Ossetian Leader Challenges Moscow Prosecutors

A public row has broken out between the leadership of North Ossetia and the Russian prosecutor general’s office after criminal charges were brought against top officials in the republic.



In a passionate speech to the North Ossetian parliament last week, the republic’s head Taimuraz Mamsurov blamed Moscow for targeting public figures – including several of his closest allies – when it should have been investigating the September 2004 school tragedy in Beslan.



“Launching criminal cases against senior officials in the republic is an attempt by the prosecutor general’s office to deflect attention away from the Beslan tragedy,” said Mamsurov, adding that “no criminal cases will distract us from investigating the Beslan terrorist action”.



The emotional reference to Beslan raised the temperature in the dispute between Vladikavkaz and Moscow.



In September 2004, more than 330 people, most of them children, died after militants seized a school in the town and took over 1,300 people hostage, and security forces mounted an operation to free them.



Relatives of the victims have accused both Moscow and the North Ossetian administration, led at the time by former president Alexander Dzasokhov, of mishandling the siege crisis, indirectly leading to excessive number of casualties.



A team of Russian prosecutors led by Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov is currently pursuing a number of senior North Ossetian figures.



The head of the republic’s tax inspectorate, Chermen Zangiev, was dismissed last year after being accused him of tax evasion - though this did not prevent him from running for the local parliament, and being elected.



Kolesnikov has warned the head of Mamsurov’s own office, Sergei Takoyev, and the mayor of the local capital Vladikavkaz, Kazbek Pagiev, that they may face prosecution. Finance Minister Konstantin Urtayev is under house arrest and former prime minister Mikhail Shatalov is at liberty but restricted in his movements.



“Everything we have set out in our plans will be carried through to its logical conclusion,” said Kolesnikov during his latest trip to North Ossetia on March 17. “We are closely following the activities of those who have no desire to encounter the law and who are trying to evade their responsibilities.”



“Some time over the next month, we will send ten or 12 people to trial. Speculation that the investigative team is winding up its work is baseless, but the scale of the task is huge. There’s a lot of work to do,” he pledged.



Kolesnikov’s aggressive pursuit of North Ossetian officials has won him some support in the republic, from people who are pleased to see someone doing something about what they regard as a corrupt system.



“At last they have started something serious,” said schoolteacher Nina Vasilyevna, who has been following the campaign and hopes that it will result in jail sentences. “Only I look at them all and see that they’re still not afraid.”



Alikhan Khugayev, the leader of the opposition movement Yedinaya Ossetia, said the two issues of dishonest government and Beslan were directly linked, because in his view it the seizure of the school was made possible by a corrupt system.



“I am only afraid that they will all get off with suspended sentences and that those who robbed the budget will just get a small fright,” he said.



Mamsurov, who has been in charge of North Ossetia only since last June when he replaced Dzasokhov, is now in a vulnerable position.



Mamsurov himself comes from Beslan, and two of his children were held hostage in the school siege. He gained in stature by reportedly turning down an offer to get his children out when the gunmen initially freed some children. His daughter was badly wounded and has undergone several operations.



Despite this, many of the Beslan relatives have been critical of his record since he became North Ossetian leader.



An official close to him, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Mamsurov was being targeted out of “personal revenge”, and that he was caught “between the hammer and the anvil” of Moscow and the relatives of the Beslan victims, neither of whom entirely trusted him.



When Kolesnikov and his investigators first arrived in North Ossetia last September, he was looking at the Beslan case on the orders of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who had just met some of the relatives. They spent more than a month in the republic, but were able to add little to the official version of what happened in the siege.



The prosecutor subsequently turned their attention to the North Ossetian government, starting with its funding of the famous local football team Alania.



Alania won Russia’s football championship in 1995 and has thousands of devoted fans, but its financing from the North Ossetian budget has proved controversial.



In the course of his investigation, Kolesnikov named at least 20 public institutions including some in health and education which he said were underfunded as a result of the money that was spent on the Alania club.



Kolesnikov told journalists his team had uncovered serious financial irregularities in government, and implicitly accused Mamsurov himself. For instance, passing a retrospective law to alter the North Ossetian budget when the money had already been spent was a “nonsense”, he said.



“Parliament passes laws and the head of the republic signs them. The question arises: why are you doing this?” he asked.



But Mamsurov suggested that the new line of investigation was a tactic to cover up the prosecutors’ failure to come up with new information about Beslan.



In a parliament, he suggested that following Putin’s meeting with Beslan residents last year, officials reached “an unspoken agreement to pressure the [North Ossetian] leadership to persuade the victims not to speak out about how the investigation was going”.



He added that his administration would never allow such a deal, saying, “This did not and could not happen.”



As well as those who welcome the investigation, there are other residents of North Ossetia who welcome Mamsurov’s defiant stance.



“All of Kolesnikov’s actions resemble a PR campaign to distract public attention,” said Oleg Teziev, head of the non-government Civic Initiative group.



According to Teziev, the officials whom Kolesnikov’s team are questioning are in fact among the best politicians in the republic. “It would all be fine – except that they’re going after the wrong people,” he said.



“If the prosecutor’s office had resolved to tackle corruption seriously, it should have started with customs, border guards and the police - not a football club which has behaved no worse than others.”



Many local observers are baffled by a campaign which appears designed to undermine Mamsurov, since Putin himself picked him last year under a new law which stipulates that regional Russian leaders, including the presidents of constituent republics, should be appointed rather than elected.



“This kind of pressure on the authorities cannot be happening by chance,” said Soslan Tabuyev, a political observer with the Ossetia.ru website. “It’s not as if they are looking at candidates who would be more suitable and loyal to [Moscow] than Mamsurov is. So it must be a question of imposing direct [Russian] federal rule on North Ossetia, with the aim of extending this system to the whole of the North Caucasus.”



Madina Sageyeva is a freelance journalist working in North Ossetia.