Participants of "Gaidar Readings" call to create agglomerations in NCFD

The roundtable "Policy in Northern Caucasus. What Experts Suggest" was the last event of the Forum "Gaidar Readings" ongoing in Pyatigorsk. In the course of the discussion, experts invited state officials to actively cooperate with various religious groups and create agglomerations in the regions of the North-Caucasian Federal District (NCFD).

Let us remind you that earlier, within the two-day "Gaidar Readings", the panellists expressed their views on human resources and land issues in Northern Caucasus. During the forum experts also discussed the issues of youth policy in the NCFD.

The roundtable "Policy in Northern Caucasus. What Experts Suggest" was attended by about fifty guests - representatives of the academia, businessmen, lawyers, government officials and public figures.

Irina Starodubrovskaya, the moderator of the debates and the head of the scientific direction "Political Economy and Regional Development" of the Economic Policy Institute (the Gaidar Institute), immediately oriented the speakers not only towards stating the existing problems, but to offer concrete measures to address them.

Slepakov: agglomerations should exist in every region of NCFD

Professor Sergey Slepakov, the head of the Division "Economics and Enterprise Management" at the Pyatigorsk Branch of the North-Caucasian State Technical University (NCSTU), supported the idea of Alexander Khloponin, Plenipotentiary of Russian President in the NCFD, to create an agglomeration, including the cities and municipal districts of the southern Stavropol Territory.

Agglomerations can be used by the authorities to master effective mechanisms to support the Russian countryside, said Sergey Slepakov.

The professor has treated the "washout" of the countryside population, leading to devastation and gradual dying out of villages to be the main problem for Northern Caucasus.

"The deep roots of terrorism, extremism and interethnic conflicts are in the struggle for living space," said Sergey Slepakov.

He was supported by Professor Natalia Kiselyova, the head of the Division of Global and Regional Economics of the North-Caucasian Institute Branch of the Russian Academy of People's Economics and State Service, who believes that these should not be urbanism mega-projects, but rather clusters of agricultural processing, which will "loop" the population of adjacent rural areas, by preventing the "washout" of the rural population.

Yarlykapov: authorities should hold dialogue with all NCFD religious groups

Akhmed Yarlykapov, a senior researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believes that for effective stabilization of the situation in Northern Caucasus, while taking Dagestan as the example, the authorities should change the attitude to perception of the society. "One should understand that Dagestan is not just Salafis and Sufis; it's a complex religious mosaic. One should not admit reduction to the Israeli variant, when there are an ultra-secular and an ultra-religious parts of the society," said the expert.

Mr Yarlykapov believes that a new state policy in religious matters should be worked out. In his opinion, the authorities should also show that they will hold dialogue with all, even radical, religious groups.

"State should not define which Islam is correct"

As stated by Irina Starodubrovskaya, the head of the scientific direction "Political Economics and Regional Development" at the Gaidar Institute, the societies in North-Caucasian republics can in no way be called patriarchal; they are characterized by coexistence of different social systems.

According to her story, the following two areas of researches in Northern Caucasus are the main ones for her Institute - vital priorities of young people and land relations. And the proposals drafted in the course of studies and expert discussions are directed to power bodies for making decisions.

She touched on separately the problem of combating terrorism, proposing to adopt the experience of Italy. "The attitude to terrorists should be as to children who got lost, not as to enemies and criminals," said Irina Starodubrovskaya.

She also criticized the fact that state institutions are now demonstrably supporting, in her opinion, only one type of Islam in Northern Caucasus. "In no case the state should decide what Islam is the correct one," said the expert.