Few Unknowns, Scant Hope in Chechen Vote

There is an election coming here in Chechnya. You can tell, because the capital is awash in campaign posters, almost all of them for one man.

“Clean Intentions, Strong Power,” says one, which shows Akhmad Kadyrov wearing the classic fur hat of a Chechen clansman. Or simply, “Kadyrov, Our President.”

A large poster of the former Muslim cleric even hangs above the headquarters of one of his six rivals, Nikolai Paizulayev. At first, a spokesman for the rival campaign said, it was thought that Kadyrov was going to occupy the building. When Paizulayev’s team moved in, he said, “we thought we would just let it stay there.”

On Chechen state television, the only candidate who has purchased advertising time is -- surprise -- Kadyrov, even though, as director Beslan Khaladov boasts, “We have the cheapest television time in Russia.”

Seven men are vying to be president of Chechnya under Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s plan to end years of war and halt -- by ballots this time, instead of tanks -- the republic’s stubborn ambition for independence. But the other six candidates have nothing that compares to Kadyrov’s advantage. Their posters don’t show them shaking Putin’s hand.

The main drama in Sunday’s elections, many human rights observers say, is how handily the Kremlin-appointed administrator of Chechnya will become its elected president.

Kadyrov’s own press minister, Bislan Gantamirov, estimated in August that his boss, whose clandestine security force many Chechens have come to fear more than the Russian army, would get less than 5% of the vote “if people are not forced to vote for him.”

Three weeks later, Gantamirov was fired and the Grozny television station he founded was surrounded by armed security forces. New polls came out showing Kadyrov would win better than half the vote.

‘Theater of the Absurd’

If there were any remaining doubts, they were erased on Sept. 11, when one of Kadyrov’s two serious challengers accepted a job as a Kremlin advisor, and the other was thrown out of the race by the Chechen Supreme Court.

“From that moment on, the elections -- which were a farce -- turned into a veritable theater of the absurd,” said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights organization that announced, along with other international organizations, that it would not monitor the polls.

But here in this violent and broken republic, many Chechens appear to believe that the balloting may be the ticket out of a wasteland of war -- if the Chechen rebels’ promise to disrupt the election by all possible means doesn’t prevent voters from getting to the polls.

“I will vote for Kadyrov!” Grozny resident Khamzat Batayev said with a wide smile. “If I make it safely to the polling station. If I’m not kidnapped or killed on the way, or blown to pieces in a polling booth.”

Russia is trying desperately to close the door on a combined six years of conflict in this oil-rich Caucasus republic. Twice since 1994, Moscow has tried to quash Chechnya’s drive for independence, only to become bogged down in guerrilla warfare and a widening wave of terrorism so persistent that the Kremlin sealed off public access to Red Square this summer during the height of the tourist season.

A referendum approved in Chechnya last spring established the republic as a permanent part of Russia with broad powers of autonomy. The next step in the Kremlin’s plan is blessing a friendly elected government in Grozny, which Moscow hopes will allow it to hand the republic over to Chechen police and withdraw its 42,000 remaining troops in time for Putin’s reelection campaign early next year.

“The plan is simple,” Putin said last month at a meeting with American journalists. “Our position is that the Chechen presidential elections are a very important step, because a legitimate figure will appear, in whose hands all the mechanisms of power should be concentrated ... and federal forces will take less and less part in the sphere of law and order.”

The plan relies on the dubious presumption that the estimated 3,000 rebels who still control much of Chechnya’s wild and mountainous south -- half a dozen Russian soldiers still die in Chechnya every week -- will be brought to heel as an improving economy dries up potential recruits. It also ignores the widespread belief that the war has lasted so long because corrupt elements in the Russian army, profiting by oil deals and arms sales to the rebels, want it that way.

Indeed, many Russians fear that by backing Kadyrov -- who was a rebel leader before switching sides three years ago -- and allowing him to build his own security forces, the Kremlin is sowing the seeds of conflict between Kadyrov’s forces and the rebels, or, equally possible, with a Kadyrov force that decides to switch sides again and fight Moscow.

“It is still a mystery to me why the Kremlin is breeding this new force that clearly will have to be fought against, with weapons. There is no doubt about it,” said Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian analyst who has written about Chechnya for years. “The Kremlin is creating a situation where the third Chechen war simply becomes imminent.”

