RFE/RL: Chechen Leadership In Exile Calls for Moratorium On Attacks On Police
posted by circassiankama on August, 2009 as CHECHNYA
July 27, 2009
Chechen Leadership In Exile Calls For Moratorium On Attacks On Police
Members of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria (ChRI) government and
parliament in exile met in Berlin on July 25 to discuss the formal
announcement in Oslo the previous day that ChRI Prime Minister Akhmed
Zakayev and Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, speaker of the pro-Moscow Chechen
Republic parliament, have embarked on consultations aimed at stabilizing the situation in Chechnya.
Those
consultations, Abdurakhmanov said in a formal statement read out at the
July 24 press conference, were initiated by Chechen Republic head
Ramzan Kadyrov with the aim of completing the consolidation of Chechen
society, and have the full support of both Russian President Dmitry
Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Zakayev reported
at length to the Berlin meeting on the content of his talks with
Abdurakhmanov, specific details of which have not been disclosed. The
Berlin meeting unanimously endorsed that dialogue as an opportunity to
bring to an end the continuing killing of Chechens by fellow Chechens,
specifically, members of the die-hard Islamic resistance headed by Doku
Umarov and pro-Moscow Chechen Republic police.
Expressing
concern at the escalation of hostilities in recent months in Chechnya
and elsewhere across the North Caucasus, the participants agreed
unanimously to issue orders to the resistance units loyal to the ChRI
to announce a moratorium on attacks on pro-Moscow Chechen police, and
to resort to arms only in self-defense.
Since it is impossible
to estimate how many of the resistance fighters currently active in
Chechnya take their orders from Zakayev, rather than from Umarov, it is
not clear what impact, if any, that decision will have on the ongoing
fighting. Indeed, the proposed moratorium plays into Kadyrov's hands
insofar as he could argue that any resistance forces that continue to
target his men must be Umarov's "bandits," and that he is justified in
eliminating them without mercy as he vowed to do two months ago.
Similarly
unclear is whether any of the three main protagonists -- Zakayev,
Kadyrov, and the Kremlin -- believe that the proposed dialogue can
indeed contribute to stabilization and reconciliation in Chechnya
without the involvement of the resistance headed by Umarov, or whether
all three see dialogue as a convenient smokescreen behind which to
pursue their own agendas. Specifically, the question arises whether the
Kremlin is seeking either to compromise Kadyrov, or at least to
circumscribe his authority.
On at least two occasions in the
past few months Moscow has failed to accede to a key request from
Kadyrov. First, in the wake of the mid-April announcement of the formal
ending of the counterterror operation in Chechnya, the Russian
authorities nonetheless failed to grant Grozny airport international
status and open a Chechen customs service that Kadyrov evidently hoped
would serve as an additional source of income. And none of the
20,000-plus Russian troops due to be withdrawn from Chechnya following
the lifting of the counterterror operation has yet left the republic.
Russian commentators have construed those twin failures as
demonstrating the limits to Moscow's trust in Kadyrov.
Second,
Moscow failed to back repeated statements by Kadyrov in early June that
all the North Caucasus republics should "coordinate" their efforts to
wipe out the Islamic resistance, by which Kadyrov clearly meant that
Chechnya should have overall control of anti-resistance operations
across the region.
Zakayev for his part may be hoping that
public recognition of his imputed influence within the resistance could
at some point in the future be parlayed into a revision of the formal
relations between Chechnya and the federal center. It should be noted
that Abdurakhmanov's statement at the July 24 press conference
mentioned Zakayev by name without specifying his official position,
which thus remains conveniently ambiguous.
As for Kadyrov, even
though Zakayev did not commit himself on July 24 to returning to
Grozny, as Kadyrov has been predicting for the past year, the
announcement of the incipient dialogue serves to deflect attention from
the questions surrounding his putative involvement in the July 15
abduction in Grozny and subsequent murder of human rights activist
Natalya Estemirova.
Meanwhile, Zakayev's public endorsement of
the process of reconciliation launched by Kadyrov with the support of
the Kremlin is at odds with a sensational denunciation posted on the
ChRI website on July 10 -- after at least one preliminary meeting had
taken place between Zakayev and Kadyrov's emissaries.
In that statement, the self-styled Operative Department of the ChRI General Representation reiterated Zakayev's allegations
of late autumn 2007 that it was Russia's Federal Security Service
(FSB), in the person of its long-standing agent Movladi Udugov, that
persuaded Umarov to turn his back on the cause of Chechen independence
and proclaim an Islamic state encompassing most of the North Caucasus
with himself as its leader.
But the July 10 statement went even
further. It argued, first, that recent developments in the North
Caucasus mirror a power struggle within the upper echelons of the
Russian leadership that pits the FSB against the Defense Ministry; and
second, that it was at the FSB's behest that the North Caucasus
resistance launched the June 22 car-bomb attack that narrowly failed to
kill Ingushetian President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov.
Since Medvedev
named him president last fall, Yevkurov has, the statement claimed,
single-mindedly focused on the tactics employed by resistance fighters
in Ingushetia and, as a career military intelligence officer, he
quickly realized that those activities were being coordinated by the
FSB -- -- hence the attempt to kill him.
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