On Oct. 30, Murat Zyazikov resigned as president of Ingushetia — a small, mainly-Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus region. Zyazikov’s fate was likely sealed two weeks previously, on Oct. 18, when a military convoy was ambushed by insurgents between the villages of Alkhasty and Surkhakhi, leaving approximately 50 servicemen dead. The ambush was the largest of its type yet seen in the republic. Ingushetia lies directly to the west of Chechnya (the Ingush and the Chechens are close ethnic relatives), and the leaders of the insurgency in Ingushetia have drawn inspiration from their Chechnyan counterparts, who have been fighting [...]
Art Goldhammer reads the tea leaves on French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s abrupt about face on the American-Russian standoff over European-based missile defense. On Friday, at an EU-Russia summit in Nice, Sarkozy had called for what amounted to a mutual cooling off period, whereby both sides would postpone deployment of measure and countermeasure for six months. But in Washington, he reversed course, stating that the missile defense system is a good idea after all. Like Art, I’d imagined, when I first saw the news Friday, that Sarkozy would not have floated this kind of plan had he not had some sort [...]
Only eight months after losing Kosovo, their cultural and historical heartland, Serbs seem strangely passive these days. At this time last year, as negotiations over Kosovo’s final status reached an impasse, Serbs felt bitter and humiliated by the pariah-status they were dealt by the international community. So their initial reaction to Kosovo’s declaration of independence — and its quick recognition by Western capitals — this past February was predictable: amidst a crowd of 100,000 peaceful protesters (more than 1% of the population), a few hundred “extremists” attacked and ignited several embassies of Kosovo-friendly governments, including that of Kosovo’s strongest ally, [...]
