1991, ethnic Russians and other Russian-speaking groups have fled the region, thus eliminating one of the groups on which Moscow had traditionally relied to maintain control. Today, for example, Russians account for fewer than one of every 20 residents in Daghestan.
Second, the people in the region are increasingly relying on foreign currency rather than the Russian ruble, precisely what happened at the end of the Soviet period across the country but just the reverse of more recent and much-commented-upon trends elsewhere in the Russian Federation.
According to official statistics, Daghestan has the lowest avereage pay of any federal subject, but the population there has increased its purchases of foreign currency from 1.6 billion rubles worth in 2003 to 8.8 billion rubles’ worth in 2004. And its foreign currency deposts over the last four years have shot up 17.5 times, the INS analysts report.
Third, despite Moscow’s promises, the Russian authorities have failed to develop a sufficiently large or effective assistance program. In this year alone, they note, the central Russian government allocated twice as much money on the celebration of the 1000th anniversary of the city of Kazan as it did on the reconstruction of Chechnya.
Fourth, the political institutions left over from Soviet times on which Moscow has continued to rely are increasingly corrupt and do not have much authority with the local population. Indeed, the INS analysts say,one can now speak of „the absence of the state” in many parts of the north Caucasus.
Because the central Russian government relies on these corrupt regimes, little of its assistance to the region reaches the population, something that undermines Moscow’s authority there. And because of both these factors, people in the northern Caucasus are far more willing to engage in protests than people in other parts of the Russian Federation.
Fifth, because nature abhors a vacuum, the INS analysts argue, Islam as a social and political force and not just as a set of ideas has moved to fill this gap, creating what are in effect parallel political institutions with more authority in the population and consequently more effective power.
Often, as in the case of Daghestan, these parallel structures take the form of Islamic jamaats, communal organizations whose operations have the effect of creating „a special social space where Russian social and legal norms already no longer operate.”
One measure of this is the explosive growth in the number of Islamic institutions, especially in Daghestan. There are now more than 1595 mosques in that republic alone – 59 times more than in 1983 – and some 14,000 young people are studying in the more than 400 Islamic academies now operating there.
Remarkably, the INS analysts note, both Moscow and local officials in the 1990s even helped power this growth, the first out of a belief that Islam could help overcome ethnic divisions and integrate the people of this region into the Russian Federation and the latter in the hope that it would provide them with an independent power base.
Sixth, because of the collapse of the Soviet external border, the people of this region have dramatically expanded their ties to foreign countries and especially to the Muslim Middle East. Indeed, for many people in the northern Caucasus, the Arab world is now less foreign than the rest of the Russian Federation.
Many in Europe and the United States have focused on the impact of the opening of the Russian Federation’s border with the West, but few have considered the results of the opening of the Russian Federation’s southern border, something that could prove equally fateful, the INS analysts say.
In 1998 alone, they report, 14,000 Daghestanis made the haj to Mecca. During the 1990s on average, 12,000 people travelled from there to Saudi Arabia each year. And in 1996 alone, the INS experts report, some 1230 young people from that northern Caucasus republic studied abroad, most of them in Saudi Islamic institutions.
Those ties have contributed to a change in the mental maps of the Daghestanis, these analysts say. Now, many in that republic and other parts of the northern Caucasus view the Arab world as far closer to them than Moscow, a place they see as an increasingly „foreign” destination.
And seventh, the INS analysts point out, the common information space which the Soviet system imposed on this region has collapsed, and as a result, people in the region increasingly get their news and have their opinions shaped not by Moscow outlets but rather by their own national elites or by groups beyond the borders of the Russian Federation.
Recent statements by Dmitriy Kozak, the Presidential plenopotentiary for the northern Caucasus whose report on Daghestan recently leaked to the press, and by top Putin aide Vladislav Surkov who compared the problems of this region to „a underground fire,” suggest that Moscow may be beginning to understand dangerous the situation is, the INS analysts say.
But they add that there is as yet little indication that they are prepared to change course, and as a result, the situation first in Daghestan and then elsewhere across the northern Caucasus is likely to develop in ways that may prove even more threatening to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation than the insurgents in Chechnya have been up to now.
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