The author of this piece, I have been told, was canned from the Moscow Times because she was "our most morally repulsive columnist." She wrote a column describing how she and her boyfriend ate food destined for Afghan refugees, apparently thinking it would be cute.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ----------------------------
San Francisco Chronicle July 4, 2002 Russians doubt Chechens ready to take on rebels Putin wants troops out, but officers dubious Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
The way Maj. Andrei Pererva sees it, no Chechen can be trusted -- not even a police officer.
"They are all bandits," Pererva said under his breath as he eyed a heavily armed Chechen officer in Grozny, the capital of the breakaway republic.
Pererva, a spokesman for Russian federal troops in Chechnya, firmly believes that Chechens cannot handle the complex and crucial task of crushing the bloody, two-phased Islamic insurgency that has cost thousands of lives in this volatile region since 1994.
But that is exactly what Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to do last week when he said Chechens must take over control of their homeland from the 80,000 federal troops who have been fighting since October 1999, when the Kremlin launched its second brutal war here. By the end of the year, Putin said, "only Chechens must be defending Chechnya."
Overwhelmed by mounting losses among Russian servicemen in Chechnya, Putin for months has been trying to put an end to the increasingly unpopular military campaign.
His hard-line vows to crush the insurrection helped him ascend to power in 2000. But having failed to end the fighting last fall, when he fruitlessly called on the rebels to disarm, Putin is now seeking ways to cut his losses and pull out of an area that has become Russia's internal Vietnam.
THOUSANDS OF SOLDIERS KILLED
In March, the Kremlin announced that more than 3,500 Russian soldiers had been killed and nearly 9,000 injured in Chechnya since 1999. Human rights groups such as the Soldiers' Mothers' Committee in Moscow say the losses are three or four times as high.
The toll among the Chechen rebels and civilians is not known because the federal government does not bother to keep a tally -- an astonishing symbol of the psychological distance between the Kremlin and Chechnya.
Somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 Chechens have fled to refugee camps in the neighboring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan and the country of Georgia.
Moscow, which claims the Chechen rebels are linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, says it is fighting against international terrorists and compares its war here to the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan. But success is elusive. Most insurgent leaders remain at large, and Russia keeps losing an average of one or two servicemen in daily clashes.
Federal troops respond to hit-and-run attacks with random document checks and vicious door-to-door sweeps for suspected rebels, during which Russian soldiers detain and sometimes kill dozens of innocent Chechens and local residents, international human rights groups say.
The group known as Memorial says it has proof that 946 Chechen civilians died at the hands of Russian troops in just three of the most populated districts during a 14-month period that ended in November. The group lists another 1,200 to 2,000 as missing.
The brutality breeds fear of Russian servicemen and a thirst for revenge, and many Chechen civilians willingly take up arms to join the insurgents.
Ordinary Chechens, who have learned to lower their gaze and hide as soon as they notice Russian men in uniforms, welcome the Kremlin's drive to withdraw most of the federal troops.
"We know that Chechen policemen have at least some kindness in their hearts,
not like the Russians," said Taya Arsakhanova, on her way home to Grozny from a refugee camp in Ingushetia.
"When the Russian troops do their sweeps, they take our men, and later we find their bodies," Arsakhanova said.
CHAOTIC CONDITIONS
But a three-day tour of Grozny with Russian troops raised doubts that the Chechen police and the republic's pro-Kremlin government were ready to take charge.
The Chechen government led by Akhmet Kadyrov, handpicked by Putin in 2000 to replace President Aslan Maskhadov, who had sided with the rebels, has done little to improve life in the war-shattered republic.
In Grozny, most buildings have long since been reduced to rubble, and people live without electricity in bombed-out ruins. There is almost no work, and nearly every night civilians blow themselves up on rebel mines planted on well-traveled roads or get caught in cross fire between the insurgents and the Russians.
"We don't trust Kadyrov," said Khamzat Visirkhanov, a Chechen refugee in Ingushetia. "He has done nothing good for us."
Russian soldiers who had fought in Chechnya during the first phase of the war, in 1994-96, have their own reason not to trust Kadyrov. During that campaign, he was a rebel leader fighting against federal troops.
Today, Kadyrov's government works in a compound heavily guarded by Russian police officers from elite counterterrorist units. Similar units guard the entrance to the headquarters of Chechnya's nascent police force.
"I don't know why they don't have Chechen policemen guard their own buildings," said a Russian officer who patrolled the courtyard of the headquarters. "I guess they don't trust them."
POLICE FORCE WEAK
After eight years of violence, most Chechen police officers have become refugees or died fighting, said Col. General Vladimir Moltenskoi, who commands the federal troops here. The new police force in the republic has only about 8, 500 men, operates in fewer than 100 of Chechnya's 400 towns and villages and is too weak to take charge, he said.
"Those who have joined the police force don't have any training," Moltenskoi told a group of foreign journalists at a military base in Khankala, outside Grozny, this week. "As a Russian proverb has it, we have to trust them but verify. We can't just let any old person to take power here."
Moltenskoi said that many Chechen police may have fought with the rebels previously, and some may still have ties with the insurgents. Lt. Col. Musa Gazimagomadov, who commands the Chechen special task police force, said he had fired 168 of the 301 officers under his command in 2000 because he suspected they were rebel collaborators.
Moltenskoi said he had evidence the rebels received their funding from abroad, mostly from Jordan and Turkey. He also affirmed the Kremlin's long- standing claim that Arab mercenaries linked to groups like al Qaeda are fighting here side by side with Chechen rebels, and that many Chechens had been training in al Qaeda and Taliban camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"I know because my troops have killed a number of Arab fighters in Chechnya, " Moltenskoi said.
Last month, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Russian troops had seized rebel documents that included accounting ledgers in Chechnya that showed incoming funds from Turkish, Qatari and Jordanian sources, and hit lists with names of pro-Russian local administrators.
Moltenskoi estimates that there are only about 1,000 hard-core rebel fighters, but he said their potency was far greater than their numbers since they received crucial help from civilians who were recruited to mount attacks on federal troops.
"Some young people join in because there is no work here," he said. "They fight to make a living for their families."
Each participant of an assault receives about $18 for an attack that results in the death of a Russian or Chechen police officer and between $50 and $150 for blowing up a Russian armored personnel carrier or a tank, he said.
"They have to show on video how they killed a policeman, or blew up a car, and then they get paid and spend the money to prepare the next assault," Gazimagomadov said. "They are universal soldiers, so to speak, ready to kill dozens and even hundreds of people for money."
The rebels don't spare ethnic Chechens, either. In April, a convoy carrying 14 men from Gazimagomadov's police unit blew up on land mines planted by rebels.
Gazimagomadov, whose office window in central Grozny is marked with four bullet holes, said: "Anyone who says that federal troops should leave the republic wants the Chechen people to die. If the troops withdraw, Arab mercenaries will take their place."