Residents of the North Caucasus are afraid that their children, grandchildren and relatives may fall under the influence of radicals and join Daesh. As the head of the Federal Agency for Nationalities Affairs Igor Barinov said, "despite great effort taken to explain Daesh is not even 'false Islam', but a direct insult to Islam, we are still witnessing how young people, drugged by the idea of the universal justice, are becoming supporters of the terrorists and the tools for ‘reformatting’ the world."
Meanwhile, the director of the Center for Ethnopolitical Studies of the 'Pyatigorsk State Linguistic University', Maya Astvatsaturova, sees positive trends in the North Caucasus Federal District, and considers them a result of purposeful activity of government and administrative bodies, as well as peoples' intuition: "Our population has a serious tradition of historical and cultural cooperation. And today we are talking about the fact that the population of the North Caucasus as a whole is certainly aimed at stability, security, cooperation and mutual support. And of course those activities that have been carried out greatly contributed to this. Activities of international scale. It is 2014 Olympics, and it is, of course, Crimea's accession to the Russian Federation, and it is certainly the position of our President on international issues. The quality of relations in the sphere of ethnic policy, ethnic culture, it has changed, but mostly, if I may say so, it became literate, civilized, and it corresponds to all-Russian civic trend."
However, Astvatsaturova admitted that there is interethnic competition: "This competition is often used demagogically, used by our opponents, and to use this competition in the field of property, land, politics and values, of course, they bring demagogical and falsely used dogmas of faith, dogmas of ethnicity. When our plenipotentiary representative to the North Caucasus Federal District, Sergey Melikov, says that we have no ethnic conflicts in the North Caucasus, political and administrative pathos of this statement is clear. And I, as an expert, I can clearly confirm that, yes, today, in the form in which these conflicts existed in the 90s, they definitely do not exist. But the danger today is in another thing. And we, and authorities, and local authorities, and mass media, react to the fact that any conflicts in the sphere of politics, property, religious beliefs, they are immediately interpreted in a negative way, and then actual facts and reasons are replaced by ethnicity and religious factors. It happens everywhere, and it must be said that our foreign opponents and those militants, who are trying to recruit our young people in bandit formations, of course, greatly contribute to this. And in this sense, today's response to these processes must be very careful, very timely and preventive."
Maya Astvatsaturova also drew attention to the fact that today, there is a new generation of young people with "high achievement complex" in the North Caucasus: "Young people of the North Caucasus want to have career aspirations, to achieve high life orientation, want to get a good education. In this sense, they even want to organize good leisure, and sports sphere, and tourism sphere. And they need answers from the authorities and from civil society. And one more thing that I would like to voice today, actually, when we talk about new interests of the North Caucasian community, you know, I would say about new spirituality, about a certain demand for this spirituality. On the one hand, this spirituality, demand for this spirituality, is implemented in traditional moments. On the other hand, a certain need in this new spirituality lies in the fact that the residents of the North Caucasus want, and have a full right, to feel themselves true Russian citizens. But on the other hand, maybe we all should think about how it will look today, this new image of a representative of the North Caucasus."
