Alla Dzhioyeva, the opposition candidate whose victory in a runoff ballot in November for de facto president of Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia was swiftly annulled by the republic's Supreme Court, was taken to a hospital after a raid by some 200 masked security personnel on her headquarters in Tskhinvali.

Accounts of what happened, and of her condition, are contradictory. Dzhioyeva had planned to hold her inauguration on February 10, despite warnings from acting de facto President Vadim Brovtsev that doing so would constitute an attempt to seize power illegally.  

The security personnel forced their way into Dzhioyeva's headquarters on February 9. Some eyewitnesses say they hit Dzhioyeva on the head with a rifle butt and she lost consciousness. The South Ossetian Interior Ministry has issued a statement denying this. Deputy prosecutor Georgy Kabulov said Dzhioyeva passed out when she realized the security personnel planned to take her to the prosecutor's office for questioning.

Shortly before the security personnel forced their way into the building, Dzhioyeva reportedly had an argument by telephone with one of her former backers, Russian wrestling team trainer Dzhambolat Tedeyev, who tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to call off her planned inauguration. 

Medical personnel at the hospital in Tskhinvali said Dzhioyeva, who is 62, suffered a minor stroke, but had regained consciousness. She has reportedly rejected an offer to transport her to a hospital in Vladikavkaz, the capital of neighboring North Ossetia.

Dzhioyeva told the Russian daily "Kommersant" on February 9 that nothing would stop her going ahead with her planned inauguration. Asked why she had not tried to register for the March 25 repeat presidential ballot, she said she would not be permitted to do so.

In fact, the agreement she signed in December with outgoing President Eduard Kokoity explicitly gives her the right to participate. Nineteen candidates have applied to register for that election. But according to a recent poll cited by "Kommersant," only 48 percent of the electorate intend to cast ballots, which implies that those who voted for Dzhioyeva in last November's runoff intend to stay at home, having "already made their choice."

Doku Umarov, the self-styled Caucasus Emirate leader, has resurfaced after a six-month silence and ordered the end of attacks by his fighters on civilian targets in Russia.

In a four-minute video clip posted on February 3 on the Caucasus Emirate's main website, Kavkazcenter. com, Umarov notes that developments in Russia today, meaning the protests against the outcome of the December State Duma election, and the corruption and iniquities of the Russian leadership in general, show that the civilian population does not support what he termed Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's "Chekist regime, of which they are the hostages."

Umarov said the insurgents were constrained by their religion not to harm those Russian civilians who do not participate in or support the Russian leadership's "war against Muslims."

Umarov ordered all militants in the Caucasus and sabotage groups preparing attacks in Russia to ensure that they do not injure civilians. At the same time, he said Russian military and security personnel and the pro-Moscow Chechen leadership remained legitimate targets.

The video clip is the first of Umarov since his triumphal announcement last summer of the reconciliation with senior emirs Khusayn Gakayev and Aslambek Vadalov, who broke with him in August 2010. The footage was shot outdoors, in a snowy forest. Umarov is shown seated, flanked by two younger fighters, and he supports his right elbow with his left hand while talking. Whether he has been wounded or is suffering from rheumatism after a decade of living rough is impossible to say.

Umarov's renunciation of terrorist attacks like those in the Moscow subway in March 2010 and at Domodedovo Airport in January last year marks a return to the strict compliance with the Geneva Conventions demanded by his predecessors as Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov and Abdul-Khalim Sadullayev. In his last interview with RFE/RL's North Caucasus Service, just days before he was killed in March 2005, Maskhadov stressed that he always insisted that his fighters avoid harming civilians. He said he even told them not to target police officers who lay down their arms.

Indeed, Umarov himself initially complied with Maskhadov's ban on terrorism as a tactic, telling RFE/RL in 2005 that "If we resort to such methods, I do not think any of us will be able to retain his human face." He specifically condemned the Beslan school hostage taking of September 2004 in which at least 334 hostages were killed, 186 of them children.

