Oppression in the Caucasus

Writing from Nalchik, capital of Russia's Kabardino-Balkar Republic,Telegraph correspondent Julius Strauss describes how Putin's "War on Terror" is tainted by brutality and corruption:

To the West, President Vladimir Putin presents the face of a staunch partner in the war on radical Islam, waging a legitimate fight against extremists in the south of his country.

As evidence of what he is up against he cites the brutal seizure of the school in Beslan last year, the downing of two Russian airliners by Chechen suicide bombers and numerous other attacks that the Kremlin regards as terrorism pure and simple.

But even as he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with western leaders abroad, at home his men are conducting a dirty and brutal war against innocent civilians that, far from combating terrorism, is driving them into the hands of a tiny minority of radicals.

The effect of these policies has been to bring the entire Russian Caucasus to boiling point and create an extremist threat in regions that have no history of militant Islam.

Republics such as Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachayevo-Cherkessiya may have so far avoided the international limelight even as Chechnya has become a byword for brutality and terror.

But analysts believe each of them is now on the brink of escalating into a conflict that could sweep through the whole region.

Alexei Malashenko, an expert on Islam with the Carnegie Centre in Moscow, said: "The entire Caucasus is ready to explode."

Nalchik, the capital of the small Muslim-dominated republic of Kabardino-Balkaria and the place where Ruslan was born and raised, was until recently a peaceful provincial backwater.

But now, egged on by a Kremlin that will brook no dissent, local security forces are running amok and terrorising the entire population with impunity.

In the vanguard of this new wave of Soviet-style oppression is the local branch of the notorious organised crime squad, known by its Russian acronym UBOP.

It was UBOP officers who beat Rasul to death because he refused to sign a document implicating himself in terrorist activities. His only known crime was to have once met a man who allegedly went on to become an Islamic radical.

At one stage during Rasul's torture he was even hauled, semi-conscious, in front of Anatoly Kyarov, the acting head of the regional UBOP. "Has he signed?" Kyarov asked, according to Rasul. When they answered no, he told the men beating him: "Continue with him then."

Arriving in today's Nalchik is akin to stepping back in time to when Soviet paranoia was at its height.

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