RUSSIA: Peace Plans Fly Thick In Chechnya But Bullets Fly Thicker

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

IPS Correspondents

MOSCOW, Apr 8 1996 (IPS) - Doubts continue that president Boris Yeltsin can enforce the peace plan for Chechnya as it now stands, and speculation is rising that a review of the plan this week may open the door to direct talks with rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudyaev.

Moscow Echo radio reported Sunday that Dudyaev proposes direct talks with Yeltsin to settle the 16-month crisis in breakaway Chechnya, believing that talks through foreign mediators, as proposed by Yeltsin last week, would not be successful.

As the rebel leader made his first proposal to end the conflict by negotiation, in a Sunday telephone conversation with parliamentary deputy Konstantin Borovoy, Russian forces pounded Chechen villages with artillery and aircraft.

Yeltsin’s officials still hold out hope for talks through intermediaries. “The president will not despair if at the very first stage the negotiations do not immediately achieve their desired results,” spokesman Sergei Medvedev told the Russian news agency Interfax Monday.

But there were indications that Yeltsin was already preparing to make the necessary concessions.

Russian nationalities minister Vyacheslav Mikhailov said Monday that Yeltsin was to Wednesday meet a newly-appointed Chechnya commission led by prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, empowered to make changes to the existing ceasefire and plan.

In a striking departure from past statements, Mikhailov conceded that both Russian and rebel sides bore responsibility for the escalation of the fighting since the supposed ceasefire was declared on Mar. 31. And he proposed the founding of a joint Russian-Chechen ‘review committee’ to “lessen the number of provocations… on both sides.”

Yeltsin announced the supposed unilateral ceasefire as part of a peace plan also calling for phased withdrawal of Russian troops from ‘quiet’ areas. But so-called ‘special operations’ were continuing against the villages of Goiskoye and Vedeno Monday where separatist rebels have been holding out, Russian commanders said.

Moscow does not consider the ‘special operations’ a breach of the ceasefire. “Large-scale operations to liquidate the rebels are not being carried out,” Interfax quoted Russian commanders as saying.

Fighting has spread to hitherto largely unaffected villages in the south-west of Chechnya in the past week as Yeltsin tries to reinforce his bargaining position at the negotiating table by dealing heavy blows against rebels who fail to halt attacks on Russian forces.

Goiskoye has been under heavy Russian attack since Thursday night when separatist rebels repelled a Russian attack claiming 300 Russian soldiers killed. The Russians say 30 troops were killed, 67 wounded and 15 are missing in action.

There was widespread fear that the next target would be the neighbouring town of Shali, population 30,000, 30 kilometres south east of Grozny. It has been menaced by a column of 200 Russian military vehicles apparently hunting a top Chechen commando leader.

Interfax quoted an official of the Moscow-backed Chechen government as saying that Shali townspeople had forced 70 rebels who moved in Friday to leave, hopeful that it would deter an all out Russian attack.

The force was reportedly led by Shamil Basyaev, commander of the commando group that carried out a mass hostage-taking in the southern Russian town of Budennovsk in June 1995.

However the official Russian agency ITAR-TASS maintained that up to 200 of Basyaev’s men with another 500-600 men commanded by another top rebel leader, Aslam Maskhadov, still operating near Vedeno, scene of earlier fighting over the weekend.

The war in Chechnya remains unpopular — 70 percent quizzed in a recent Moscow poll opposed the use of force there and a similar majority are critical of the president’s failure to resolve the crisis. Yeltsin concedes that he will have little hope of being re- elected in June without a deal in the breakaway republic.

Yeltsin ordered troops into the tiny, thinly populated North Caucasus republic “to protect the territorial integrity of the country” and silence a three-year campaign for independence, in December 1994.

More than 30,000 have died since then and the military have proven powerless to nail Dudyaev, even though he is able to happily speak freely to legislators and media alike without obstacle.

Furthermore the continued Russian offensives have since restored Dudyaev’s falling popularity by recreating him as a national resistance leader in the mould of historical Chechen leaders like Sheikh Mansur and Imam Shamil.

His opponents, like liberal Yabloko party leader and presidential candidate Grigori Yavlinsky, former premier and liberal Russia’s Choice party chairman Yegor Gaidar and human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov have called for an immediate ceasefire and all- embracing talks followed by a full troop withdrawal and a referendum on independence of Chechnya.

At the other side of the political spectrum Yeltsin has been strongly critcised by the hardline nationalist opposition, which demands he “relentlessly suppress” the “mutiny” in Chechnya.

“End the helpless policy of pacification,” urged one typical open letter to Yeltsin from the Russian Orthodox Church Political Forum. “Withdrawal from Chechnya will not lead to peace. An independent Chechnya will become a bulwark of struggle against Russia and lead to the historical demise of Russian statehood.”

“Yeltsin’s problem is that he wants peace and eventually to get the troops out, but rules out Chechnya’s secession from Russia and doesn’t want to negotiate with Dudyaev,” Dmitri Trenin, a Moscow- based analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says. “But for all the efforts of the Federal Army Dudyaev eludes them and he is still the controlling force in the republic.”

And according to TASS Tim Guldiman, head of mission of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe which brokered a failed July ceasefire warned that agreement in Moscow did not automatically mean compliance on the ground.

“The orders of Russia’s top leadership on termination of hostilities in the (Chechen) republic are not always fully carried out by the military here,” TASS quoted him as saying.

Morale in the Russian army is at a new low. More than 7,000 Russian soldiers have died and hundreds taken prisoner in the fighting so far, while more than 700 have deserted from the army during the campaign.

Over 40 percent of soldiers in the 80,000 strong Russian force question their presence in Chechnya and don’t see the objective of the operation, the daily Moscow News has reported, quoting a leaked Russian defence ministry report. Since the start of the Chechen debacle, the press has been full of accusations of its criminal brutality toward civilians.

“In Chechnya Russia has been confronted with not just a criminal gang (as Yeltsin suggests) but with a well-orchestrated national liberation movement,” former Chechen parliament speaker Yusup Soslambekov wrote in a recent commentary for the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

Dudyaev has made his own position clear. “We are prepared to fight indefinitely to add to our history of 437 years fighting against the Russian Empire,” he told a group of journalists in a recent interview in his hideout. “Only independence and withdrawal of the federal troops can bring peace”.