IN THIS ISSUE

* European human rights body issues new report on the North Caucasus
* Kabardino-Balkaria policemen killed and wounded in shootout with militants
* Moldova's new government profiled
* ...while its alliance unites against communist revanche threat
* Turkey hosts annual IMF-World Bank summit
** New in the Jamestown blog on Russia and Eurasia (http://www.jamestown.org/blog):
- The Kremlin's Red Guards
 

PACE: the North Caucasus is "Beset by Violence"

The Jamestown Foundation

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has issued a new report highlighting the deteriorating human rights and security situation in the North Caucasus. The report's author, Swiss parliamentarian Dick Marty, said on September 30, one day after the report was issued: "In April 2009, the Russian government announced the end of the operations in Chechnya. Now, however, the entire region is beset by violence" (www.assembly.coe.int, September 30).

The report by the European human rights body states that "paramilitary groups set up by illegal combatants" in the North Caucasus are becoming "increasingly organized, coordinated, widespread and technically well-equipped again." It adds that such groups are more frequently targeting senior regional officials, that suicide bombings have become a recurring tactic this year and that the number of civilian victims of terrorist attacks is increasing.

The report says that this past summer saw "an unprecedented jump" in the activity of armed insurgents in the North Caucasus. "It is significant that, since the beginning of 2009 the victorious statements announcing that terrorism has been crushed in the region that were so frequent in previous years have been far less triumphalist in tone," the report stated. It added: "In fact, several senior officials and elected representatives including the President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, acknowledge that the impression that the North Caucasus was becoming more peaceful was wrong. The conflict has not died out or become more localized. Instead, it is threatening to spread to republics which have been relatively calm to date, namely Kabardino-Balkaria and North Ossetia-Alania."

According to the report, 142 members of the security forces in the North Caucasus were killed and 280 injured during the three summer months of 2009 - the highest level of losses among the police and the army in four years (compared to 82 dead and 169 injured in summer 2008, 63 dead and 134 injured in 2007, 83 dead and 210 injured in summer 2006, and 102 dead and 265 injured in summer 2005). The report says that terrorist attacks have claimed victims not only among the security forces but also among the civilian population, noting that in Ingushetia, terrorist attacks on civilians have become more frequent since the summer of 2008, "targeting customers of gaming rooms and cafés as well as religious leaders and public officials." This past summer, the report highlights, a wave of attacks targeting senior civil servants swept Dagestan and Ingushetia and killings of local Russian-speakers resumed "after a long break."

Abuses by the security forces, including abductions, torture, degrading treatment, extra-judicial executions and trials on trumped-up charges, "continue unabated" in the North Caucasus, the report states. "Furthermore, the situation of almost complete impunity for crimes committed by members of the security forces during anti-terrorist operations seems to endure," it adds. "Nothing is known about what has happened to most missing persons and the people responsible are hardly ever called to account," according to the report. Security forces in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan "usually state that all persons killed during special operations are combatants who resisted arrest," but the bodies of those killed often bear "signs of torture" and witnesses say that they were abducted "by often unidentified members of the security forces." Human rights activists fear there are "death squads" operating in the region, comprised of "local security force units including local elements of federal bodies, whose activities are not supervised by the federal authorities."

The PACE report examines the situation in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan individually and cites a number of specific cases of human rights abuses throughout the region. It also examines what it calls the "wave of killings of human rights defenders," including the case of Natalya Estemirova, the Memorial human rights activist who was abducted in the Chechen capital Grozny on July 15 and found murdered in neighboring Ingushetia later that day. The report notes that some of her fellow activists, including Memorial head Oleg Orlov and Moscow Helsinki Group Chairwoman Lyudmila Alekseyeva say the circumstances of Estemirova's killing "point to the Chechen security forces' involvement" and the "direct responsibility" of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov (http://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2009/ajdoc43_2009.pdf).

