Kadyrov, Kadyrov and more Kadyrov

Here he is. The widely feared strongman Ramzan A. Kadyrov was inaugurated as the new president of Chechnya with a blessing from the Kremlin, which has relied on him to stabilize the region after more than a decade of separatist fighting. Human rights groups say that security forces under Mr. Kadyrov’s control abduct and torture civilians suspected of ties to Chechnya’s separatist rebels. Some suggest that he was tied to the murder last year of the journalist Anna Politkovskay who made her name as a critic of the Kremlin and its policies in Chechnya. But Kadyrov, only 30, is credited with a reconstruction boom that he administered as the region’s prime minister, under which the capital, Grozny, is being transformed from a moonscape of rubble and shattered buildings, as Rodrigo Fernández writes in El País from the zone. “My main goal is to make Chechnya prosperous and peaceful,” he said at the inauguration ceremony in Gudermes, east of Grozny. But the cult of personality and deification of one man will not do anything good for the republic or its society.