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Subject: IWPR'S CAUCASUS REPORTING SERVICE, NO. 47
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WELCOME TO IWPR'S CAUCASUS REPORTING SERVICE, NO. 47, September 1, 2000

ARREST OF OPPOSITION EDITOR SPARKS OUTRAGE IN BAKU  Yeni Musavat's Rauf
Arifoglu declares a hunger strike after the authorities charge him with
taking part in a plane hijack. Shahin Rzaev reports from Baku

THE FORGOTTEN REFUGEES  Why the victims of North Ossetia's four-day war
remain trapped in purgatory. Erik Batuev reports from Maiskoe, North Ossetia

STATE TARGETS BALKARIA'S ISLAMIC COMMUNITY  Moscow continues to regard
Kabardino-Balkaria as a potential breeding-ground for Islamic extremists.
Maya Bitokova reports from Nalchik

********** VISIT IWPR ON-LINE: www.iwpr.net **************

ARREST OF OPPOSITION EDITOR SPARKS OUTRAGE IN BAKU

Yeni Musavat's Rauf Arifoglu declares a hunger strike after the authorities
charge him with taking part in a plane hijack

By Shahin Rzaev in Baku

The arrest of a leading Azerbaijani newspaper editor on terrorism charges
has sparked widespread media outcry at what is seen to be an official
attempt to smear the opposition in the run-up to parliamentary elections. 

Rauf Arifoglu, editor of the influential daily Yeni Musavat, has been
charged with illegal possession of a firearm, taking part in a plane hijack
and terrorism, according to the Turan news agency.

Arifoglu is reported to have gone on hunger strike at the National Security
Ministry detention centre in Baku, even refusing to drink water.

His arrest prompted a three-day closure by 33 Azerbaijani newspapers and
news agencies. The Human Rights Centre of Azerbaijan accused President
Heidar Aliev's government of launching a "dirty-tricks campaign" against the
opposition in the run-up to parliamentary elections on November 5.

"The leaders of the mass media see the pressuring and arrest of Yeni Musavat
editor Rauf Arifoglu as the latest measure aimed at limiting press freedom
in Azerbaijan," newspaper editors said in a statement.

They threatened to appeal to the Council of Europe, to which Azerbaijan is
seeking admission, to evaluate the situation developing in the country.

Arifoglu's arrest on August 22 followed the attempted hijack four days
earlier of a domestic flight from Nakhichevan to Baku by a member of the
Musavat party, Mekhti Guseinli.

Guseinli doused himself with kerosene, threatening to ignite it, and called
Arifoglu on a mobile telephone, saying he wanted to speak to the editor of
the most widely read newspaper in Azerbaijan. He then made a series of
political demands, including a change in the date of the elections, and
ordered the pilot to fly to Ankara.

Arifoglu tried to convince the hijacker to give himself up and informed the
Minister of National Security of the incident.

Guseinli was overpowered without harming any of the passengers and the
aircraft landed safely.  

Four days later, officials from the public prosecutor's office appeared at
Yeni Musavat's offices to demand a recording of the conversation between
Arifoglu and the hijacker -- a tape which the editor had already offered, in
a signed article, to hand over to the security services.

Arifoglu was arrested and questioned for four hours about his alleged role
in the hijack attempt. A warrant was then issued to search his apartment.

Arifoglu's arrest came as public attention, and that of the media, was
focussed on the death in Ankara of the ex-President of Azerbaijan, Abulfaz
Elchibey. Most of his reporters were at the airport covering the return of
the ex-President's body when the editor's apartment was searched.

According to witnesses, Arifoglu promptly ran out on to the balcony and
shouted: "Everyone, this is because of the elections. They've planted a
pistol on me! See you in two or three months."

As police cordoned off the apartment, officials from the public prosecutor's
office, dressed in civilian clothing, wrestled a camera and videocassette
off a crew from the independent ANS television company who had filmed the
episode. 