Kadyrov is suing Orlov for defamation for saying that he was responsible for Estemirova's death. However, the Memorial head said as the trial began on September 25 that he stands by his comments about the Chechen leader. Orlov told reporters outside the Moscow courthouse where the trial got underway that there is "no doubt of the political guilt of Ramzan Kadyrov" in Estemirova's murder. As the Associated Press noted, Orlov has never said he had evidence of Kadyrov's direct involvement, but has repeatedly blamed Kadyrov for Estemirova's murder, citing an atmosphere of lawlessness and impunity which he said Kadyrov has fostered. The news agency quoted Orlov as saying that he rejected an offer from Kadyrov for an out-of-court settlement in which he would drop the monetary damage demand if Orlov issued a public retraction. Orlov called the offer "strange."

Orlov also claimed that Kadyrov had "directly, publicly, on television equated rights defenders with terrorists, bandits and criminals," thereby endangering the lives of human rights activists in Chechnya (AP, September 25).

Insurgent Attacks Reported in Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia

The Jamestown Foundation

Insurgent violence has continued across the North Caucasus this week. Russian media reported that a gun battle broke out today when policemen at a road patrol checkpoint in the town of Prokhladny in Kabardino-Balkaria stopped a car for a document check, and those inside opened fire. Four policemen were wounded, and one of the officers later died in the hospital. Four gunmen escaped from the car, but security forces managed to surround them in a house near the town's railway station, and armored equipment and commandos were preparing to storm the building. Kabardino-Balkaria's Interior Minister Yury Tomchak was reportedly personally overseeing the security operation (www.echo.msk.ru, October 2).

Meanwhile, the office of Ramzan Kadyrov reported today that an operation coordinated by the Chechen president himself had killed eight militants in the mountains of southern Chechnya near the administrative border with Dagestan. A spokesman for the office said there were no police casualties in the operation. Interfax quoted Kadyrov as saying: "There are dense forests and high mountains, but regardless we managed to start and carry out the operation successfully" (Reuters, October 2).

Chechen investigators said on September 30 that they had opened a criminal investigation into threats by hackers to kill Kadyrov posted on the Chechnya Today website (www.chechnyatoday.com) in late June. Mariam Nalayeva, a spokeswoman for the Chechen branch of the investigative committee, told the Moscow Times that the threats to kill Kadyrov appeared on the website's home page for several hours on June 29 after an attack by hackers and that the probe was only opened this week because investigators needed to wait for the Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a linguistic analysis of the threats first. "The Chechen branch of the FSB conducted a linguistic analysis that found that the threats carried a real danger," she told the English-language newspaper by telephone from Grozny. A spokesman for Kadyrov's office told the Moscow Times that a Dagestan resident suspected of organizing the website attack was detained in Moscow this week (Moscow Times, October 1).

Kavkaz Center reported on September 27 that a female suicide bomber tried unsuccessfully to kill Kadyrov that day. The Islamist website cited eyewitnesses who reported that an unidentified woman had tried to cross through a cordon of policemen guarding a building in the town of Gudermes in which Kadyrov was holding a meeting. The woman allegedly detonated explosives when the policemen stopped her, wounding or killing several of them (www.kavkazcenter.com, September 27). There was no independent confirmation of Kavkaz Center's report. Police in the Chechen village Starye Atagi yesterday reportedly prevented a suicide bomber from blowing up the local police station. The suicide bomber detonated his explosives and died, but no one else was hurt in the abortive attack (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, October 1).

On September 30, Chechen Interior Minister Ruslan Alkhanov told a meeting of the heads of the republic's security agencies in Grozny that 84 militants have been killed in Chechnya since the beginning of the year. But he also said that 43 young people had joined the rebels since the start of the year, and that 11 of them had done so in September alone.

In Dagestan, the local branch of the FSB reported today that two militants were killed during a special operation in the republic's Buinaksk district. One submachine-gun, a TT pistol and ammunition were found at the scene of the incident. An FSB source reported that a group of gunmen were spotted during a search operation in the village of Erpeli and that they opened fire when ordered to surrender. Police said the gunmen were members of a gang led by Nabi Migitdinov that operates in the Buinaksk region. Reportedly, Migitdinov has long been on the wanted list for planning and carrying out crimes aimed against law enforcers, and his son was killed this year while attempting to assassinate an imam of one of Buinaksk's mosques (ITAR-TASS, October 2).

