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Moscow Removes Ingushetia President - Yahoo! News

Moscow Removes Ingushetia President - Yahoo! News: "Spontaneous dancing broke out in the streets Thursday night in the tiny Russian republic of Ingushetia, which borders the troubled Chechnya region. The reason for the celebration was that Moscow had accepted the 'voluntary resignation' of Ingush President Murat Zyazikov. No part of the Russian Caucasus today has a political situation hotter than Ingushetia's, and no leader in the volatile region has been less effective and more embattled than Zyazikov.

Moscow had picked Zyazikov, a general of the FSB (the state security body that succeeded the KGB), in 2002 to replace then-Ingush President General Ruslan Aushev, whose 'fault' had been immensely popularity among his people and his opposition to the war in Chechnya. But under Zyazikov's tenure, Ingushetia has supplanted Chechnya as the permanent hub of anti-Moscow Islamist resistance in the Caucasus. Chechen rebels now wage hit-and-run attacks from the Ingush mountains. But the lines of conflict in Ingushetia are not always simple - an increasingly bloody war of all against all pitches clans against their rivals, citizens against corrupt law-enforcers, and secret services against rebels, with all kinds of private vendettas thrown in. Kidnappings and summary executions by security services, as well as attacks on villages and military columns by militants have become the order of the day. Last ye"

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