Umarov's reversal may reflect the influence of Gakayev and Vadalov, who advocated confining military activities to Chechnya and targeting primarily the pro-Moscow Chechen leadership.

By contrast, the new young generation of commanders in Kabardino-Balkaria consider all those who are not with them to be against them, and have warned that they will not go out of their way to avoid injuring civilians who ignore their duty to join the ongoing jihad.

Finally, it is not clear whether the ban on harming Russian civilians is simply a moratorium, as Umarov hinted, and whether it will be lifted on the eve of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi in two years' time. Russian and Western experts alike have long assumed that the insurgency is already making plans to stage terrorist attacks to disrupt the games and humiliate and embarrass the Russian leadership.

Either way, it is highly unlikely that Umarov's statement will either effect a review of the U.S. decisions to designate him personally a terrorist, and the Caucasus Emirate a terrorist organization, or that it will radically change most Russians' negative perception of him.

It seems there is still no end in sight to the political stalemate that has prevailed in South Ossetia ever since disputed presidential elections late last year.

Talks that began last week and continued on January 30 have failed to yield a hoped-for agreement, whereby acting de facto South Ossetian President Vadim Brovtsev would cede power to opposition leader Alla Dzhioyeva.

Dzhioyeva had already announced two days earlier that her inauguration as president will take place on February 10.

The People's Party, which is loyal to former President Eduard Kokoity, denounced Dzhioyeva’s statement as a declaration of "civil war" .

Brovtsev, for his part, warned on January 30 that "we shall not allow anyone to sabotage" the repeat presidential ballot scheduled for March 25.

The parliament also warned that responsibility for any possible political destabilization lies squarely with Dzhioyeva.

Warning Of 'Bloodshed'

Even some of Dzhioyeva’s closest supporters have signaled disapproval. Former South Ossetian Defense Minister Lieutenant General Anatoly Barankevich, her election campaign manager, has been quoted as telling media on February 1 that Dzhioyeva’s plans to proceed with her inauguration “could lead to bloodshed.”

The standoff between Dzhioyeva and the breakaway republic's previous leadership dates back to November, when Dzhioyeva was initially declared the winner of a runoff ballot to elect a successor to outgoing President Kokoity, who was barred by the republic's constitution from serving a third presidential term.

The Supreme Court, however, intervened to annul the results, citing unspecified violations by Dzhioyeva's supporters.

After popular protests on Dzhioyeva's behalf, which lasted almost two weeks, a senior Kremlin official dispatched to Tskhinvali succeeded in mediating an agreement whereby Dzhioyeva acknowledged publicly the legality of the parliament's ruling to schedule new elections, thereby implicitly retracting her insistence that she was legally elected president on November 27 in a free and fair ballot.

She also undertook to tell her supporters to disperse and return home.

Kokoity for his part agreed to step down, his term in office having officially expired on December 7, and to fire three senior officials whom the opposition perceived as having either persecuted dissenters and human rights activists, or connived in the annulment of the election results.

The officials in question are Prosecutor-General Taymuraz Khugayev (whose sister is married to Kokoity's brother); Khugayev's deputy, Eldar Kokoyev; and Supreme Court Chairman Atsamaz Bichenov.

Brovtsev as prime minister automatically became acting president until the inauguration of whichever candidate wins the March 25 repeat election.

'Unilateral' Decisions, Ultimatums

The pro-Kokoity parliament, however, failed to endorse the firings, a failure Dzhioyeva subsequently viewed as a violation of her agreement with Kokoity.

On January 18, Dzhioyeva said she had revoked her signature on the December 10 agreement because Kokoity had failed to honor it.

Dzhioyeva also formally asked Brovtsev to cede the presidential powers to her. She warned that failure to do so would be construed as a bid to retain power illegally.

Both Dzhioyeva and Brovtsev had described their talks on January 23 as "constructive."