On October 1, gunmen shot and wounded two policemen in the town of Kizlyar, northwest of the Dagestani capital Makhachkala, after their van was stopped at a traffic checkpoint for a routine check. The attackers fired from automatic weapons, wounding a traffic police officer and another police official, before speeding away. A police source said the van was later found abandoned and that weapons and extremist literature was found inside (RIA Novosti, October 1). Also on October 1, a car exploded near a district police office in Makhachkala, Dagestan's capital. The blast set the car on fire, and the burned body of a man was later found inside the vehicle. In the early hours of October 1, someone fired from a grenade launcher at the building of the Khasavyurt district administration, slightly damaging an office of the planning department located on the third floor of the four-story building. No one was hurt in the incident (ITAR-TASS, October 1).

On September 28, unidentified gunmen fired on a police outpost in the village of Surkhakhi in Ingushetia. The outpost building was slightly damaged but no one was hurt in the attack. That same day, unidentified gunmen fired on the home of the head of administration of the village of Ekazhevo, Nuradin Ekazhev. No one was hurt in the attack. On September 26, an explosive device detonated at the gate of the home of the administration chief of Ingushetia's Sunzha district, Islam Sainaroev, located in the village of Ordhzonikidzevskaya. No one was hurt in that incident (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, September 28).

Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev said September 29 that 270 militants had been "neutralized" -meaning killed- and another 453 detained since the beginning of the year. As the Kavkazsky Uzel website noted, Russian law enforcement agencies claimed back in the spring of 2008 that there were only around 500 militants left in the North Caucasus (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, September 29).

Moldova's Post-Communist Government Takes Office Amid Crisis

Vladimir Socor

A new Moldovan government finally took office on September 25 and the new Prime Minister, Vlad Filat, undertook his first visit abroad in that capacity on September 29 to Brussels, reflecting this government`s top priority to advance relations with the European Union (Moldpres, September 29, 30, October 1).

Meanwhile, since September 11 for a 60-day period as the constitution dictates, the office of state president is held by the new chairman of the parliament, Mihai Ghimpu. The state presidency became vacant upon the expiry of Vladimir Voronin's term as acting president (Voronin's regular term of office, his second and final, had expired already in April). Ghimpu then exercised his interim powers to nominate Filat as prime minister. Ghimpu and Filat retain their posts as leaders of the Liberal Party and the Liberal-Democrat Party, respectively. They are components of the Alliance for European Integration (AEI) that also includes Marian Lupu's Democratic Party and Serafim Urecheanu's Our Moldova.

The new government is an arduously negotiated power-sharing arrangement among the AEI's four parties. Parliament approved the new government's composition and program with the 53 votes of AEI's deputies while the 48 communist deputies boycotted the voting. The Communist Party is vociferously opposing the new government and threatens to block the election of the head of state by parliament, so as to force new parliamentary elections.

Filat, born in 1969, graduated in law from the Iasi University in Romania and became a successful businessman on both sides of the Romanian-Moldovan border during the 1990's. Filat was implicated in a cigarette-trading scandal, widely reported in the Romanian media at that time, but he was never found guilty of any wrongdoing by the Romanian courts. He was minister of state and privatization minister in Moldova in 1998-99 and made a spectacular business career afterward, reputedly as one of Moldova's wealthiest individuals. Filat founded his Liberal-Democrat Party in 2007 in opposition to the Communist Party. Several leaders of smaller parliamentary parties, however, complained bitterly that Filat was using his resources to lure those parties' district organizations into his party. Filat's party ran well-financed operations in this year's two parliamentary election campaigns.

