GROZNY — The leader of the volatile region of Chechnya vowed on Wednesday to build a ski resort "not unlike Switzerland" once rebels are destroyed in his republic, which was ravaged by two wars in as many decades but has since been rebuilt.
Chechnya, nestled in the North Caucasus where an Islamist insurgency is raging, will first eliminate rebel leader Doku Umarov from his mountainous hiding place before putting up the ski slopes, said President Ramzan Kadyrov's spokesman.
"[We have] a good climate and beautiful nature. We have places where the infrastructure of the resorts will be not unlike Switzerland," Kadyrov's spokesman Alvi Karimov quoted the president as saying in the Chechen capital of Grozny.
"To make these places completely safe, it is necessary to eliminate the bandits that remain there," he added, using a Russian word often synonymous with "militants."
An Islamist group under Umarov, Russia's most-wanted guerrilla leader, has taken responsibility for attacks across Russia including a train bombing last November that killed 26 people. He is part of an insurgency that aims to create a pan-Caucasus, sharia-based state independent of Russia.
Kadyrov, an ex-rebel who fought against the Russians but then switched sides, is largely credited by the Kremlin for rebuilding Chechnya in the last two years.
Though Chechnya now boasts glistening shopping centers, cultural museums and meticulously paved streets, most Russians from outside the region are skeptical after the wars and do not venture there.
Moscow spent 26 billion rubles ($900 million) on its program to develop Chechnya and Russia's other volatile, Muslim-dominated southern regions last year.
President Dmitry Medvedev has called the growing violence on Russia's southern flank its biggest domestic political problem and has blamed the region's economic backwardness and poverty as key causes of the violence. Earlier this week he created a new federal district out of the North Caucasus region and appointed Alexander Khloponin, a former Krasnoyarsk governor and Norilsk Nickel chairman, as deputy prime minister of the districtA Message from The Moscow Times:
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