From: MSN Nicknamepsychoteddybear24  (Original Message)    Sent: 12/21/2005 5:26 PM
Wednesday, December 21, 2005. Issue 3321. Page 10.

A Virtual Election in a Fantasy Chechnya
By Svante E. Cornell

The parliamentary elections in Chechnya orchestrated by the Kremlin on Nov. 27 were another step in President Vladimir Putin's strategy to gain international legitimacy for his handling of Chechnya. While this may constitute a short-term victory, the elections do nothing to improve the deadlock in Chechnya and the rapidly deteriorating situation in the North Caucasus as a whole.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, if not earlier, Putin has painstakingly followed a five-step strategy for dealing with Chechnya. The first component was to isolate Chechnya and hinder both Russian and international media from reporting independently on the conflict. The second was to rename the conflict: Instead of a war, it was now an "anti-terrorist operation." Third, Moscow sought to discredit the Chechen struggle and undermine its leadership by accusing the Chechen opposition collectively of involvement with terrorism. Fourth was the '"Chechenization" of the conflict: an attempt to turn it into an intra-Chechen confrontation by setting up and arming a brutal and corrupt but ethnically Chechen puppet regime in Grozny under the leadership of Akhmad Kadyrov, the former mufti of the republic. Finally, Moscow declared that the war was over and that a process of normalization was taking place, seeking to legally and politically return Chechnya to the Russian fold and making it an international nonissue.


The first step in normalization was a referendum on laws to elect a Chechen leadership, which was duly held on March 23, 2003. This was followed by an October 2003 presidential election that sought to legitimize the rule of Kadyrov over Chechnya. An unforeseen step was the early presidential election of August 2004, held due to the assassination of Kadyrov in May the same year (which failed to derail Moscow's plan). The parliamentary election held this November sought to finalize the process of normalization.

This process has garnered a modicum of international legitimacy, but it has blatantly failed to stabilize Chechnya. To the contrary, this misguided enterprise has spread the unrest in Chechnya to the rest of the North Caucasus, jeopardizing Moscow's control over the region.

The main problem with Moscow's strategy has been its total disregard for the realities in Chechnya. As a recent report by several Russian and international NGOs titled "A Climate of Fear" aptly suggests, the Kremlin has sought to create a "virtual Chechnya" through propaganda. In this Chechnya, life has normalized and the war is over; the only problem is that this Chechnya does not exist.

The real Chechnya, as documented by innumerable eyewitnesses and Russian as well as international NGOs, is a territory where basic human security does not exist. Federal forces and their subcontractors, the forces of Ramzan Kadyrov, commit atrocities against civilians with impunity while the increasingly radicalized resistance in turn uses indiscriminate violence in and outside Chechnya to increase the cost of the war to Moscow. The extreme brutality of Moscow's campaign and the lawlessness that plagued Chechnya during its periods of de facto independence have led to a process of "Afghanization" at a wider social level. As in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, the human and material destruction and the collapse of civic norms and values have undercut the very functioning of society, creating a fertile breeding ground for radicalism among a young generation that has known nothing but violence and deprivation.

Thus Moscow's political enterprise in Chechnya is at best a poor attempt at window-dressing. All four votes -- the referendum, two presidential and one parliamentary election -- have been farcical. Turnout figures have been widely inflated each time, masking the widespread refusal of the population to take part. In the referendum, the legal texts were drafted in Moscow and were not subjected to meaningful discussion or deliberation in Chechnya. No true opposition has been allowed to participate. The separatist opposition has been shut out of the process, making any form of reconciliation or conflict resolution impossible. In addition, many independent forces loyal to Moscow have also been shut out of the process by administrative and coercive measures -- to safeguard the Kadyrov clan's hold on power. In none of the elections was real choice available to the people. Freedom of assembly and freedom of the press have been severely restricted, and no true debate has existed. To cap it all, the armed groups ubiquitous in the republic have made any true political process impossible.