The new Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister, Iurie Leanca, is part of Filat's Liberal-Democrat team. Leanca is a career diplomat and a consistently pro-Western figure. He was deputy minister and first-deputy until 2001, before he left the ministry for the duration of the communists' tenure in power, and spent most of that period as a senior manager for the oil company Ascom, Moldova's probably largest business entity. Leanca is now embarking on an effort to restore the foreign affairs ministry's once-respectable professional standards, which were allowed to deteriorate significantly from 2001 to date.

The new Defense Minister, Vitalie Marinuta, is an army officer with multiple graduate and post-graduate courses in U.S. and NATO institutions to his credit as well as service stints on several NATO and U.S. multinational staffs. This is Moldova's first modern and Western-oriented defense minister. The predecessors were either Soviet-schooled officers or civilian cronies of sitting presidents. The new Intelligence and Security Service (SIS) Director, Colonel Gheorghe Mihai, worked in the Moldovan SSR KGB from 1979 onward and for independent Moldova's National Security Ministry (currently the SIS) from 1991 onward (Moldpres, NewsIn, September 25).

The government's program as approved by parliament for 2009-2013 focuses strongly on relations with the European Union. It sets the goals of signing an association as well as a visa liberalization agreement, and a deep and comprehensive free trade agreement with the E.U., all contingent upon accelerating Moldova's own internal reforms. Not unlike Voronin's government, the AEI government declares that its agenda of building relations with the E.U. is in fact a domestic reform agenda. The AEI government, however, pledges to implement those declared goals more effectively than Voronin's government ever did.

Under this program, the government will propose a strategic partnership between Moldova and the United States. At the same time, the document pays lip service to Moldova's "strategic partnership" with Russia under the 2001 bilateral inter-state agreement, a Voronin legacy from which the new government cannot openly disengage. Nevertheless the program sets the goal of ridding Moldova of Russian troops and having an international civilian observer mission replace the existing "peacekeeping" operation.

The government's program further envisages normalizing relations with Romania (a process underway already) and resuming Moldova's implementation of the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP), (which Voronin practically shelved recently) with NATO, without prejudicing Moldova's neutrality status (Moldpres, September 25).

The initial reaction in Brussels seemed, on the whole, unedifying to the new Moldovan government. The E.U.'s Council and Commission Presidents, Javier Solana and Jose Manuel Barroso, were busy elsewhere and did not honor Filat's requests for meetings. Second-tier E.U. officials spoke encouragingly, but anti-crisis assistance to Moldova from the E.U. seems slow to materialize, even as Russia has promised Moldova a $500 million state loan (Moldpres, September 30).

The Politics of Moldova's Governing Alliance

Vladimir Socor

The Alliance for European Integration (AEI) has taken over much but not all power in Moldova from the Communist Party. The AEI is a heterogeneous combination of four political parties, each one with its own profile and its leadership ambitions, and in some cases competing against each other for their overlapping electoral constituencies. The AEI is holding together thus far, thanks largely to unsophisticated communist politicians refusing dialogue and threatening to trigger new elections for a revanche. In this sense, AEI's irreconcilable communist foes can also be seen as the AEI's inadvertent best friends, helping it to hold together for the duration of this battle.

Almost all Moldovan parties, including those in the AEI, are leader-oriented parties and some of the top leaders tend to act as authoritarian personalities. The Liberal, Liberal-Democrat, Democratic, and Our Moldova parties hold 18 seats, 15 seats. 13 seats, and 7 seats, respectively, for an AEI total of 53, against 48 communist seats in the new parliament. The AEI parties' top leaders are all dominant personalities, three of them -except, that is, the Democratic Party leader Marian Lupu- running their parties with a heavy micromanaging hand.

The AEI parties agreed among themselves on a power-sharing formula. At the top level this means that the parliament's chairmanship went to the Liberal leader Mihai Ghimpu, the premiership to Liberal-Democrat leader Vlad Filat, and the state presidency was to go to Lupu, the well-respected chairman of the preceding parliament. These candidacies were to be regarded as joint AEI candidacies under the agreement. The election of the head of state in parliament requires at least 61 votes in the 101-seat chamber, meaning that Lupu and AIE fall short by 8 votes at this point. This situation necessitates a deal with at least some communists as well as full commitment by all AEI parties to the AIE's joint candidacy for head of state (Moldpres September 29, 30, October 1).

