Putin’s Caucasus ‘viceroy’: a man with a plan
KISLOVODSK — Alexander Khloponin may be Russia’s biggest optimist. The senior most official in charge of the violence-plagued North Caucasus, he largely dismisses Islamists’ fight for a sharia-based state as a cause of violence in the region and says alcoholism and fires in Siberia kill more people. “This is just the redistribution of property, just criminals,” Khloponin, deputy prime minister and former governor of Krasnoyarsk region, said in the spa town of Kislovodsk in the Caucasus foothills as he laid out plans to build ski resorts, ports and refineries in a region famous for its dramatic mountains. The Kremlin calls the unrest in the Caucasus, where it is battling a violent Islamist insurgency bent on establishing a caliphate, its biggest headache. Russia fought two wars against separatists in Chechnya in the 1990s. While relative normalcy has recently returned there, the unrest spread to neighboring Dagestan and Ingushetia exposing former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s inability to bring order to the Caucasus by way of force alone. Putin’s youthful successor at the Kremlin, Dmitry Medvedev, tried a new tack, when he in January appointed businessman Khloponin as a new Kremlin envoy responsible for the Caucasus. Several months into his new job, Khloponin appears to have sold his recipe for the Caucasus to Putin, Russia’s top boss, who this week unveiled a new drive for the region where economic prosperity will ultimately lead to peace. Putin, who once famously said rebels should be “wiped out in the outhouse,” said in much more mellow remarks in Kislovodsk that he “sometimes feels sorry” for the militants who run around the mountains as they do not have any other opportunities.... MORESource: The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100709com3.html |
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