Despite official assurances to ANS vice president Mir-Shahin Agaev that the
equipment would be returned, it was still in police hands a day later.

Police at the scene announced that a Makarov pistol had been found in
Arifoglu's apartment and that he would be charged under article 220 of the
Criminal Code, which covers the illegal possession of firearms. The editor
was put in a police car and taken away.

As the search of Arifoglu's apartment and his arrest unfolded in Baku, one
of his reporters, sent to Nakhichevan to investigate the attempted hijack,
was arrested there and held for almost a day.

Musavat chairman Isa Gambar told ANS that Arifoglu's arrest had been staged
to exclude his party from the parliamentary elections and to brand it as a
"party of terrorists".

"Even if he had a pistol, would he hide it at home, knowing that at any
moment a search could be carried out in connection with the seizure of the
airplane?" he asked.

Musavat has already been refused premises to hold a pre-election congress.
Its newspaper, Yeni Musavat, was attacked in February by rioters from the
Nakhichevan Republic. The party has been condemned in the official press for
its alleged role in the attempted hijack.  

Shahin Rzaev is editor of the Impulse newspaper


THE FORGOTTEN REFUGEES

Why the victims of North Ossetia's four-day war remain trapped in purgatory 

By Erik Batuev in Maiskoe, North Ossetia

The 7,000 Ingush families marooned in Maiskoe's makeshift shanty-town have
been living in limbo for the past eight years. They are the forgotten
refugees of the North Caucasus wars, their plight overshadowed by the bitter
deadlock in Chechnya and the sprawling refugee archipelago to the east. Hope
-- like the other necessities of life - is in short supply.

The Ingush refugees are the victims of the four-day North Ossetian conflict
which flared up in the autumn of 1992 and claimed an estimated 500 lives.
The families were driven from their homes in the Prigorodny region by ethnic
Ossetians who disputed a Moscow edict giving the Ingush the right to settle
there.

Any refugees attempting to return to Prigorodny in recent years have been
subjected to vicious attacks from local residents whilst the Kremlin has
stubbornly refused to intercede. Consequently, they remain trapped in
Maiskoe - the last Ingush enclave in North Ossetia - or just across the
border in Ingushetia.

Their enforced exile is unthinkably bleak. Most of the refugees have made
homes for themselves in abandoned railway carriages on the outskirts of the
settlement. The electricity supply is irregular and gas is non-existent.
Others live in a flimsy tent-town, huddled under dilapidated electricity
pylons.

Starved of the media spotlight, the Ingush refugees receive nothing from the
international aid organisations which distribute food and clothing amongst
the 250,000 Chechen refugees currently living in Nazran.

Earlier this month, the Ingush president, Ruslan Aushev, asked the Russian
leader, Vladimir Putin, to introduce direct presidential rule in North
Ossetia and enable the displaced Ingush to return to Prigorodny. Putin,
however, has entrusted General Victor Kazantsev, the new governor of the
Southern Federal Okrug, with the task of defusing the situation.

"Neither Ingushetia nor North Ossetia needs us," said one refugee.

Some of the Ingush families have attempted to return to their homes, even
without guarantees of security. But buses have been mobbed by stone-throwing
crowds and newly rebuilt homes have been burnt down or destroyed by bomb
attacks.

The conflict between the Ossetians and their Ingush neighbours has its roots
in recent history. In 1944, Ingush families living in the Prigorodny region
were accused of collaborating with the Nazis and summarily deported to
Kazakhstan.

The Ingush were rehabilitated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1957 and given
permission to return to their homes. Forty per cent of Ingushetian territory
was subsequently transferred to North Ossetia.

However, the Ossetian authorities in Vladikavkaz introduced a welter of red
tape, preventing many Ingush from reclaiming their homes and it was not
until the spring of 1992 that the Russian Duma passed a law guaranteeing the
Ingush territorial rehabilitation.