But on January 30, Brovtsev said further talks "are pointless if one side takes unilateral decisions" and issues ultimatums.

He said Dzhioyeva’s demand that he cede the presidency to her was itself a violation of the December 10 agreement, which stipulated he should serve as acting president until the March 25 repeat election.

Dzhioyeva has not yet commented on the apparent deadlock.

Meanwhile, the number of would-be candidates in the March 25 election has risen to nine, at least five of whom can tentatively be identified as aligned with the existing authorities.

This suggests that Kokoity, who many believe is still pulling strings behind the scenes, has opted for the same scenario as in the November election: to split the vote between the largest possible number of candidates in order to ensure that no candidate wins in the first round, and any two acceptable candidates reach the runoff.

When RFE/RL’s Echo of the Caucasus conducted a straw poll of residents in Tskhinvali this week, only one respondent out of six knew how many candidates have so far thrown their hats into the ring, and most considered the number of hopefuls excessive, especially compared with the five candidates in the Russian presidential ballot on March 4.

The long-standing tensions within the ruling three-party coalition between President Serzh Sarkisian's Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) and the Bargavach Hayastan (Prosperous Armenia, BH) party, headed by wealthy businessman Gagik Tsarukian, have escalated over the past two weeks.

This seems to be occurring because of Tsarukian's withdrawal from a commitment the three parties made in February not to compete against each other in the May 2012 parliamentary elections, and to back Sarkisian for a second term in the presidential elections the following year.

With just four months to go, the HHK has finally announced it will participate alone in the May elections.

That announcement put an end to months of mutually contradictory statements and speculation about whether the three parties aligned in the ruling coalition would form an election bloc.

What new political alignments might emerge in the run-up to the May ballot remains unclear, however.

Tensions between the HHK and BH first surfaced in the fall of 2009, fuelled by persistent rumors that BH might quit the coalition to facilitate a political comeback by former President Robert Kocharian, who is close to Tsarukian.

Protocols And Political Comebacks

Both the HHK and BH sought to downplay that speculation. In February 2011, they signed a formal protocol together with the third coalition partner, National Security Council Secretary Artur Baghdasarian's Orinats Yerkir (Country of Law) party, on jointly participating in the May 2012 parliamentary elections and supporting Sarkisian's bid for a second term in the presidential election the following year.

Last September, however, Kocharian confirmed that he might attempt a political comeback in the absence of a tangible and stable improvement in economic and social conditions, or if unspecified groups lobbied for his return to big-time politics, but only if he were convinced he could "radically improve the situation."

Tsarukian immediately defended Kocharian's right to return to the political arena.

Despite a veiled warning by Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian (no relation to Serzh) and a wave of arrests of BH activists on criminal charges in November, Tsarukian declined formally to reaffirm his commitment to the February protocol.

A BH spokeswoman finally said last month that the party has no plans to form an alliance with the HHK for the May 2012 ballot.

Denials And Insinuations

At the same time, she denied that there had been any "political pressure" to do so.

Similarly, Orinats Yerkir leader Baghdasarian denied on December 13 that any of the three parties had proposed an electoral alliance.

One can only guess about which of the three parties dealt the death blow to the supposed parliamentary-election alliance, and how it will impact on their respective election chances.

But circumstantial evidence indicates that BH either broke ranks, or miscalculated the HHK's patience with its efforts to increase its popularity by underscoring its independence from the HHK.

One leading BH member implicitly accused the HHK on January 27 of engineering the resignation of no fewer than 58 of its members, presumably in retaliation.

One of the defectors has since been named to head the police department in the southern town of Ararat.

Whatever precipitated the decision that the three parties would run independently, it will be greeted with triumph by former President Levon Ter-Petrossian, now head of the Armenian National Congress (HAK), an umbrella group that unites some two dozen small extra-parliamentary parties and movements.

