Ilyumzhinov: No Longer The Khan He Used To Be
KIRSAN Ilyumzhinov, the incumbent leader of Kalmykia, received 47 percent of the vote in Sunday's presidential election - a solid success for a democratic leader, but an indignity for a popularly elected khan. Ilyumzhinov's star began to rise in 1992, when, as head of the Steppe Association, he received an 11-billion ruble credit from the federal government to purchase wool for Russian textile mills. The money was transferred to a number of little-known companies and vanished. When the prosecutor's office looked into the case, one of the parties involved died of a ruptured liver. Another died in an automobile accident. For his part, Ilyumzhinov promised to give every voter in this southern republic $100 and walked away with the presidency of Kalmykia in 1993. In 1995, Kalmykia was turned into a domestic-offshore zone. All local taxes on companies registered in the republic were replaced by a single $300 payment. These payments didn't flow into the regional budget, however, but into a foundation personally managed by Ilyumzhinov. In 1999, Kalmyk company Vneshnetorgovaya Firma RD exported filtration equipment worth $250 million, and requested that the government refund the 20-percent value-added tax on the shipments - a cool $50 million. The tax authorities balked, asserting that no such equipment had ever existed, much less been exported, and that the whole affair was a brazen attempt to bilk the budget. The money was refunded on the personal order of then-Tax Minister Alexander Pochinok. The Tax Police nevertheless pursued the case, and the Kalmyk authorities were forced to comply with a request for relevant documents. They sent the documents off in a Zhiguli automobile, but en route to Moscow the car supposedly crashed into a KamAZ truck and was consumed by flames. Larisa Yudina, editor of the Sovietskaya Kalmykia newspaper, attempted to write about the affair and was murdered by Ilyumzhinov's aide Sergei Vaskin, who had previously been convicted on various charges. The murderers of a Kalmyk FSB officer who was looking into allegations that Kalmyk Interior Minister Timofei Sasykov controlled the narcotics trade in the region have never been found. A rather unusual situation has taken shape in Kalmykia. The authorities, lacking any source of legitimate income, have turned to criminal activity - money laundering, illegal black-caviar trade and the like. The Taliban and General Manuel Noriega were involved in similar activities. In this sense, it would be more than reasonable to launch an operation like the one the Americans carried out in Panama - a special forces raid to extract the Kalmyk Noriega, followed by the filing of formal charges against him. But Viktor Ivanov, deputy chief of the presidential administration, acting on behalf of the Kremlin's chekist contingent, insisted that Ilyumzhinov be disqualified from running for another term as president. The chekists, however, failed because they lacked sufficient clout within the administration. Their opponents, headed by presidential-administration chief Alexander Voloshin, objected that without Ilyumzhinov, Kalmykia would turn into a second Chechnya. The results of the election in poor, downtrodden Kalmykia, show that both camps got it wrong. Ilyumzhinov isn't all that popular in Kalmykia after all. And if the "St. Petersburgers" in the Kremlin think Ilyumzhinov is a criminal, they still have no right to deprive the people of the right to choose their leader. They would have their work cut out just enforcing the law and convicting Kalmykia's leaders on all the charges they can actually prove. Yulia Latynina is host of "Yest Mneniye" ("Some Believe") on TVS.
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