ANALYSIS:With insurgency and corruption raging in Russia, concerns have surfaced over security
THE BOMB at Moscow’s main international airport not only exposed the failure of Russia’s leaders to fulfil repeated promises to crush terrorism, but stoked fears over its ability to safely host the 2014 Winter Olympics and football’s 2018 World Cup.
Many Russians see these events as symbols of their country’s recovery, through a period of rebuilding and relative stability, from the chaos and humiliation of the Soviet collapse and the difficult decade that followed.
But for all Russia’s apparent political solidity and economic strength, it is still badly weakened by the grinding insurgency in the North Caucasus and endemic corruption, both of which probably played their parts in Monday’s horrific attack at Domodedovo.
Since 2000, Russian politics has been dominated by Vladimir Putin, first as president and now as prime minister, who entered the Kremlin vowing to snuff out Chechnya’s rebels, eradicate graft and subject his unruly country to a “dictatorship of the law”.
Eleven years on, all-out war may have ended in Chechnya but the insurgency has spread to the neighbouring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia, and radical Islam’s influence is growing among their disaffected youth. Unemployment and poverty are rife in the Caucasus, where officials and security forces are associated as strongly as ever with brutality and corruption.
President Dmitry Medvedev has identified the turbulent North Caucasus as Russia’s greatest problem, but corruption cannot be far behind. International watchdogs say graft in Russia is getting worse, and even Medvedev has been forced to admit that his repeated pep talks to officials to clean up their act have had little or no effect.
Putin’s “dictatorship of the law” also failed to materialise. Tycoons who challenged him have ended up in jail or self-imposed foreign exile, while those who have shown loyalty live lavish lives unsullied by investigations. The same goes for officials at all levels and in all agencies – if you have the right connections you can hope with considerable confidence for protection from the law.
Militants from the North Caucasus have committed all the recent major terror attacks in Russia, and their bloody missions are made simpler by the relative ease with which they can acquire weapons and bribe people at every stage of their plans.
In the two most infamous attacks, the Moscow theatre siege in 2002 and the Beslan school siege two years later, dozens of militants bristling with weapons reached their targets after travelling unhindered through what are supposed to be two of Russia’s best-guarded areas – the heart of the capital and a region of the North Caucasus that is crawling with security forces.
Hundreds of people died in the Dubrovka theatre and the Beslan’s School Number One, but the authorities failed to properly investigate either event and blocked independent inquiries. No senior official has been sacked for the failings that allowed the attacks to happen.
Just days before the Beslan atrocity, two Chechen women blew themselves up on two domestic flights from Russia’s Domodedovo airport, killing all 89 people on board the planes.
A policeman at the airport was later jailed for failing to search the women and two airport workers were jailed for taking bribes to let them board without proper identification.
The small fry are always blamed for allowing such crimes to occur. Medvedev has lambasted Domodedovo’s operators for failing to prevent Monday’s attack, and they provide an easy target after being blamed last month for major problems that occurred during bad weather.
It remains to be seen whether more influential figures will be held responsible for Russia’s continued security problems, but Medvedev did note the global resonance of the latest attack.
It came a day after Fifa president Sepp Blatter met Putin to formally award Russia the 2018 World Cup, and it happened at what is expected to be the main gateway for foreign visitors to the event.
The country is also due to host the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, a city on the edge of the North Caucasus. However, if Russia is to use these sporting spectacles to show the world how much it has changed, it must first seek to cure some of its most chronic problems.
Dan McLaughlin reports from Budapest on events in eastern Europe and Russia