The Avars, the Dargins, the Kukmyks, the Laks
No, those are not made-up names taken from some cool video game. They're just four of dozens of peoples stuffed into the North Caucasus. (Dagestan alone has 36 constituent nationalities). And most of them hate each other. And the pot's been on the boil since the Iron Curtain came down. And it's ready to blow.
All very bad news, of course, for Comrade Putin, lately seen in Paris at a meeting of the Gang of Four. Most of us think that Putin's suffocation of democracy is the real crisis in Russia but the gathering clouds over the North Caucasian front show the enormous dangers that now face the federation on its flanks. If this segment were to spiral off into a "failed states" universe, Putin would go down in history as the man who lost the Caucasus and he'd find himself early retired, or worse.
Terrorism, corruption, crime, ethnic hatred and radical Islam are all part of the regional combustible mix as Chechnya has shown, but it's no different in its neighbours: Adygea, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia, North Ossetia and Dagestan. All are racked with tension and all are currently experiencing some form of upheaval. Putin's plight, alas, does not mean a plus for the West. If the North Caucasus crumbles, southern Caucasian states such as Georgia and Azerbaijan, which are currently facing West, would be in danger, which means that trans-national crime and terror would spill over Eastern Europe's borders.
Russia's geo-strategic position is being challenged as never before and everything we've seen of late suggests that the remnants of the ex-Soviet Union aren't up to the task of dealing with the complexity. Which makes one wonder about the quality of the assurances Putin gave in Paris about Russia's ability to guarantee Iran's compliance with its nuclear commitments. Oh, oh. Meanwhile, this article from the 10 February issue of The Economist provides an excellent overview of the North Caucus nightmare. One sample sentence sums up the horror of it all: "During the war, Stalin ordered the wholesale deportation of four north Caucasian Muslim nations, along with several others, at an enormous cost in lives: the Chechens and Ingush (ethnic cousins), Karachays, Balkars and Meskhetian Turks."
Comments
Oy, such difficulties we face.
Thanks for the map, gives one a good idea of the problems the Russian Federation is facing.
I suspect much of the region's troubles are holdovers from the old Soviet days, when matters were suppressed instead of dealt with. The continuing difficulties with extremism and organized crime owing a lot to the lack of resources available to the authorities. And with Russia's declining population it can only get worse.
The day is coming when the whole thing collapses, and if Chechnya et al are any indication, it will be bloody.
Posted by: Alan Kellogg | March 21, 2005 04:29 PM
I hope Chechnya are not an indication :(
Posted by: gothic industrial music | March 21, 2005 08:41 PM
What I can't understand is why the Russians want to hang on to any of it. It's like my first impression of South Carolina in August "We fought a war to keep this?" The argument about holding the country together, where will this all end, doesn't hold either; plenty of people in huge stretches of territory are Russian and want to stay in Russia. This is a chance to dump a bunch of difficult foster children. They only grabbed these colonies in the first place because that was the done thing back then.
Posted by: Jim | March 25, 2005 12:20 AM