Ingushetia and North Ossetia
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Subject: Ingushetia and North Ossetia
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Ingushetia and North Ossetia
Jamestown Foundation
Tuesday, September 15, 1998
MONITOR - A DAILY BRIEFING ON THE POST-SOVIET STATES
INGUSH PRESIDENT SAYS WAR WITH NORTH OSSETIA WAS ONLY NARROWLY
AVERTED. The President of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, said yesterday
that war between his republic and its North Caucasus neighbor, North
Ossetia, had been "only five minutes away" on the night of Saturday,
September 12. Five policemen guarding a joint Ossetian-Ingush
checkpoint and one attacker were killed that night. A trailer camp of
about seventy makeshift homes was also set on fire. Its occupants -
Ingush families who had only recently returned to North Ossetia's
Prigorodny District after having been forced to flee North Ossetia in
1992 - fled back to Ingushetia. Aushev said that, as soon as the news
reached the Ingush capital Nazran, Ingush security forces were put on
full alert. Ingushetia would not hesitate, he added, to send its
forces across the border to North Ossetia to protect Ingush citizens
in Prigorodny District. Only the intervention of Russian Interior
Minister Sergei Stepashin had averted war between the two republics,
Aushev said (Russian agencies, September 14).
The dispute over Prigorodny District has its roots in Stalin's wartime
deportations of the Ingush and other indigenous peoples of the North
Caucasus. In 1946, Stalin made the Ingush-inhabited Prigorodny part of
North Ossetia. It has been a source of often-deadly conflict ever
since. In 1992, it provoked the first instance of armed inter-ethnic
conflict in Russia since independence. There were hopes in January
this year, when Aleksandr Dzasokhov was elected president of North
Ossetia, that he and Aushev would be able to mend fences and speed up
the return of thousands of Ingush forced to flee the republic in 1992,
but these hopes have been disappointed. Yesterday, Aushev called the
events of the weekend - which the North Ossetians are blaming on an
armed band of Ingush - a "serious blow" to Ingush-Ossetian relations.
Aushev called the attack a provocation and accused unidentified groups
in North Ossetia of organizing it (Russian agencies, September 14).
______________________________________________________________________
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Copyright c 1998 The Jamestown Foundation.
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