Filat, however, seems to regard his prime-minister's post as a stepping stone toward being elected president by popular vote, possibly next year, under an amended constitution. As party leader, Filat has campaigned to amend the constitution to that end. He would prefer a colorless transitional figure as head of state at this stage. Consequently, Filat is now signaling quietly that he might not necessarily back Lupu's election as head of state in parliament, notwithstanding the agreement among the AEI's parties.

In the current situation, the Liberal Party leader Mihai Ghimpu temporarily combines the posts of chairman of parliament and acting head of state. Elected to the parliamentary chair with the AEI's 53 votes, Ghimpu became interim head of state by default; upon the expiry of Vladimir Voronin's term as acting president on September 11 (Voronin's second, final regular term of office had expired in April). Ghimpu exercised his interim presidential powers to nominate Filat to form the government, which the parliament again approved with the AEI's 53 votes. Ghimpu, a veteran of the Moldovan Popular Front movement of the late 1980's-early 1990's, spent many years in the wilderness before re-emerging in 2007 as chairman of the Chisinau Municipal Council, following his nephew Dorin Chirtoaca's election as Mayor of Chisinau. The uncle-nephew tandem presided over a notoriously fractious council and chaotic municipal administration until this year, when their Liberal Party entered parliament for the first time. Chirtoaca was instrumental in popularizing the party in these elections; but he has chosen to stay on as mayor, intending to build a political power base at Chisinau City Hall (Moldpres September 29, 30, October 1).

Meanwhile, the Liberal Party has toned down its national-Romanian message, practically muting it during this year's two electoral campaigns and after acceding to shared power. Most of the Liberal leadership team holds Romanian citizenship or are applicants for it, in addition to Moldovan citizenship. The party has inherited most of the core "unionist" vote, amounting to some 10 percent of Moldova's total electorate. This segment switched to the Liberal Party when Moldova's Christian-Democrats renounced the goal of unification with Romania. In Bucharest, President Traian Basescu has openly signaled his sympathy for the Moldovan Liberals and Chirtoaca personally through invitations to Romania and media appearances there.

In Chisinau's inner circles, Filat is believed to aim resolutely for the state presidency. In what looked like advance preparations, Filat campaigned in 2007-2008 for a referendum on constitutional amendments to enhance presidential powers and elect the president by popular vote, instead of by election in parliament. He further proposed instituting single-mandate electoral districts and allocating one half of the parliament's seats to deputies elected from those districts, instead of the current proportional system based solely on party lists. Both of those measures would have significantly reduced the influence of political parties. Filat used his party's organizations in a signature-collecting campaign for a referendum on those constitutional amendments. The effort, however, fell short of the necessary number of signatures.

The Liberal-Democrat team includes some representative figures from civil-society groups and from the legal profession. The team also consists largely of Romanian-minded figures, mostly however without the "unionist" baggage that the Liberal Party carries from the past.

Meanwhile, Communist Party leaders calculate that the ongoing economic crisis and upcoming winter could severely damage the AEI government. The communists therefore seem intent on forcing new parliamentary elections for a revanche. They can precipitate new elections by refusing to lend 8 votes for the head of state to be elected in parliament, in which case parliament is dissolved and new elections are called. The European Union and the International Monetary Fund can forestall that scenario by disbursing the planned anti-crisis assistance without further delay, as Filat has just suggested during his Brussels visit (Moldpres September 29, 30, October 1).

Politically, a timely disbursement would enable the government to survive the winter without severe loss of popularity. And in that case, the communists would no longer risk triggering new elections and would instead have to become more cooperative in the parliament and political arena.

