RUSSIA-CHECHNYA: Fighting Slowed, Not Stopped By Midnight Order

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Strokan

MOSCOW, Apr 1 1996 (IPS) - Monday’s midnight order to Russian forces to ‘halt’ operations in the breakaway Chechen republic appears to be designed as a means of containing rather than stopping the bloody conflict. Attacks by both sides were reported in the afternoon.

General Vyacheslav Tikhomirov, commander of Russian operations in Chechnya, gave the ceasefire order in line with Sunday’s announcement by president Boris Yeltsin. However reports reaching Moscow indicate that both federal troops and Chechen forces concentrated in south-east Chechnya are unlikely to stop fighting.

Tikhomirov told Russian media that said his troops reserved the right to return fire if attacked and that ‘special operations’ would be carried out against the rebel ‘gangsters’. Tens of thousands of Russian troops continued to pound Chechen strongholds right up to the deadline, on Sunday continuing large-scale operations in eight mountain villages in the south-east.

The partial ceasefire is part of a complex plan of Yeltsin’s designed to end the deeply unpopular Chechen war without being seen to concede ground to the rebels. Despite a rise in his poll support in March, he still is trailing behind his chief rival in June’s presidential elections, Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov.

Yeltsin has staked all on scratching together a peace reasonably acceptable to most involved. Federal army troops will be withdrawn from the rural areas and interior ministry paramilitary police left to take over — but not in the capital Grozny, and not without negotiated concessions by the rebels.

His plan also includes new elections and talks on Chechnya’s “status within the Russian federation”. Rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudyaev demands full independence and complete withdrawal of Russian troops.

But Tikhomirov told the official Russian ITAR-Tass news agency in the Chechen capital Grozny on Monday there would be no quick withdrawal. “Troops will stay where they are and conduct (local) peace negotiations and oversee the implementation of the accord.”

One Yeltsin administration source anticipated that Interior ministry forces would remain in place, but federal army units would be pulled out of Chechnya and stationed along the administrative border of the republic to form a “sanitary cordon”. Cross-border raids by rebels have cased widespread death and destruction.

The negotiations on ‘status’ are expected to aim at a treaty on power-sharing between federal and local authorities, similar to other pacts signed with states within the Russian Federation.

One key aspect of the plan will be a bid to reinforce links with different factions within Chechnya’s fractious clan lords by declaring certain sectors ‘islands of peace’ where military operations would totally cease. The aim would be to extend these zones until they interconnected while areas where rebel guerrillas continued to operate would be declared ‘free-fire zones’.

The Kremlin refuses to negotiate with Dudyaev but Yeltsin has signalled flexibility on indirect talks with the rebel leader, possibly through Mintimer Shamiyev, leader of the mainly Muslim Russian federated region of Tatarstan in central Russia.

The plan has not stopped the opposition from intensifying its attacks on Yeltsin. Opposition Yabloko bloc leader and presidential candidate Grigory Yavlinsky has called a series of protests against the war and what he calls the ‘genocide’ against the Chechens.

Yavlinsky said “the overwhelming majority” of Russia’s democratic, human rights, trade unions, public and youth organisations would be involved. He also joined a number of observers concerned at the long term damage done to the credibility of the Russian Army by its continual failures in Chechnya.

“Politicians committed a crime against the Russian army” by dragging it into the war,” said Yavlinsky.

“Not being trained or prepared for prolonged policing and punitive operations, the army has entered a period of disintegration,” agreed top Russian military analyst Alexander Zhilin, “due mostly to never-ending military operations that lack any clear objectives.”

Zhilin, just back from Chechnya, said Russian troop discipline had been wrecked by poor morale and massive alcohol and narcotics abuse. He cites informal but reliable estimates that say that for every one Russian soldier killed in combat, five die in accidents, drunken brawls or gunfights between fellow troops.

Such is the collapse of discipline that senior officers are said to be willing to exclude villages and towns from attack in exchange for payments between 20,000 and 40,000 dollars. Zhilin believes that dozens of rebel bases have escaped destruction this way.

One unanswered question in all this is the future of Moscow- appointed Chechen premier Doku Zavgyaev and his government, whose removal has been demanded by Dudyaev. Yeltsin’s plan envisages elections for a new parliament.

In the meantime Moscow appears to have turned on Zavgyaev and his colleagues, who have come under frequent attack from Dudyaev’s rebels but are now targeted by Moscow forces. Chechen deputy prime minister Abdulla Bugyaev told the Russian independent news agency Interfax that federal troops were illegally detaining Chechen citizens and disarming Chechen police.

He accused “marauding” Russian troops of looting food stores and hospitals and said was being carried out by Russian units and condemned as “illegal” the pre-ceasefire Russian attacks on the villages of Samashki, Sernovosk and Gudermes.

Yavlinsky remains the only presidential candidate to condemn the war outright. Both Yeltsin and Zyuganov qualify their criticism — both recognise conservative public opinion resistant to concessions to the unpopular Chechens and further fragmentation of the Russian republic.

“The activity of the Communist party in parliament reveals it is not interested in terminating the conflict, despite all the rhetoric,” said the Moscow daily Izvestia’s parliament correspondent Sergei Chugaev.

Zyuganov always returns to the view that there should be no withdrawal of Russian troops, he said.

“He accompanies this with words to the effect that this is very ‘complex issue’, ‘that it takes time’, but the hard fact is that there was not a single vote of the Communist party in this or indeed in the previous Duma (parliament), to suggest that the party favours the end of the war.”