For Yeltsin, North Ossetia is a nightmare come true. The Russian president has struggled for months to contain ethnic unrest in the former Soviet republics. But it now has spread into Russia for the first time since the Soviet Union broke up. In October, locals say, an Ossetian tank accidentally ran over and killed a boy from the Ingush ethnic minority. Ingush civilians retaliated, and the resulting violence has already left 261 dead and 584 wounded. Ossetian nationalists have mortared and burned Ingush houses by the hundreds; some 33,000 Ingush have fled. Both sides display mutilated bodies to prove that atrocities are being committed by the enemy. Yeltsin has imposed emergency rule and sent some 3,000 soldiers to restore peace; last week the local government asked him to extend the state of emergency by two months. “This is the first test case for us, in the Caucasus,” Sergei Stankevich, a top Yeltsin adviser, told NEWSWEEK. “We should have reacted earlier, in a more organized way.”
The Caucasus region, home to dozens of independence-minded nationalities that the czars forcibly corralled in the last century, has been boiling ever since the onset of perestroika. Ethnic conflicts have erupted among as many as 10 Caucasian nationalities beyond Russia’s borders. In an effort to head off trouble at home, Yeltsin last spring brokered a federation treaty among Russia’s semiautonomous regions. But in North Ossetia, that agreement proved no match for an old grudge. In 1944, Stalin deported thousands of Ingush as alleged Nazi collaborators. Most returned after Stalin’s death. But now the Ingush, less than 10 percent of North Ossetia’s population of 650,000, want to recover the land they lost. But the Ossetians assert that the disputed land belonged historically to Russian Cossacks, who have joined the fighting.
Yeltsin’s stake in the dispute is immense. If he looks weak, his ultranationalist critics will accuse him of squandering the czarist patrimony of a strong and unified Russia. By committing troops, he hoped to preempt such an attack. But other regions could step up their independence claims. Such republics as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan are increasingly restive. Entire regions of Siberia have claimed ownership of their raw materials. A provincial tax revolt already is draining Moscow’s coffers.
The burden will worsen dramatically if the North Caucasus becomes a military quagmire. Stankevich says the problem has been “localized.” But when the troops moved through North Ossetia to the border of nearby Chechnya, the Chechens threatened to declare war on Moscow. Recently Ingush fighters attacked Russian troops and seized several Russian armored personnel carriers. Local fighters have taken Russian soldiers hostage. “The task is to make a man forget his memories,” says Sergei Shoigu, Yeltsin’s deputy administrator in Vladikavkaz. But as long as the traces of the Russian Empire remain, the past will continue to haunt Moscow and its unhappy republics-and Yeltsin’s ethnic troubles are likely only to get worse.
