rom: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 3/1/2007 4:26 PM
Putin makes a feared former rebel president of Chechnya
By Steven Lee Myers
Thursday, March 1, 2007
MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin on Thursday appointed Ramzan Kadyrov, a widely feared official whose security forces have been accused of kidnappings, torture and other abuses, to be the new president of the battered Russian republic of Chechnya.
The appointment, while expected, cemented Kadyrov's position as the dominant political figure in Chechnya, where Russian and Chechen forces have largely quashed a separatist movement after two wars, beginning in 1994.
Putin announced his decision during a meeting with Kadyrov at his residence outside Moscow, even as the senior human-rights official for Europe, Thomas Hammarberg, visited Grozny, the Chechen capital, and denounced "a real widespread pattern of serious ill-treatment and many cases of torture against those who have been arrested," as the BBC reported.
Hammarberg was attending a government-organized conference on human rights that the most prominent Russian rights groups boycotted as a sham intended to obscure the fact that more violence in Chechnya of late has been attributed to security forces loyal to Kadyrov than to any remaining separatists.
Kadyrov and his subordinates have also figured in the investigation of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who was killed in Moscow in October, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization in New York City whose leaders met with Russian officials in Moscow in January.
Politkovskaya's last article, published posthumously, asserted that Chechen police officers routinely tortured people detained as suspected separatists. Speculation of Kadyrov's involvement in her murder, which remains unsolved, was so intense that Kadyrov went public to deny it.
"I did not kill women," he said in October, "and I never kill them."
Putin, in his brief televised remarks, praised Kadyrov for his efforts "to restore the republic," first as deputy prime minister and then as prime minister. Kadyrov replied that he would continue to carry out Putin's policies in Chechnya. The appointment requires the endorsement of the republic's Parliament, but that is a formality given Putin's control and Kadyrov's power in the region.
Kadyrov's rise to the Chechen presidency had been predicted ever since rebels killed his father, Akhmad, the first pro-Moscow leader installed by the Russians, in a bombing at a soccer stadium in May 2004.
At the time, the son was too young to succeed him as president under the republic's Constitution, which sets an age limit of 30. He reached that age in October. Like his father, he had fought federal forces in the first Chechen war, which ended in Russia's humiliating withdrawal in 1996, but he joined with pro-Kremlin forces when fighting resumed in 1999.
For a time he commanded thousands of fighters known as "kadyrovtsy," who fought against the rebels and for the spoils of war. They have since been absorbed into government security forces but are believed to remain more loyal to Kadyrov than to Moscow.
In recent months he openly quarreled with his father's successor, Alu Alkhanov, who stepped down last month.
Kadyrov's appointment is the culmination of Putin's policy of giving significant autonomy to Chechens willing to display fealty.
Critics say Putin has ignored reports of abuses because Kadyrov's tactics have succeeded in helping to contain separatist sentiment.
"In Chechnya now, the active phase of the war is over and the separatists are weakened," said Lev Ponomaryov, director of For Human Rights, an organization in Moscow, warning, as others have, that Kadyrov wielded unchecked control.
"But at the same time," he continued, "Chechnya has become a place where Russian law effectively does not exist."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/01/news/chech.php