However, fierce fighting broke out on the night of October 31, 1992, and a
state of emergency existed in North Ossetia until February 1995. The
combatants included volunteers from South Ossetia - then a mutinous republic
of the new Georgian state - eager to fight alongside their ethnic kin.

According to some observers, Russia saw the war in North Ossetia as a
convenient means of provoking armed conflict with neighbouring Chechnya. On
the eve of the fighting, the then minister of emergency situations, Sergei
Shoigu, handed over 57 armoured vehicles and 300 automatic rifles to the
Ossetian forces. "To guard the water utilities and wells," Shoigu later
explained to the Moscow Prosecutor's Office.

However, analysts have since speculated that Moscow expected the Chechen
president to enter the war on the side of the Ingush fighters and give the
Russians an excuse to invade a republic which was already displaying
breakaway tendencies.

However, the Chechen leader took a neutral stance and consequently the
fighting was short-lived. Over 35,000 Ingush residents were forced to leave
their homes which were promptly occupied by South Ossetians. With South
Ossetia itself in a state of conflict with Georgia, these settlers have
shown few signs of wanting to leave.

Before the war, 28 North Ossetian settlements were inhabited by Ingush
families but refugees have returned to just three - villages which have
always had an exclusively Ingush population. Here, too, life is hard. The
Ingush find it almost impossible to get jobs and are subjected to regular
document checks at Ossetian police posts. Until recently, they were forced
to seek medical aid across the border in Ingushetia as Ossetian hospitals
refused to treat them.

And the unresolved conflict continues to poison the community at large. One
Ingush resident told me the following anecdote to illustrate the
impossibility of his existence.

An Ossetian family, the story went, discovered that one of their cows was
missing and suspicion naturally fell on their Ingush neighbour.

In order to prove his innocence, the Ingush went in search of the cow and
found her in a nearby wood, in the throes of giving birth. The man helped to
deliver the calf and led both animals back to the Ossetian's farmstead.

The Ossetians took in the cow and her calf without a word of thanks,
terrified that their neighbours had seen the Ingush entering their gates.
Only later did the Ossetian farmer approach his neighbour's home, secretly
through the kitchen garden, and offer him a basket of vegetables.

"They could kill me for this," he told the astonished Ingush. Such tales
give a disturbing insight into apparently unbridgeable rift which has opened
up between the two ethnic groups. 

Erik Batuev is a regular contributor to IWPR


STATE TARGETS BALKARIA'S ISLAMIC COMMUNITY

Moscow continues to regard Kabardino-Balkaria as a potential breeding-ground
for Islamic extremists

By Maya Bitokova in Nalchik

State-controlled media in Kabardino-Balkaria has launched a wave of
anti-Islamic propaganda in a renewed bid to exorcise the spectre of
fundamentalism in the North Caucasus.

The campaign boasts few subtleties. Television news programmes broadcast
scenes from Muslim ceremonies, featuring plenty of animal sacrifices and
bloody knives but little in the way of commentary. 

The scenes are followed by footage of Russian soldiers in Chechnya being
executed by Islamic extremists - the notorious Wahhabis who have become
synonymous with terrorism and organised crime across the former Soviet
Union.

Routine reports from Kabardino-Balkaria are littered with apparently
harmless observations: "On the central street of the city, shops are busy
selling Islamic wares such as rosaries and books with excerpts from the
Koran..." The political sub-text is barely concealed.

Islam has never been widely propagandised in the Kabardino-Balkarian
republic but, now, in the wake of the military campaign in Chechnya, it is
coming firmly under the spotlight.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, changing attitudes to religion
went hand in hand with the rebirth of a "national consciousness". Faith
helped to fill the spiritual vacuum left by the breakdown of the socialist
system.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the local authorities made no attempt to
discourage religious worship and even appeared to patronise the Islamic
faith. Plans to build mosques and open educational centres in the North
Caucasian republic were spearheaded by religious leaders acting with the
apparent approval of the authorities.

