The North Caucasus: Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia

[zenpundit]

I generally like Jamestown stuff but this struck me as really weird.

Isn't a "Vilyat" a corruption of an Ottoman Turk administrative division? When did the Ottomans rule Daghestan ? Golden Horde, sure. Persians, definitely. Why would Wahabbist neo-salafi loons use antique Turkish terminology when a good Wahabbist would see Ottoman sanjaks as corrupt former oppressors of "true Islam" ?

Maybe I have missed something somewhere ?

[Jedburgh]

I generally like Jamestown stuff but this struck me as really weird.

Isn't a "Vilyat" a corruption of an Ottoman Turk administrative division? When did the Ottomans rule Daghestan ? Golden Horde, sure. Persians, definitely. Why would Wahabbist neo-salafi loons use antique Turkish terminology when a good Wahabbist would see Ottoman sanjaks as corrupt former oppressors of "true Islam" ?

Maybe I have missed something somewhere ?

It is a term that is used in many Central Asian states: Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - none of which were ever under Ottoman rule. In Dagestan, they can also be referred to as rayons, but wilayat is a common usage.

[zenpundit]

It is a term that is used in many Central Asian states: Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - none of which were ever under Ottoman rule. In Dagestan, they can also be referred to as rayons, but wilayat is a common usage.

Thank you Jed, that clarifies -and makes linguistic sense for some of the CA examples.

[Jedburgh]

ICG, 3 Jun 08: Russia’s Dagestan: Conflict Causes

....Large-scale war is unlikely to develop in Dagestan, but violence can be expected to continue to be caused by competition over lands and jobs, spillover from Chechnya and the rise of local jihadi groups. The origins of the present jihadi-inspired violence are in the “hunt for the Wahhabis” carried out by the Dagestani authorities after the 1999 Chechen incursion and the arbitrary persecution of pious youth by local law enforcement officers. The violence in Dagestan’s streets is also fed by the movement of rebels and Islamist militants across the porous border with Chechnya, as well as by the republic’s omnipresent corruption and criminality. Rival clans, led by President Aliyev and Makhachkala’s mayor, Said Amirov, duelled for control of economic and political assets in 2007, as the street troubles intensified.

Reprisals by local and federal security forces have failed to curb the violence; instead they seem to be escalating it. The troubled March 2007 electoral campaign and the growing number of attacks on local officials and assassinations carried out by Islamic militants suggest Dagestan faces a violent future.

[kaur]

President Dmitry Medvedev’s statement in Daghestan last week that foreign forces are behind anti-Russian movements there is leading some Russian commentators to overstate the role of such forces there and thus to misunderstand the nature of the conflicts in that region, according to a leading Russian expert.

In his July 9 comments, Medvedev attempted not only to “sum up the threats to Russian statehood” in the region but also “to explain their causes,” the Moscow analyst says. The Russian president pointed to unemployment and poverty as among the most important, but he listed others as well.
Among these, the Russian leader said, are massive and widespread corruption, “systemic deformations of government administration,” and the “extremely low” quality of regional officials, charges that while true raise questions such as “who formed these power structures” if not the current tandem at the head of the much ballyhooed power vertical.

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/...-in-north.html

If anyone is interested about more general situation in Northern Caucasus, then you can dowload paper "Kreml and Northern Caucasus" here. This paper is in Russian

http://www.politcom.ru/tables/docl.doc

[kaur]

Couple weeks old news. Last summer there was killed head of Dagestan's ministry of interior affairs. Today there is version that killer weapon was "loaned" to killers by Russian military personnel in Dagestan.

Couple articles in Russian

http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/021/15.html

http://newsru.com/russia/26feb2010/brigada.html

http://www.gzt.ru/Gazeta/proisshestv...t-/292192.html

[bourbon]

In Russia’s Dagestan Region, Police Live in Fear, by Ellen Barry. The New York Times, March 20, 2010.

It is all a measure of how thoroughly order has broken down in the Russian region of Dagestan, in the North Caucasus. Fifty-eight police officers were killed in attacks here last year, according to the republic’s Interior Ministry, many of them while running errands or standing at their posts. Last month alone, according to press reports, 13 officers were killed in bombings and gangland-style shootings.