MORE BORDER VIOLENCE IN DAGESTAN.

A group of about fifteen people made a raid Monday night on a police checkpoint in the Dagestani city of Kizlyar, near the Chechen border. Two policemen died in the crossfire. Dagestani police ran some of the suspects to ground near the village of Oktyabrskoe, also close to the Chechen border. Also that night, a raid was carried out on a police checkpoint on a bridge near the village of Krasno-Oktyabrskoe. Two Dagestani policemen guarding the bridge have disappeared. (NTV, RTR, April 6)

Dagestani Security Council Secretary Magomet Tolboev told the Monitor that he believed that those responsible for the Kizlyar raid were Dagestanis, not ethnic Chechens — proving initial police reports of a "Chechen trail" unfounded. The magazine Novoe vremya has proposed an original, albeit controversial, explanation of the events. According to the magazine’s deputy editor-in-chief, Vadim Dubnov, the government in Dagestan is almost completely under the control of criminal authorities. The most lucrative business is the misappropriation of subsidies received from Moscow, which make up 90 percent of the republic’s budget. In Dubnov’s opinion, it is the government itself which is destabilizing the situation in the republic — in an effort to wring fresh subsidies out of the federal government to "normalize" the situation. (Novoe vremya, April 5)

Russia Sends Emergency Aid to Chechnya.