Medvedev denounces Chechen killings
Calls for arrests in killings of 3 rights workers
MOSCOW - President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia declared yesterday that the capture of those responsible for the recent killings of three Chechen human rights workers should be the “paramount task’’ of the nation’s security services.
Medvedev also appeared to signal dissatisfaction with Chechnya’s Kremlin-appointed strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, a former rebel warlord who has been accused of terrorizing the population.
“I think this is a challenge for the Chechen leadership,’’ Medvedev said at a news conference in the Black Sea resort of Sochi after talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
“The Chechen president must do everything he can to find and apprehend these murderers,’’ he said.
His demand was made amid a surge of violence in Chechnya and two neighboring provinces, Dagestan and Ingushetia, that left 23 people dead.
The bloodshed underscored the Kremlin’s struggle to maintain control of the region against an Islamist insurgency that appears to be gaining momentum.
In the deadliest attack, militants burst into a bathhouse Thursday night in the city of Buynaksk in Dagestan and gunned down seven women, authorities said.
The attack occurred after the rebels sprayed a nearby police post with gunfire, killing four police officers.
Six other police officers and five suspected rebels were reported killed in gun battles in Chechnya and Dagestan on Thursday and yesterday.
In Ingushetia, authorities said a woman who made a living telling fortunes was shot to death Thursday by militants who consider the practice a grave sin.
An American specialist on the region warned in an article this week that Russia’s repressive policies in the North Caucasus had created “fertile ground for terrorist recruiters’’ and represented a threat to US security interests.
“Getting targeted assistance to the region, including job creation, should be of the highest importance to the White House and the State Department, as well as European governments,’’ wrote Sarah Mendelson, director of the human rights and security initiative at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Referring to the unsolved killings of several human rights activists and journalists, Mendelson urged President Obama and European leaders to make clear to Medvedev that “impunity will not be tolerated’’ while pressing him to accept international help to address lawlessness in the region.
Chechnya’s most prominent human rights activist, Natalya Estemirova, was abducted and executed last month, and a couple who ran a center for children traumatized by Russia’s two wars against Chechen separatists were found shot to death in the trunk of their car Tuesday.
A day later, the Ingush construction minister was gunned down in his office. The Ingush governor, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, returned to work this week after recovering from an assassination attempt in June in which four of his bodyguards were killed.
Medvedev linked the attacks on the human rights workers to those on government officials, and he said they were “aimed at destabilizing the situation in the Caucasus’’ and carried out by militants with foreign support.
