INGUSH PRESIDENT SAYS WAR WITH NORTH OSSETIA WAS ONLY NARROWLY AVERTED.

The President on Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, said yesterday that war between his republic and its North Caucasus neighbor, North Ossetia, had been “only five minutes away” on the night of Saturday, September 12. Five policemen guarding a joint Ossetian-Ingush checkpoint and one attacker were killed that night. A trailer camp of about seventy makeshift homes was also set on fire. Its occupants–Ingush families who had only recently returned to North Ossetia’s Prigorodny District after having been forced to flee North Ossetia in 1992–fled back to Ingushetia. Aushev said that, as soon as the news reached the Ingush capital Nazran, Ingush security forces were put on full alert. Ingushetia would not hesitate, he added, to send its forces across the border to North Ossetia to protect Ingush citizens in Prigorodny District. Only the intervention of Russian Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin had averted war between the two republics, Aushev said (Russian agencies, September 14).

The dispute over Prigorodny District has its roots in Stalin’s wartime deportations of the Ingush and other indigenous peoples of the North Caucasus. In 1946, Stalin made the Ingush-inhabited Prigorodny part of North Ossetia. It has been a source of often-deadly conflict ever since. In 1992, it provoked the first instance of armed inter-ethnic conflict in Russia since independence. There were hopes in January this year, when Aleksandr Dzasokhov was elected president of North Ossetia, that he and Aushev would be able to mend fences and speed up the return of thousands of Ingush forced to flee the republic in 1992, but these hopes have been disappointed. Yesterday, Aushev called the events of the weekend–which the North Ossetians are blaming on an armed band of Ingush–a “serious blow” to Ingush-Ossetian relations. Aushev called the attack a provocation and accused unidentified groups in North Ossetia of organizing it (Russian agencies, September 14).

ESTONIAN PRESIDENT CALLS FOR AID TO RUSSIA…