Russian Military Success Is No Guarantee Of Chechnya Peace

Moscow (dpa) – Russia’s recent military successes in Chechnya have dealt a severe blow to Islamic rebels.

But as the generals stick to sledgehammer tactics and Moscow rules out talks with the militants, peace remains a remote prospect after 22 months of fighting.

The situation in the North Caucasus republic remains “tense and acute” – and not because of rebel activity, the Moscow-loyal head of the Chechen administration, Ahmed Kadyrov, said Tuesday after federal troops routed one rebel formation and its leader, Arbi Barayev, and encircled a second large gang of militants.

“It is the unwarranted detention of citizens unconnected with the illegal armed gangs as well as looting during mop-up operations that whip up this tension… And we are alienating the people this way.”

The expectation now is that rebel leaders will easily replenish their ranks by exploiting distrust of the population toward Moscow that has been fostered by poverty and brutality by federal troops.

Young Chechen men are disappearing without trace in filtration camps run by the Russians, and the number of documented cases of civilians murdered by troops during house-to-house search operations this month has more than doubled, say Russian human rights activists.

“We documented 35 cases only in the first two weeks of June,” Oleg Orlov from the organization Memorial told The Moscow Times newspaper.

Equally shocking are media reports that troops did not allow women and children to flee from the Grozny suburb of Alkhan-Kala during massive bombardments of houses occupied by Barayev’s men.

True, fear of brutal reprisals by the rebels and the murders of numerous village heads also hinder any Russian efforts to distance the Chechen people from the separatists.

But the death of Barayev, a main organiser of the reprisals, has momentarily tipped the balance in favour of the Russians.

Kadyrev and others argue that the Russians must now step into the vacuum left by his death and by the disarray of other isolated rebel leaders that have suffered setbacks.

“The time has come to fully engage economic levers, create tens of thousands of jobs, give young men the chance to earn a wage through peaceful labour, and not by laying mines and committing terrorist attacks.”

Another prudent signal to the populace that the worst injustices of the conflict are over would be a suitably harsh sentence for Colonel Yury Budanov, a tank officer on trial in a Russian court for the murder of an 18-year-old Chechen girl.

Budanov admits killing her with his bare hands in March last year after he dragged her from her family home for interrogation.

But the signs do not indicate that anything other than force and intimidation will be employed to reestablish Moscow’s rule.

The Kremlin still refuses to hold talks with Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, generally regarded as the most “reasonable” of the rebel leaders.

The acting chief of the Russian army group in Chechnya, Gennady Troshev, meanwhile, said recently that if he had his way, captured militant leaders would be publicly executed, “strung up on a town square so all can see”.

As for millions of dollars the government in Moscow has promised for reconstruction and job-creation in Chechnya, these funds look likely to disappear into dark channels.

Overseeing their movement will be the newly-appointed federal inspector Bislan Gantamirov, a former mayor of Grozny who was jailed once already for embezzling millions assigned for the restoration of the city after the 1994-1996 conflict.

And many people in the Russian military and population regard the Budanov case as a shameful “scape-goat” prosecution of an officer driven to excesses by the pressures of serving in a combat zone.

Banners demanding his release became a regular feature at the courtroom in Rostov where the hearings continue. Medical evidence supporting claims that he also raped the girl has not been admitted by the court.

Morale among Russian military officials may be high after the recent battlefield triumphs. But the Kremlin is clearly worried about its inability silence the “Chechen meatgrinder”, as the war is known.

At an unofficial round table meeting with western journalists earlier this month, a senior Kremlin official professed puzzlement about why it is so hard to “annihilate” the Chechen rebel leaders.

And then answered his own question. “This terrorism is not possible without the support of the local population. And there is virtually no collaboration at all with the Russians.”