NAPOLEON once said: “Give me 20,000 Cossacks and I will conquer the whole of Europe, and even the whole world.” Now, President Putin is enlisting the help of the Cossack ethnic minority to keep order in Russia’s volatile southern regions. The President has introduced personally to the Russian Duma a Bill that would create special Cossack security units to preserve law and order and fight terrorism.

It could become law this month. About 600,000 Cossacks would be eligible to join the units, the first of which could be formed by the end of the year. The move would mean Cossacks returning, after a 90-year hiatus, to their traditional role as tough defenders of Russia’s border regions.

The need for such defence was underlined yesterday as eleven soldiers were killed and more than twenty people, including civilians, were injured when a lorry carrying troops was blown up by a radio-controlled bomb in Makhachkala, capital of the restive Dagestan region that borders Chechnya.

Cossacks were bands of freemen who lived in what is now the south of Russia, defying the authority of tsars and Ottoman princes and conducting armed raids on both sides. Eventually they swore allegiance to the Russian tsars and, as cavalry, were at the vanguard of the expansion of the Russian empire into Siberia and the Caucasus. Their culture and way of life was brutally suppressed under the Soviet Union.

Cossacks now want to pick up their long tradition of military service to the Russian state. Sergei Buzinov, the deputy Ataman (chief) of the Cossack Military Society in Rostov-on-Don, said: “We want to defend the motherland. Historically, Cossacks served together, under a special bond of brotherhood.”

General Gennadi Troshin, formerly commander of the federal troops in the Chechen republic and now presidential aide on Cossack issues, told the Russian media that Cossacks could play an important role in protecting Russia’s southern borders, where Islamic extremism and ethnic divisions have fostered unrest. Mr Buzinov agreed, saying: “About 1,200 Cossack voluntary organisations exist in Russia, where Cossacks, on foot or on horseback, help to maintain law and order in Russian cities.”

Analysts have mixed feelings about the proposal. The Cossacks’ reputation for bravery stands, and their strong traditions could make them more immune to corruption than the FSB (the KGB’s successor) or conventional military.

Alexei Malashenko, Caucasus expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow, said that Mr Putin did not trust his official units. “The secret services, for example, made a mess of Beslan. Someone has to protect ethnic Russians”

However, Ivan Safranchuk, the director in Moscow of the Centre for Defence Information, said: “Cossacks now are indivisible from nationalists. This (plan) is very dangerous.”

Unofficial volunteer units of Cossacks, which are active in regions such as Rostov or Krasnodar, have been accused by some human rights organisations of acting as vigilante paramilitaries, harassing and beating other ethnic minorities.

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