|
MOSCOW
- President Vladimir V. Putin, who rose to power in late 1999 on the promise he
would solve Russia's problem in Chechnya once and for all, does not like to talk
about the breakaway republic these days. For
the second time in five years, Russia is waging war to keep the rebel region
under its control, but Putin's army is in a quagmire. His aides now say the
conflict will drag on for many years, even decades. Military and political
observers increasingly doubt that the Kremlin has any strategy for ending the
war.
The
war Putin undertook to put down Chechen ''bandits'' and the one he finds himself
fighting have turned out to be two very different things. The Russian president
is having trouble explaining the kind of conflict that Chechnya has become, in
which unseen assailants launch deadly hit-and-run attacks on the Russian
military from places where no rebels should be. ''I think Putin does not know
what to do with Chechnya, and he is probably just drifting,'' said Ruslan
Khasbulatov, an ethnic Chechen who is the former speaker of the Russian
parliament.
Last
month, Moscow was forced to halt a planned withdrawal of most of its 80,000
troops after only 5,000 had left Chechnya; instead, the Kremlin said it was
sending troops back to the war-shattered region. A
year after Russian military commanders declared victory there, federal losses
continue to mount at a rate of one soldier killed and several wounded every day
in increasingly bold hit-and-run attacks by small groups of guerrillas. The
military and police have responded by sealing off entire villages and rounding
up everyone suspected of rebel sympathies. Many never come back.
Officials
of the pro-Moscow Chechen government, widely unpopular in the region for its
inability to protect civilians from the roundups, have become targets of the
rebels, too - dozens have been killed or wounded in recent attacks; others have
resigned in fear. Frustrated
by the continued heavy casualties, General Gennady Troshev, commander of Russian
troops in Chechnya, this month called for public execution of rebels. It was
Troshev who declared one year ago that ''the war, as such, is over.'' Now, he is
calling for Russian troops to conduct sweeps for rebels outside Chechnya itself,
in the region to the west.
Following
a summit meeting with President Bush in which he responded to American criticism
of Russia's military campaign, Putin told reporters Monday that he is ''getting
tired'' of explaining what he's up to in Chechnya and that it would take ''a
dumb person'' not to understand the Kremlin's actions, the Associated Press
reported. But many Russian politicians themselves are having trouble making
sense of the Chechnya campaign. One of them is Alexei Arbatov, deputy chairman
of the Russian parliament's defense committee, who was wounded when a military
helicopter carrying him was hit by rebel gunfire near the border of Chechnya.
Arbatov
told reporters that the army's presence in Chechnya, and the recurring violence
against civilians, were turning local people against Moscow. He said he was
surprised to learn that troops were having more difficulty controlling
Chechnya's plains than its remote mountain areas, and that rebels were moving
freely across the republic's borders. In order to defeat the rebels, Arbatov
said, federal troops must find a way to distinguish civilians from rebel
fighters.
''Their
mission is to show the population that federal authority is better for them and
to win the population over to our side,'' Arbatov said in a recent interview. ''Only
then will we be able to rob the militants of their base of support and be done
with this war and with this illegal separatist armed movement.'' But the
reality, said Aslanbek Aslakhanov, the representative from Chechnya in the Lower
House of the Russian parliament, is that ''the army treats the population as a
potential enemy.''
On
Wednesday and Thursday last week, 20 civilians were reported murdered by troops
in Chechnya. In an unusually swift response, Russian security forces rounded up
19 soldiers suspected of involvement in the killings, which human rights groups
complain have been routine. Authorities have in the past questioned soldiers in
connection with massacres, but so far only one officer has been put on trial,
for the murder of a Chechen girl. ''You can destroy the population, but you
cannot win their sympathy by these methods,'' Aslakhanov said.
The
Kremlin's plan for Chechnya used to be that with major cities and towns under
control, troops would crush remaining rebel bands and round up their leaders.
But despite constant security sweeps, the top rebel commanders remain at large.
The head of Russia's Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev, said last
month that troops could not get to the leaders without risking heavy losses.
Rather than call the previous policy a failure, Patrushev suggested that the
Kremlin's mission in Chechnya had changed. No longer was Moscow's goal to kill
or arrest rebels; instead, the idea was to ''prevent Chechnya from being a base
from which terrorists could launch attacks.'' Putin echoed this sentiment in his
interview Monday.
Whether
this new strategy has been successful is debatable. Rebel attacks continue. On
Tuesday, three car bombs in Chechnya killed three civilians and wounded 34,
adding to the untold civilian casualties. The Kremlin admits to 3,096 Russian
deaths since the campaign began in October 1999; independent observers suggest
the toll might be double that. Meanwhile, the cost of the war has risen. Pavel
Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst in Moscow, recently estimated that
operations in Chechnya had cost $2 billion in 2000 alone. That is almost a third
of the entire Russian defense budget. Clearly, the money was not coming from the
budget, but from the windfall that Russia, an exporter of oil and gas, reaped
from high world energy prices.
''But
if oil prices tank, where is that going to come from?'' asked Fiona Hill, a
Russia analyst at the Brookings Foundation. ''Who's going to suffer in Russia to
keep this war going in Chechnya?'' Support for the war is starting to slip. At
the end of 1999, two-thirds of Russians approved of a military solution, but a
recent survey by pollster Yury Levada found that 58 percent now support halting
the fighting and holding peace talks with the rebels. Still,
Hill suggested that the Kremlin may prefer a costly, low-scale conflict to the
alternatives. The Russians are not willing to grant the Chechens independence.
That, they believe, would re-create the situation that existed before the
current conflict, when Chechnya became a haven for kidnappers and gangs who
launched raids on Russian territory.
The
Kremlin has publicly ruled out peace talks with the separatists' fugitive
president, Aslan Maskhadov, and top rebel commanders, whom it blames for the
kidnappings and raids. Unable to win the war on the ground, the Kremlin has
tried to take control of its media in an attempt to win the propaganda war, by
muting dissent and sanitizing what news gets through. ''Add
economic difficulties to the dead-end policy in Chechnya and Putin's rating
would begin to melt,'' veteran Moscow political observer Otto Latsis wrote in
the English-language Russia Journal recently. ''The people in his administration
seem to have realized this danger and to have decided that if it is to happen,
the later people find out what is going on, the better.''
|
