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RUSSIA IN THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS: WHERE DO THE CONFLICTS STEM FROM?
Magomed RAMAZANOV
Magomed Ramazanov, Ph.D. (Philos.), member, Human Rights Governmental Commission, Republic of Daghestan (Makhachkala, Russia)
The Northern Caucasus, a linguistic, ethnic, and religious patchwork plagued with socioeconomic and political problems is the sore spot of Russia’s. Considerable positive shifts of the Soviet period notwithstanding, the region is still trailing behind more developed areas. This should probably be explained by the region’s specific features.
Ethnic mosaics and ethnocultural variety caused by its geopolitical situation, migration, armed conflicts, deportations and repressions add ethnopolitical hues to socioeconomic and political difficulties sowing strife both inside individual ethnoses and between them. In addition, Russia’s never-ending revolutions, perestroika and reforms have been stirring up this conservative and patriarchal area forcing the local ethnoses to seek self-preservation. They reject novelties and change of idols and values aggressively; this became especially clear in the latter half of the 1980s and early 1990s when the political situation and ethnodemographic problems had come to the fore. Ethnic tension was mounting for several reasons, the main being lack of understanding of the region’s specifics demonstrated by the central and local authorities; lack of attention to its specific economic problems, a bias toward harsh measures, which were gradually alienating local people from the Center.
Development of democracy, growing national self-awareness and greater political activity added oil to the already smoldering ethnoterritorial, religious, social, and political contradictions. By the end of the 20th century the local ethnic and socioeconomic crises had acquired a political dimension. One can say that in the Northern Caucasus the Russian statehood and the new Russian federalism are tested for strength.
Divided Peoples
The radical economic reforms coincided with the appearance of long-term factors that had worsened the situation in the region as a whole; Chechnia, Ingushetia, Kalmykia and Daghestan were affected more than their neighbors. One of the key factors of the present tension is rooted in the national-territorial division inherited from the Soviet Union that contradicted the historical ethno-confessional division of the North Caucasian peoples. This moved the land issue from the grass-root level to the status of the ethnic and state territorial problem.
Today, there are at least ten territories claimed by two peoples. Three large North Caucasian ethnoses are divided by state borders: the Ossets who live in North Ossetia that is…………….
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