Inspired by the Arab Spring, the HAK launched a series of protests in February 2011 with the aim of extracting major concessions from Sarkisian, who Ter-Petrossian insists defeated him in the March 2008 presidential election because the ballot was rigged. These concessions included the scheduling of early elections.

While President Sarkisian rejected that demand, the authorities did accede to others, including the release of opposition supporters jailed following the postelection clashes in Yerevan in March 2008 and a formal "dialogue" with the authorities.

Pernicuous Influence

The HAK suspended those talks in August, however, to protest the arrest of one of its youth activists.

One of the leitmotifs of Ter-Petrossian's criticism of the Armenian authorities in the run-up to the 2008 presidential ballot was the role and pernicious influence of wealthy businessmen, several dozen of whom not only control economic monopolies but represent the HHK in parliament.

In an astonishing U-turn in November, Ter-Petrossian affirmed the HAK's readiness to cooperate with BH if that party "sincerely wants to leave the coalition and fight for truly fair and legal elections."

He also defended Tsarukian against what he termed smear campaigns launched by the authorities.

Not all of the 20-odd small parties aligned under the HAK banner approved Ter-Petrossian's offer, however.

Some argued that the HAK risked losing popular support by openly wooing BH.

Hrant Bagratian, who served as prime minister under Ter-Petrossian from February 1993 to November 1996, subsequently explained that Ter-Petrossian's objective was not to form an alliance with BH but to prevent an election bloc composed of BH and the HHK.

A member of the HAK's Political Council told RFE/RL on January 27 that 18 of its members have reached agreement on jointly participating in the May election. He did not specify whether they would seek to team up with other opposition parties.

Senior HAK members are confident the party will poll the minimum 5 percent of the vote necessary to win parliamentary representation under the proportional system.

Of the total 131 parliament mandates, 41 are for single-mandate constituencies and the remaining 90 are allocated according to party lists.

Opposition Parties Under Pressure

Many domestic observers likewise believe the HAK will win seats in the new legislature, together with the HHK and BH.

The two opposition parties represented in the current parliament may be hard-pressed to retain their current level of representation.

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation-Dashnaktsutiun (HHD), which has 16 parliament mandates, joined the ruling coalition in March 2008, but quit one year later to protest Sarkisian's overtures to Turkey.

Hrant Markarian of the HHD's governing bureau told journalists on January 26 that the party believes it will win seats in the new legislature, and is therefore disinclined to form an election alliance with any other party.

The Zharangutiun (Heritage) party, headed by U.S.-born former Foreign Minister Raffi Hovannisian, has seven parliamentary mandates.

Zharangutiun is currently in exploratory talks with the Free Democrats, a new grouping established last year by a handful of veteran Ter-Petrossian allies who quit the HAK under pressure.

They include a second former Foreign Minister Alexander Arzoumanian, who managed Ter-Petrossian's 2008 election campaign.

Relations between the HHD and Zharangutiun are strained. The two parties exchanged barbs last month after the HHD declined to back Zharangutiun's candidates for the vacant posts of parliament speaker and deputy speaker and voted instead for the HHK's nominees.

Russia's National Counterterror Committee has identified as one of three fighters killed during a counterterror operation early on January 27 as Dzhamaleyl Mutaliyev (nom de guerre Emir Adam), commander of the Ingushetia front of the North Caucasus insurgency.

Mutaliyev was killed in what appears to have been a classic counterterror operation. Security personnel backed by helicopters and heavy weaponry surrounded a private house in the village of Ekazhevo, southeast of Nazran, and launched an all-out attack when the fighters rejected a demand to surrender. The security forces claim not to have incurred any casualties.

That account suggests that an informant alerted the security forces to Mutaliyev's whereabouts. A comment on the report of his death posted on Abror.info, the website of the Ingush wing of the North Caucasus insurgency, expressed incomprehension "why the brothers do not take routine security precautions." The security lapse was all the more puzzling given that Mutaliyev, like other prominent Ingush fighters, and in contrast to most Chechen, Kabardian, and Balkar militants, never appeared in front of a camera unmasked.