Grozny today is a panorama of ruin. The capital before the war had 400,000 residents. Half are now gone. There is no landline telephone service, the water supply has been fouled by seeping oil, and the streets and fields have been seeded with more mines than anyplace else on Earth. At dusk, citizens lock their doors, soldiers retreat into fortified bases, and the night belongs to speeding vehicles with unknown occupants.

Epic Devastation

It is a city whose devastation leaves Beirut and Sarajevo looking pristine by comparison, the target of the fiercest attack on a European city since World War II. Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s goal in 1994 was to keep Chechnya and its oil from bolting amid the chaos of the Soviet Union’s breakup.

Russian troops, bogged down in urban warfare against the well-armed, furtive, persistent rebels, withdrew in 1996, but the war resumed three years later, when Chechen rebels entered neighboring Dagestan.

Today, it is possible to drive for 20 minutes through downtown Grozny and see only a handful of structures still intact. In apartment towers missing several floors off their tops, huge chunks off their sides and all their windows, laundry hangs on balconies. Dim lights glow from deep within ruins. Maimed dogs race down streets.

Checkpoints with signs warning that soldiers will shoot to kill anyone approaching within about 10 yards are at many busy intersections. Many have been bombed or shot at.

“I dread these coming elections. I have only 17 days to go here, and the idea that something might happen and I may have to stay here longer terrifies me,” said one young Russian soldier as he stood guard outside the Russian encampment.

“We don’t really give a damn who wins as long as we don’t have to fight in any war here again,” he said. “But I’ve been here a year and a half, and let me tell you, this is a doomed place. Whoever comes to power here won’t change anything.”

Pointing to the shattered hulk in central Grozny where she lives, 58-year-old Sainyet Machigova said life was improving. Still, her family must live on a pension of only 1,000 rubles a month, about $33. Machigova said she lived largely “on hope” -- mainly hope that her son, who was arrested by Russian authorities three years ago at the age of 26, will reappear.

“They arrested him here at the market, where he went for cigarettes,” she said. “I have tried to look for him. The policeman who arrested him said they checked his papers and let him go. But he never came home.”

She stood silent for a moment. “Strange things happen to people now,” she said.

Thousands of families have similar stories, and Kadyrov’s guards have been blamed for many of the disappearances. Still, Machigova said she would support the Moscow appointee, the onetime rebel leader and Muslim cleric.

“I will vote for Kadyrov,” she said. “He’s afraid of God.”

In a five-story relocation center for returning refugees, where as many as 16 people are living in each four-room apartment, most families said they would have backed Malik Saidullaev, the popular businessman who was disqualified from the race by the Chechen Supreme Court last month, if they voted at all.

“I frankly, absolutely don’t care who wins this election, if you want my opinion,” said Adam Iderbiyev, a 58-year-old former financial controller. “Because I have no hope for anybody or anything.”

“My own life makes no sense anymore,” added his neighbor, Taisa Taipoval, who came to the center after losing both her children, a 17-year-old daughter and a 23-year-old son, in 1999 when a bomb hit their apartment building in Grozny.

“The worst has already happened to me. I buried my children,” she said. But maybe, she said, the elections will help. “If we elect a good president. I think Kadyrov may be good. But so far, we don’t see anything but shooting and murders.”

At Kadyrov’s headquarters, campaign manager Taus Dzhabrailov said the Chechen administrator would easily win the election because the public knows he is the only man who can bring stability.

“We can criticize everything until we’re blue in the face, but we need elected power to do anything about it,” Dzhabrailov said. “Today there is talk that first law and order should be introduced in the republic, and then elections held. That’s the wrong view. We must have legally elected officials in the republic who can influence the situation in order to restore law and order.”

Even now, he added, the situation is much better. “If we compare what is happening here with 2000 and 2001, it’s earth and sky,” he said. “People can travel around the Chechen republic. The republic lives in peaceful conditions.... There are no kilometer-long lines.”

Kadyrov’s challengers remain optimistic.

“I am convinced. Maybe we will not have it today or tomorrow. But I am 100% sure that after the election, we will have quite different realities of life,” said Kuduz Saduyev, deputy director of the state gas company and a candidate.

“No, we don’t have fair chances. No, we don’t have equal possibilities. But this is the situation in the republic right now,” added Hussein Bibulatev, a former deputy premier of the Chechen republic who is also among the candidates.

“Danger exists. Threats come. Lives of relatives and supporters are threatened. Everybody knows about it,” he said. “But we can’t not hold these elections. We need to put an end to these conditions. We are deliberately taking the risks ... because if we don’t hold elections, even in such conditions, we will have this war for another 10 years.”

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.