RUSSIA-CHECHNYA: Floundering Yeltsin Torn Between Chechen Options

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sergei Strokan

MOSCOW, Feb 26 1996 (IPS) - Russian president Boris Yeltsin continues to flounder over his next steps in the breakaway state of Chechnya, as the conflict crosses the border into neighbouring republics and his plans for peace or victory are derided by the opposition.

Opponents doubt he can resolve the issue, as promised, before his June re-election bid, despite the release of a long-awaited package of proposals to end the 14-month conflict.

The options range from rapid withdrawal to all-out war, but Yeltsin is no nearer to picking one over another. Some 30,000 have died in fighting between Russian forces and Chechen separatists loyal to rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudyaev, in a hopeless conflict that is now highly unpopular with the Russian public.

“Two weeks ago the president said to have seven peace options, then it was eight,” said Mikhail Gerasev, a military expert with the U.S.-Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Now there are probably 24, but that still doesn’t bring peace.”

The fighting took a dangerous turn over the weekend when 3,000 Ingush civilians came under Russian fire on Saturday in six villages near the Chechen border, where the Russians say separatists were hiding out. Before Chechnya declared independence in late 1991, the two republics known as Checheno-Ingushetia.

Listing but not detailing the options in a state of the nation speech to the Russian parliament Friday, the list was drafted for him by a special government commission on Chechnya, headed by premier Viktor Chernomyrdin and several presidential staff experts.

Russian foreign minister Yevgeni Primakov hints that Chechnya could be granted “a special status” within the Russian Federation, but refuses to give details. Yeltsin’s press secretary Sergei Medvedev limits himself to saying that the proposals range from a complete Russian pullout to “energetic use of fire and sword”.

The president has restated willingness to talk with “any political forces interested in the establishment of peace,” and even talks on autonomy, but rejected talks with Dudyaev. Instead he renewed his support for a Moscow-backed government led by Doku Zavgyaev, precariously installed in the Chechen capital of Grozny.

“We will not make a deal with bandits behind the backs of the legitimate government of Chechnya,” grim-faced and determined Yeltsin stressed in a nationwide televised speech. “We are ready for the compromises on the question of the status of Chechnya within Russia, but no to the detriment of the security of its citizens”.

“Any plan that grants Zavgyaev legitimacy is doomed,” warned Alexander Iskandaryan, Director of the Centre for Caucasian Studies in Moscow. “Zavgyaev, guarded by federation troops, has the support of, at most, hundreds of Chechens and cannot even move around Grozny freely. He is not a real political force to negotiate for peace.”

Eminent Yeltsin’s opponents, like the popular 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 put forward their own peace plan in Moscow daily “Izvestia” last week.

They called for an immediate ceasefire and all-embracing talks followed by a full troop withdrawal and a referendum on independence of Chechnya. Earlier regional governor Boris Nemtzov presented Yeltsin with a million signatures — and with more to come — collected in support of an immediate end to hostilities.

The leaders of the federation’s republics have their own points of view. The ITAR-TASS news agency quoted Tatarstan’s president Mintimer Shaymiyev as calling for direct talks between the Russian government and Dudyaev, with Russian regional leaders and international delegates as observers. He did not mention Zavgyaev.

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 an open letter to Yeltsin from delegates to the Orthodox Political Forum last week. “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.”

“The president is unlikely to be capable of the kind of dramatic action proposed by the liberals, but the military option still looks unpromising,” said Dmitri Trenin, a Moscow-based analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“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. But for all the efforts of the Federal Army Dudyaev eludes them and he is still the controlling force in the republic.”

The Russian Army has totally failed to catch Dudyaev, who remains with a daily drive of Grozny and moves himself and his troops about the country without hindrance from the increasingly humiliated Moscow forces.

The Russian armed forces’ chronic underfunding, large-scale draft evasion, poor living conditions, inadequate training and leadership have been exposed in Chechnya. “Such an army is incapable of defending the state or the people,” the Communist Party daily Pravda storms.

Last Thursday the defence ministry announced the capture of Novogroznenskoe village in Chechnya, saying it destroyed “a strong military base”.

But Ilya Maksakov, a journalist who was there covering the war for the Nezavisimaya Gazeta liberal daily told IPS that Novogroznenskoe was “just a village populated by peaceful citizens, women and children”.

The immediate consequence was a devastating counterattack by Dudyaev’s guerrillas, who attacked Federal forces in the nearby village of Tsentoroi and blew up a key Chechnya-Dagestan oil pipeline.

Dudyaev seems confident of ultimate victory and is no mood to help Yeltsin’s election campaign by either talking or losing.

“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”.

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

“Further tightening of the Chechen knot carries the danger of the conflict spreading to the whole Northern Caucasus, making it a zone of permanent instability”.

Another difficulty for Yeltsin in disentangling himself from the Chechen imbroglio is Dudyaev’s long reach into the Russian political elite. Arkady Volsky, a former top negotiator in the conflict, says that some of his top secret memos to Yeltsin ended up on Dudyaev’s desk as well.

“It appears that mafia henchmen are entrenched at the very top of the Russian political pyramid. For them the war is a black hole down which countless trillions (of roubles) disappear through a giant financial and weapons scam,” said political analyst Sergei Roy.

These forces will benefit in war or peace, he notes wryly. “(Post-war) reconstruction work in Chechnya also offers opportunities to siphon off more trillions from the budget”.