According to the Counterterror Committee, Mutaliyev was 35, had been fighting since the second Chechen war (1999-2000), and was close to renegade Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev, who was killed in July 2006 in Ali-Yurt, just a few kilometers south of Ekazhevo. If that information is true, then Mutaliyev was almost certainly one of the Ingush fighters who under Basayev's command staged attacks on police and security personnel across Ingushetia in June 2004, killing 67 of them. 

"Emir Adam" was first identified as commander of the insurgency wing in Ingushetia in August 2010, when Doku Umarov first announced and then retracted his decision to step down as self-styled Caucasus Emirate head. A group of senior Chechen commanders withdrew their sworn allegiance to Umarov in protest; Adam reaffirmed his loyalty to Umarov as "a sincere and worthy Muslim and a steadfast fighter." 

​​It was Adam who formally identified the Riyadus Salikhiin suicide battalion as responsible for the suicide bombing in September 2010 in Vladikavkaz that killed 19 people and injured a further 240. He described that bombing as part of the Ingush campaign to drive the Ossetians out of "Ingush lands they have occupied," meaning the Prigorodny district of North Ossetia that was part of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR prior to the 1944 deportation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples to Central Asia. In the same statement, Adam denied that it was his fighters who tried in mid-September 2010 to kill respected Islamic preacher Khamzat Chumakov.

Not Attacking The Rank-And-File

In the fall of 2010, the "qadi" (Shari'a judge) of the Ingushetian insurgency wing announced a moratorium on attacks on rank-and-file police officers, "not because we do not have the strength to kill them in their homes, but because we hope that they will reconsider and show understanding for our position."  

The leadership of the Ingushetian insurgency wing reaffirmed last August that "we have never had any interest" in killing those officers of ancillary services such as the traffic police and the drug-control agency "who are not hostile to Muslims."

But Mutaliyev's men have no compunction about attacking other members of the security forces. They claim to have perpetrated no fewer than 100 attacks in 2011, including one in August on the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia in which they killed at least four Chechen Interior Ministry personnel and injured up to seven. They also claimed responsibility for the killing in late August of a senior Ingush Federal Security Service (FSB) officer, Magomed Korigov.

The insurgency website Kazkavcenter.com calculated that 36 federal and local military, police and security personnel were killed in Ingushetia last year and 46 injured; Kavkaz-uzel.ru came up with a lower total, 19 killed and 32 injured. 

One possible successor to Mutaliyev as commander of the insurgency wing in Ingushetia is the Kabardian Haji-Murat Bekov, an Umarov protege seen here in early 2011 huddled with a fellow fighter in a foxhole knee-deep in slush and melt-water. If Umarov is grooming Bekov to play a key role in planned attacks to disrupt the Sochi Winter Olympics in early 2014, it would make sense for him to acquire combat experience commanding a multinational group of fighters.

The shooting in Makhachkala on January 20 of a human rights lawyer and his relative has focused attention yet again on the brutal and indiscriminate approach of Daghestan's security forces to combating the Islamic insurgency.

Republic of Daghestan President Magomedsalam Magomedov recently demanded that the police make cracking down on the insurgency their top priority; Interior Minister Major General Abdurashid Magomedov (the two men are not related, the president is a Dargin and the minister a Lak) for his part complained that midlevel police officers adduce the insurgency as an excuse for their failure to prevent and solve other kinds of crime.

What neither admitted is that the police in Daghestan, as elsewhere in Russia, themselves engage in criminal activities and function as a "krysha" -- protector -- for organized crime groups. In an interview last year with the website Caucasian Knot, Nikolai Petrov of the Carnegie Center in Moscow described Daghestan's Interior Ministry as not a part of the government called on to protect the state system, but an independent actor, a "fortress under siege" that seeks in the first instance to defend "its own corporate interests."

