Yeltsin’s View of Chechnya Fails to Sway G-7 Leaders

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin upstaged the leaders of the world’s major industrial powers on the final day of a summit here Saturday with a bombastic defense of his war against Chechnya and a dubious claim that the separatist republic’s president is seeking asylum in Turkey.

But Yeltsin’s impassioned discourse failed to sway the leaders of the Group of Seven nations to his view that his troops are waging a fight against terrorism in Chechnya.

The G-7 presidents and prime ministers pressed Yeltsin for a peaceful resolution of Russia’s conflict in Chechnya, with President Clinton insisting that “the cycle of violence has to be broken” to build democracy in post-Communist Russia.

A deadly hostage drama in the southern Russian city of Budennovsk, where Chechen rebels were holding hundreds of Russian civilians captive, thrust the 6-month-old war in Chechnya into the fore of the G-7 summit, which was already distracted by the escalating conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Russia’s proposed sale of nuclear reactors to Iran.

But the leaders of the exclusive rich-nation club also claimed some successes in economic affairs during their three-day session in this Maritime provincial capital, including an early warning system for collapsing currencies and common ground on the need to reform U.N. institutions.

After a highly animated and occasionally slurred account of the campaign to thwart Chechnya’s secession, Yeltsin told journalists before an hourlong meeting with Clinton that Chechen leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev has asked for political asylum in Turkey.

However, White House spokesman Mike McCurry said Administration officials had learned nothing from their inquiries to the Turkish government and U.S. diplomats in Ankara to substantiate Yeltsin’s claim that Dudayev was preparing to flee Russia.

Yeltsin told journalists in a confidential tone that “we found that Dudayev has asked Turkey to provide him with political protection, and Turkey has agreed and given him permission to transit to another country. We don’t care where he goes, as long as it’s far, far away from Russia.”

Russian officials have previously suggested that Dudayev was on the verge of defeat or flight, but never at a forum as serious and influential as the G-7 summit.

As Yeltsin advanced this purported intelligence, which may have been intended to discredit Dudayev by suggesting he was about to leave his rebel followers in the lurch of advancing Russian government troops, Clinton took on a bemused expression.

Yeltsin insisted “my good friend Bill Clinton” had expressed unwavering support for the Kremlin’s handling of the Chechnya conflict, prompting Clinton to differ.

“It is true the United States has always said that Chechnya was a part of Russia,” Clinton said, adding that he agreed with Yeltsin that “terrorism everywhere is wrong.”

“But I also subscribe to the position taken by the G-7 that sooner or later--better sooner than later--the cycle of violence has to be broken,” Clinton said, urging a political solution.

Yeltsin sought to justify his quashing of the Dudayev-led rebellion by deeming Chechnya “the center of world terrorism, of bribery and corruption and mafia.”

“We couldn’t act otherwise,” he said of the crackdown by Russian forces that is believed to have killed at least 20,000 people, mostly civilians. “We had to destroy those terrorists and bandits.”

Yeltsin’s defense of his actions in Chechnya was delivered in an emotional state that one senior U.S. official termed “his emphatic mode.”

But his playful gesticulations before the media prompted some members of Clinton’s security entourage to suggest that the Russian president may have been drinking.

Despite the outburst on Chechnya, Yeltsin drew praise from the G-7 leaders, in particular from Clinton, for his proposal to host an international seminar in Moscow next year seeking ways to curb nuclear terrorism and smuggling.

Yeltsin also endorsed a joint statement promising to “immediately curtail any nuclear cooperation program with Iran” if the Tehran government seeks to build nuclear weapons.

But he later made clear that he had not wavered from his resolve to sell more than $1 billion in nuclear power equipment to the rogue state over the objections of the United States.

On Bosnia, the G-7 leaders repeated their call for an immediate cease-fire in the escalated fighting between the Muslim-led Bosnian government and nationalist Serbian rebels “to allow political negotiations, without which no lasting solution is possible.”

But no fresh initiatives to compel the combatants to negotiate were advanced at the Halifax summit, and both Clinton and British Prime Minister John Major acknowledged during the discussions that international mediation efforts are at an impasse.

In the form of a wide-ranging communique, the leaders issued a cornucopia of fresh expressions of dismay over other global hot spots and injustices, from renewed concern over Kashmiri unrest to a demand for the release of dissident Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, formerly Burma, to a call for peaceful resolution of the conflict over the Spratly Islands involving China, Vietnam the Philippines and an array of other nations.