In reality, however, the local and central governments missed no opportunity
to torpedo religious initiatives in Kabardino-Balkaria. The scheme to build
a mosque in the capital, Nalchik, is a good example.

In 1992, a radio and television fundraising initiative was launched to
collect funds for the ambitious construction project. It became a matter of
honour for every family and village to donate money to the mosque - not
least because the names of those who had made a contribution were screened
daily on television, together with the exact sum they had donated.

The target was reached in a few days, to widespread excitement, and the
entire nation waited eagerly for the first stone to be laid. They waited in
vain. The money simply disappeared - some said into the pockets of corrupt
officials, others claimed it had been deposited in a foreign bank which
later went bust.

Whatever the case, the mosque has never been built and no official
explanation has been forthcoming.

The Islamic Institute in Nalchik is the latest victim of official pressure.
Opened in the early 1990s, the institute was set up to instruct would-be
effendis and forge links with Muslim states abroad.

Over the past eight years, 500 graduates have left the institute, with 25
being sent to Egypt and Saudi Arabia for further training. Recently, the
institute was renovated and teachers were invited from Turkey, Syria and
Jordan.

Earlier this month, however, the authorities announced that the Islamic
Institute would be closed down because it was operating without a licence.
Again there was no further explanation, again there was no warning. The
closure was announced as a fait accompli.

And, in the face of these open attacks, the people of Kabardino-Balkaria
have remained silent. Since the demise of the Adyge Khase, the only real
opposition party in the republic, there has been no platform for protest and
certainly no individuals willing to champion the cause of the underdog.

There is a sense that the population at large is entirely at the mercy of
the Moscow government and its representatives in Nalchik, President Valery
Kokov's regime.

Kabardino-Balkaria has been dubbed a "potential trouble-maker" and a
breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalism - and therefore strenuous
measures are being taken to discredit the Muslim faith as a whole.

Maya Bitokova is a radio and TV journalist in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria

********** VISIT IWPR ON-LINE: www.iwpr.net **************

IWPR's Caucasus Reporting Service provides the regional and international
community with unique insiders' perspective on the Caucasus. Using our
network of local journalists, the service publishes objective news and
analysis from across the region upon a weekly basis.

The service forms part of IWPR's Caucasus Project based in Tbilisi and
London which supports local media development while encouraging better local
and international understanding of a conflicted yet emerging region.

IWPR's Caucasus Reporting Service is supported by the UK National Lottery
Charities Board. The service is currently available on the Web in English
and will shortly be available in Russian. All IWPR's reporting services
including Balkan Crisis Reports and Tribunal Update are available free of
charge via e-mail subscription or direct from the Web.

The institute will be launching a fourth news service, IWPR Central Asia
Reports, in the coming months. To subscribe to any of our existing or
forthcoming news services, e-mail IWPR Programmes Officer Duncan Furey at
duncan@iwpr.net.

For further details on this project and other information services and media
programmes, visit IWPR's Website: <www.iwpr.net>.

Editor-in-chief: Anthony Borden. Managing Editor: Yigal Chazan; Assistant
Editor: Alan Davis. Commissioning Editors: Giorgi Topouria in Tbilisi,
Shahin Rzayev in Baku, Mark Grigorian in Yerevan, Michael Randall and Saule
Mukhametrakhimova in London. Editorial Assistance: Felix Corley and Heather
Milner. To comment on this service, contact IWPR's Programme Director: Alan
Davis alan@iwpr.net

The Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR) is a London-based independent
non-profit organisation supporting regional media and democratic change.

Lancaster House, 33 Islington High Street, London N1 9LH, United
Kingdom.Tel: (44 171) 713 7130; Fax: (44 171) 713 7140. E-mail:
info@iwpr.net; Web: www.iwpr.net

The opinions expressed in IWPR's Caucasus Reporting Service are those of the
authors and do not necessarily represent those of the publication or of
IWPR.

Copyright (c) IWPR 2000

IWPR'S CAUCASUS REPORTING SERVICE, NO. 47

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