MOSCOW, October 17, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The new leader of a Russian province rocked by recent bloody attacks warned Monday, October 17, that religious repression was partly to blame for the crisis in the country, promising that he will reach out to Muslims.

"You can't solve these problems just through prohibition," Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Arsen Kanokov as telling the Kommersant daily in an interview.

The recently-appointed president of the Kabardino-Balkaria province was speaking a week after more than 60 people were killed in simultaneous attacks claimed by Chechen fighters on government buildings in the southern Russian city of Nalchik.

Kanokov also highlighted that the closure of mosques and abuses by law-enforcement bodies as reasons for the ‘radicalization’ of local Muslims in the lead up to last week's violence.

"Law-enforcement bodies did indeed commit certain excesses. I consider that closing mosques was not right. You cannot close mosques and push people into one place," he said, referring to the sole, government-controlled mosque left in Nalchik.

"Banning them from praying, forcing them into cellars and hiding places, where it is harder to control them, will only be worse. There has been, in my view, a certain deviation which we will correct."

Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered sealing off the city and issued shoot-to-kill orders for any person who puts up armed resistance to security forces.

Nalchik is located some 150km west of the Chechen capital Grozny.

Kanokov, whom the Kremlin named in September to roll back endemic corruption, economic collapse and a growing Islamic insurgency in the province, said the government must be closer to the people if it is to win their trust.

"If people see that (the authorities) feel their concerns, worry about them, then they will look differently on the authorities. If we shut ourselves from the population, from its problems, then people feel this at once."

He said economic development would be the key to keeping unemployed youths from falling under the influence of ‘well-financed radical groups’.

"There is very high unemployment and a very low living standard. The economy practically has not functioned, people had nothing to do, and that means the mass of young people.

"Of course it is very easy to bring them under the wrong influence, especially with finances," he said.

Kanokov said he would discuss in Moscow the possibility of allowing the relatives of gunmen killed during the fighting in Nalchik to retrieve their bodies.

Under anti-terrorism laws, the bodies of fighters and others killed in armed clashes are buried secretly on prison territory.

Kanokov said he would probably be against making an exception in this case, but "on the other hand, it would certainly be a tension-reducing act."

A statement posted on an Internet Web site used regularly by Chechen fighters said the Nalchik attack was mounted by a unit of the Caucasus Front of the Armed Forces of the Chechen Ishkeria Republic.

Interfax quoted an official as saying that the attacks were in reprisal for the recent arrest in Nalchik of a group of Islamists, whom the gunmen were attempting to free.

The Yarmak unit was the target of a swoop by security forces in January.

The Nalchik attack was the latest in a series by Chechen fighters on Russian federal security installations in the volatile North Caucasus region.

The small mountainous Caucasus republic has been ravaged by conflict since 1994, with just three years of relative peace after the first Russian invasion of the region ended in August 1996 and the second began in October 1999.

It was on December 11, 1994 that former Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian troops into Chechnya to subdue an increasingly powerful separatist movement.

After two years of horrific fighting, Russian troops pulled out in 1996.

In 1999, then-prime minister Vladimir Putin pushed some 80,000 Russian troops into Chechnya in what Moscow called a lightning-strike “anti-terror operation” but which has since degenerated into a grinding war with Chechen fighters.

At least 100,000 Chechen civilians and 10,000 Russian troops are estimated to have been killed in both invasions, but human rights groups have said the real numbers could be much higher.