Russia’s President, Dmitry Medvedev, pretends that this republic is a haven of stability. Not so, says Tom Parfitt: the Ingush are subject to a campaign of murder and repressionAmong the first-class passengers who flew into Ingushetia’s Magas airport from Moscow on the afternoon of 31 August were two grey-haired men in suits. The pair avoided each other’s gaze. One was Murat Zyazikov, 50, a former KGB officer and president of Ingushetia, the small Muslim republic which borders Chechnya in southern Russia. The other was Magomed Yevloyev, 36, an outspoken critic of Russia’s brutal rule in Ingushetia, founder of the ingushetiya.ru website, and Zyazikov’s great nemesis.The fates of the government bureaucrat and the government critic, which had been so closely bound up with each other, were about to diverge.
