Christian Science Monitor
Feb 10 2005
Calm before the Chechen storm?
Rebels urge Russia to peace talks before Feb. 22 cease-fire deadline.
By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
MOSCOW – A surprise unilateral cease-fire ordered by two top Chechen
rebel commanders has Moscow abuzz with debate. Experts are asking, is
it a genuine chance for peace, a PR stunt, or an artificial lull
before a fresh storm of Beslan-style terrorist assaults?
Few see much hope of ending the Chechen war, now well into its sixth
year, unless there is a political breakthrough that sees the Kremlin,
the separatist rebels, and pro-Moscow Chechen forces sit down
together to seek a settlement.
President Vladimir Putin appears determined to stay his chosen
course, which involves signing a treaty with the Kremlin’s handpicked
Chechen leader Alu Alkhanov – perhaps as early as this May – that
will lock Chechnya into Russian permanently. But amid reports that
the rebels could have acquired a nuclear device or radiological
weapons, many experts see only an escalating cycle of violence in the
offing.
“The situation in Chechnya is currently at a dead end,” says
Alexander Iskanderyan, director of the independent Center for
Caucasian Studies, in Yerevan, Armenia. “The key to its solution is
in the Kremlin, but I see little hope of change there.”
Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya’s rebel president-in-hiding, called
attention this week to the self-imposed cease-fire, which had been
announced last month on a rebel website but went largely unnoticed.
He portrayed the move as an olive branch to get peace negotiations
started, and urged Russian leaders to take up the offer to talk
before the cease-fire expires on Feb. 22.
“If our Kremlin opponents are reasonable, this war will end at the
negotiating table,” he told the Moscow daily Kommersant, in a rare
interview published Monday. “If not, blood will continue to be
spilled for a long time but we will reject any moral responsibility
for this continued madness.”
The cease-fire was endorsed by Shamil Basayev, the notorious Chechen
field commander who has claimed responsibility for many terror
strikes against Russia, including the 2002 seizure of 800 hostages in
a Moscow theater and last September’s school siege in Beslan that
left 331 people dead, half of them children. In an interview
broadcast by Britain’s Channel 4 News this month, Mr. Basayev
declared: “We are planning more Beslan-type operations in future
because we are forced to do so.”
That threat gained ominous traction this week when self-exiled
Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky said a “Chechen businessman” had once
offered to sell him a miniature nuclear weapon stolen from former
Soviet stockpiles. “It is a portable nuclear bomb,” Mr. Berezovsky
said. “Some part of it is missing at the moment, but these are small
details.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry quickly denied that, saying that all
Soviet-made “suitcase bombs” are accounted for. But independent
experts say Chechen militants may well have the means to produce a
“dirty bomb,” with deadly radioactive materials wrapped around
conventional explosives. “They probably don’t have a real nuclear
weapon, but we know they have had access to radioactive substances in
the past,” says Pavel Felgenhauer, a Moscow-based security expert.
“This threat is very real. A dirty bomb could make part of a Russian
city uninhabitable for 100 years. We may expect anything after the
cease-fire ends.”
Though the Kremlin has not responded to Mr. Maskhadov’s peace
overture, pro-Moscow Chechen leader Mr. Alkhanov said the only issue
he is willing to discuss with rebel leaders is their surrender.
“Negotiations with those who have engaged in bloody crimes against
society are absolutely out of the question,” he said. “The only real
salvation for such people is to give themselves up and confess their
crimes.”
There is doubt about whether the cease-fire, which was to take effect
Feb. 1, is holding. Russia’s official ITAR-Tass agency, which usually
reports peace and order prevailing in Chechnya, quoted Russian
commanders Thursday saying there have been up to 20 rebel attacks
each day this week.
Some experts say that Maskhadov, elected in Chechnya’s only
internationally recognized polls in 1997, no longer controls rebel
forces and is a fading force. “Maskhadov is just one of the leaders
of the Chechen resistance, and not even the strongest,” says Mr.
Iskanderyan. “[The cease-fire] may be just an attempt to show he’s
still relevant.”
But 17 prominent Russian human rights activists issued a statement
Wednesday warning that Chechnya was turning into an “eternal
conflict” and urging the Kremlin to take up the offer for
negotiations as “practically the only way of stopping Chechnya’s
transformation into yet another front in the confrontation between
radical Islam and Western civilization.”
The pro-Moscow Chechen government insists that reconstruction of the
war-torn republic has made great strides, though there is little
independent information. At a Moscow press conference this week,
Alkhanov said the treaty being drafted will settle the conflict by
granting Chechnya some economic autonomy “within the federal
constitution.”
But according to Malik Saidulayev, a Moscow-based businessman and
Chechen community leader, there is no security, order, or prospect
for peace in Chechnya.
The Kremlin’s “policy of Chechenization of the conflict has failed
and the situation in the republic has grown much worse,” he says.
“The war is not ending, it is spreading to the rest of the Caucasus
region.”
–Boundary_(ID_aMMM7rJDXeUy9/5gCkHrYw)–