IMF-World Bank Summit Opens in Istanbul

Emrullah Uslu

Istanbul is hosting the annual International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) summit on October 2-7. It is expected that around 15,000 delegates including the finance ministers from the G7 will attend the summit. World Bank President Robert Zoellick and IMF Managing-Director Dominique Strauss-Khan held press conferences on October 2. A series of seminars are scheduled to be held from October 3 to 5. The International Monetary and Financial Committee, or IMFC, is expected to discuss the impact of the global economic crisis on developing countries on October 4, while the Development Committee will convene on October 5 (Hurriyet Daily News, September 30).

Strauss-Khan was not welcomed by all segments of Turkish society. During at an event on October 1 at the Bilgi University in Istanbul a student journalist protester threw a shoe at him and attempted to storm the stage as he spoke (Hurriyet Daily New, October 2). Ironically, the protestor threw a Nike shoe, one of the symbols of a capitalist economy, which was ridiculed by major Turkish newspapers and media outlets (Star, October 2). However, perhaps the irony in the protest resembles the Turkish government's resistance to IMF credits to restore its economy, which was primarily restored by IMF plans after the recession in 2001. Turkey has been the fund's largest borrower this decade, drawing approximately $43 billion to help recapitalize more than 20 failed banks since 2001. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, strictly followed IMF policies during his first period in office in 2002-2007. However, since his re-election in 2007, he has resisted taking on new loans after more than one year of protracted discussions with the IMF.

Economists stress that Erdogan wants to show that his $600 billion economy can survive the global crisis without borrowing more money. Ahmet Akarli, an economist for Goldman Sachs Group in London, suggested that Erdogan has consistently said "no" to the IMF, despite domestic pressure and the views of the overseas business community. He most likely regarded dependency on the IMF loans as incompatible with his strategy of transforming Turkey into a leading global player and a heavyweight in its immediate neighborhood (Bloomberg, October 2). Speaking ahead of the annual IMF-World Bank summit, Economy Minister Ali Babacan firmly said that the meetings are not "about Turkish-IMF relations," adding that he will not "mention anything" about the issue during the meetings. "We decided not to mention IMF-Turkey relations," Babacan explained at a press conference on Wednesday. "Instead, we will focus on the global economy and how to deal with the current crisis," he continued (Hurriyet Daily News, September 30).

Despite the Turkish government's resistance to IMF credits, the outlook for the Turkish economy is not positive. IMF reports indicate that the Turkish economy may shrink by 6.5 percent in 2009. Its prediction exceeds the government's estimate of a contraction of 6 percent this year and is more than the 5.1 percent which the IMF predicted in its "World Economic Outlook" in July. The Turkish government expects to see a significant upturn in 2010 with 3.5 percent growth forecast (Hurriyet Daily News, October 1).

While facing social and political resistance in Turkey, Strauss-Kahn wrote an article in the Hurriyet Daily News underlining the importance of the role played by the IMF in the global economy. He listed the challenges facing the world economy then stressed the IMF's critical role in resolving this economic crisis:

"The IMF has an important role to play. It stands at the heart of the international financial architecture. As many emerging markets and low-income countries reeled from the effects of the crisis, the IMF stepped into the breach and provided necessary financing, while striving to protect the poor and most vulnerable. Recognizing the unique role of the IMF, world leaders pledged to dramatically increase our lending resources, including our concessional resources for low-income countries, and we have made our lending more flexible. The IMF also acted as a capable policy advisor, ahead of the curve on many issues, supporting the efforts of world leaders in securing a cooperative solution to the world's economic problems. We continue to work on increasing the attraction of our advice," Strauss-Kahn argued (Hurriyet Daily News, October 1).

It appears that the IMF director wants to emphasize the importance of his institution, while the Turkish government, predominantly for political reasons, resists accessing additional IMF funds. Since his re-election Erdogan has used the IMF credit issue as one measure of his government's economic success. Signing a new agreement with the IMF would certainly be a political blow for the Erdogan government. Therefore, he recently stated that: "Turkey does not sign an unconditional agreement with IMF; we will sign an agreement with the IMF only if it accepts the conditions that we set" (TRT, September 29).

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