No Way Out?

By Paul Quinn-Judge

At first light, Russian troops in combat gear move slowly along one of Grozny's ruined main streets, past makeshift crosses erected to their fallen comrades. Hugging the edge of the road to avoid snipers, they peer into the bushes, looking for radio-controlled mines and booby traps laid overnight by Chechen separatists. The soldiers--young conscripts fresh from the provinces and professionals here for the money--are tense, but they barely glance at most Chechens passing by. And the Chechens ignore them. The Russians don't find any mines this morning, and at a concrete-and-barbed-wire checkpoint, their comrades inspecting cars and buses don't catch any rebels. They occasionally rough up the drivers and often demand bribes, but the guerrillas know very well how this game is played. "Stick some money out the window, and they don't check anything," says a self-described mujahid. Ordinary residents like Zinaida, a clerical worker with a teenage son, are happy just to see another dawn. "Night is our hell," she says--a time when soldiers descend on homes, beat down doors and take away young men suspected of rebel activities. Most are never seen again.

This is gradual normalization, the phrase that Russian President Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine has come up with to describe what passes for life in Chechnya. When a mine blew up recently near the campus of Grozny University, a student looked at his watch and quipped, "Normalization is early today." Normalization is scheduled to enter a new phase this week, with the expected announcement of election results for the Chechen presidency. Chechens had little choice but to vote for Putin's hand-picked nominee, Akhmad Kadyrov, 52, head of the Moscow-appointed administration in Chechnya. The former mufti, or chief Islamic legal authority, of Chechnya was once an anti-Russian guerrilla fighter. He rallied to the Russian cause in late 1999 because, as he tells it, he disapproved of the growing influence of radical Islamists among the rebels. It was a dangerous move--Kadyrov has since survived many attempts on his life--but a politically advantageous one. By election day, he was virtually the only candidate left in the race; most of his serious rivals had been disqualified on technicalities, dropped out for "personal reasons" or been suddenly awarded plum jobs in Moscow.

Once in office, the new Chechen President is to be given broad powers to run the republic, Putin recently told a group of journalists from the U.S. media, including TIME. A local legislature will also be elected. Then the Kremlin plans to announce that the war is over, reduce its troop numbers to a small permanent garrison and hand over pacification duties to the 13,000 men in the Chechen police force, which is widely viewed as Kadyrov's private army, and an undisclosed number of Kadyrov's personal security guards.

This Chechenization strategy--intended to remove the war as an issue in Putin's re-election campaign next spring--is reminiscent of the U.S.'s attempts to declare victory and get out of Vietnam three decades ago. It also has echoes in the U.S.'s current predicament in Iraq, as Bush seemed to acknowledge at a news conference with Putin at Camp David two weeks ago when he said, "Terrorists must be opposed wherever they spread chaos and destruction, including Chechnya." In Chechnya guerrillas have fended off a superior military force and used terrorist tactics to take the battle from Grozny to the streets of Moscow.

There's a neat symmetry to Putin's Chechenization scheme. The Chechen war, waged in 1994 by Putin's predecessor Boris Yeltsin, was supposed to be a brief punitive action against a small, unruly republic. But it ended in August 1996 with at least 80,000 Chechens dead, Russia humiliated and Chechnya independent in all but name. The experience was as scarring for Russia as Vietnam was for the U.S. In late 1999, after a series of apartment-block bombings in Moscow that the Kremlin blamed on Chechen terrorists, Putin, then Prime Minister, ordered the reinvasion of Chechnya, making the conflict a key theme of his presidential election campaign. By February 2000, Russian jets had crushed the resistance in Grozny by reducing the city to rubble. Putin's promise to bring the rebellious republic back into line got him elected President. He has no intention of letting the place unmake him now.

But with a Russian victory no closer today than it was three years ago, Putin desperately needs a credible Plan B. As many as seven Russian soldiers are being killed every day in Chechnya, according to close observers of the war. Moscow rarely publishes its losses, but last February the Kremlin admitted to almost 4,600 soldiers dead since late 1999--more than it lost in the first Chechen war but still considered a gross understatement. Musa Doshukayev, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian-appointed administration in Chechnya, told TIME that the official Kremlin count "causes only mirth among security specialists." No one has counted the Chechen civilian dead this go-around, though a conservative estimate is 10,000. While officials in Moscow talk of wiping out the last 3,000 guerrillas--something they were promising to do to the last 2,000 fighters three years ago--the rebels have retained control of large swaths of territory. And all the while, Chechen civilians continue to live in fear and squalor, many of them without running water, sanitation, electricity or jobs.