That the police have long been the militants' primary target is largely due to former Interior Minister Lieutenant General Adilgirey Magomedtagirov, who construed the controversial 1999 legislation banning "wahhabism" (meaning Salafi Islam) as giving the police a free hand to kill anyone suspected of collaborating, or even sympathizing, with the insurgency.

Police have launched counterterror operations on the basis of false denunciations, using tanks and heavy artillery to kill devout but blameless believers, some of them women. They are also believed to be behind many of the cases in which men known to be practicing Muslims are abducted, tortured, and then summarily executed.

The perpetrators of those killings are rarely, if ever, apprehended and brought to trial. There is no incentive to do so; and even given the political will, identification would not be easy given the multiplicity of federal and republican police and security units engaged in counterterror operations in Daghestan.

Individual Daghestani officials have conceded that such indiscriminate violence has proven counterproductive. Rizvan Kurbanov, a former first deputy prime minister with responsibility for the law-enforcement agencies, admitted in November 2010 that "we know that in many cases what impelled people to head for the forest [to join the insurgency ranks] was their outrage at illegal actions by members of the law-enforcement agencies."

But other senior law enforcement officials adduce the difficulty of identifying the perpetrators of arbitrary reprisals to exonerate their subordinates of blame. Last November, for example, the Daghestan Prosecutor-General's Office released a statement saying its investigations have not brought to light any evidence that law-enforcement agencies were involved in any of the 29 abductions reported in Daghestan between January and October 2011. The statement stressed that the fact that the perpetrators in every case were armed, masked, and dressed in camouflage fatigues does not mean that they were police or security personnel.

Such disclaimers cut little ice with the population at large, who are increasingly at risk of being killed or injured. The website Kavkaz-uzel noted that civilian casualties in the ongoing fighting in Daghestan rose by almost 40 percent last year compared with 2010, to reach 74.

In late November, relatives of the "disappeared," together with the independent Muslim organization Ahl us-Sunnah (People of the Tradition [of the Prophet Muhammad]), staged a mass demonstration in Makhachkala to protest police brutality and abductions. Kurbanov, whom President Magomedov dispatched to reassure the protesters their grievances would be investigated, was met with jeers and whistles and shouts of "we don't believe you!"

President Magomedov on January 16 assessed the overall effectiveness of the police in 2011 as "unsatisfactory," despite what he termed a "huge amount of work done." He noted that the number of crimes rose by more than 8 percent but did not cite specific figures. He further stressed that "the fight against terrorism and extremism" should be a priority for every government agency.

Abdurashid Magomedov conceded that his ministry's performance in 2011 fell short in some respects, including in fighting corruption. At the same time, he took issue with the president, arguing that the fight against terrorism should not take precedence over "our primary function of combating crime." One year earlier, in December 2010, he had argued the opposite, telling subordinates in his New Year address that "the primary focus remains the struggle with extremism and terrorism."

President Magomedov's criticism of the Interior Ministry calls into question the effectiveness of the blanket reassessment over the past year of the republic's 16,000-plus police force. Some of the 200 officers dismissed as a result told journalists the process was unfair. One officer who had worked in the police for 35 years attributed his dismissal to a corruption investigation he undertook in 2006-2007 and for which he was formally reprimanded.

Dismantling the ties between the Daghestani police, organized crime groups and government officials may be utopian; drafting and enforcing strict guidelines for the conduct of "special" and "counterterror" operations that would minimize the likelihood of innocent civilians -- including the two men shot dead in Makhachkala on January 20 --  being arbitrarily killed is not.

As Russian journalist Maksim Shevchenko, former head of the Public Council's working group for the North Caucasus recently argued, the process of "adaptation," under which former militants lay down their arms to become law-abiding members of society, should cut both ways, with the "force" agencies, too, pledging to abandon illegal methods.