Putin's Plan B may work, at least as far as Russian public opinion is concerned. Most Russians prefer not to think about the war, and hostility toward Chechens and other people of the Caucasus is endemic. Plus, Putin has been relentless in enforcing a media blackout. The war appears on TV only when there is an incident too large to ignore--like the Chechen suicide bombing in the neighboring republic of Northern Ossetia in August that killed 50 people and destroyed a military hospital--or when ministers boast that the rebels are on their last legs. Russian media owners know that critical coverage of Chechnya is the quickest way to get shut down, and foreign media are officially allowed there only on closely controlled government trips.

While Russian leaders claim that the republic is gradually returning to normal, the conflict is in fact spreading. To the west, in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, Chechen guerrillas are stepping up operations against Russian troops. Chechen fighters have reached north into the Russian heartland as far as Moscow. Suicide bombings at a Moscow rock concert and an attempted bombing on the capital's main thoroughfare in July have unnerved the public. In Chechnya the guerrilla movement is split between traditional separatist fighters loyal to Aslan Maskhadov, the last elected president of Chechnya, and newer, deeply fundamentalist militants backed by Arab money and a sprinkling of volunteers from the Islamic world. Among them are radicals affiliated with al-Qaeda, some of whom slipped across the border from their hideaway in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge after the Georgians shut down a base there last year. Much of the worst damage, though, is inflicted by young local radicals whose leaders were strongly influenced by Wahhabi preachers in the mid-'70s.

When the Kremlin put Kadyrov in charge of Chechnya in June 2000, many assumed he would be a transitional figure. But he has consolidated his position with the Kremlin, in part by arguing forcefully that only Chechens can wipe out the anti-Russian insurgency. To help him with this, the Russians have built up the Chechen police into a well-armed force that needs to be expanded, Kadyrov told TIME in a brief interview in Grozny. "The main task is to get the [police] up and running," he said.

The Russians suspect that many of Kadyrov's Chechen police are legalized guerrillas who actively fight with or provide intelligence to the insurgents--charges that Kadyrov's aides shrug off as unproved. According to a Russian officer, these so-called loyal Chechens regularly feed information on troop movements to the rebels. When his unit helicopters into the field, this officer is supposed to inform the area commandant's office, which is staffed by Chechens. But he never lets his chopper land at the planned destination. "I always order the pilot to land some two or three hundred meters away and open fire at our supposed landing site," he says. "Then we find dead rebels who have been waiting to ambush us there."

With two-timers in his ranks, can Kadyrov possibly make good on his pledge to put down the guerrillas? The Kremlin has so far tried to crush the revolt with air strikes and house-to-house sweeps and now, its critics assert, by abducting suspected separatists in the night. These tactics have changed nothing, and the new Chechenization policy probably won't either. What it will provoke, says Ruslan Khasbulatov, former speaker of the Russian parliament and a Chechen, is civil war as the guerrillas turn their guns on Kadyrov's men, Moscow's Chechen proxies.

Many doubt the Russians will ever leave. "Russian generals have zero enthusiasm" for Chechenization, says Deputy Prime Minister Doshukayev, because there's too much money to be made in Chechnya. The arms and explosives that kill Russian troops come straight from the Russian bases, according to local people and foreign observers. Russians deal the weapons on the black market even though they will be used to kill fellow soldiers. Guerrillas don't have to smuggle arms into Chechnya, says pro-Kadyrov newspaper editor Lechi Magomayev, because "they can buy them at the nearest base." Chechen officials say the military is also involved in oil smuggling and other rackets.

Various peace plans have been suggested for turning things around in Chechnya. One of the most detailed, put forward by Khasbulatov, speaks of giving Chechnya autonomy "under international supervision" within the Russian Federation. But Putin is opposed to anything that weakens Moscow's writ. And many Chechens believe with equal force that their only hope is independence.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no supporter of the Chechen struggle, writes in 1973's The Gulag Archipelago that of all the people in the Soviet camps and in exile, the Chechens were from the "one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission." The Chechens have lived up to that description. Unlike President Bush with Iraq, Putin can make sure Russians are not reminded of the Chechnya quagmire on a daily basis on TV. But silence is no solution. "I am here because it's the only job I know how to do," says Mikhail, a noncommissioned officer with the militarized forces of Russia's Interior Ministry, as he feeds a cat in the tightly guarded garrison that protects the Chechen government headquarters in Grozny. "This war is a f______ mess." Chechnya may not be Putin's undoing in the coming elections, but its endless nightmare is likely to haunt him in his second term.

--With reporting by Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

With reporting by Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow