EUROPE : Chechen’s Fear Tactics Strike at Russia’s Heart

Like a long-ago nightmare, the war in Chechnya had faded from most Russians’ list of worries when a bizarre reminder emerged from beneath the snow and leaves of Moscow’s Izmailovsky Park.

There, in the desolate spot where a Chechen separatist commander had instructed them to look, a camera crew from Russia’s NTV television dug up a small container of radioactive cesium-137 wrapped in a yellow shopping bag.

Russian officials were quick to report that the radioactive isotope was harmless to passersby and would have been dangerous only if it exploded in the air.

But that wasn’t the point of commander Shamil Basayev’s televised act of psychological warfare.

His point was this: One year after Russian troops invaded his tiny, breakaway republic to crush an independence movement and four months after a cease-fire stopped the death toll at about 20,000 lives, the conflict is heating up again. And the separatists won’t let the rest of Russia ignore it.

In the last two weeks, dozens of combatants have died. The Russians have killed civilians with artillery blasts at rebel-held mountain villages. The rebels bombed the motorcade of Doku Zavgayev, the Russian-appointed Chechen leader, wounding him and six bodyguards.

“We are completely prepared to commit acts of terrorism that will be tangible for Russia,” Basayev told NTV in an interview in Chechnya that was broadcast last week with film of the container’s discovery.

He claimed that his followers had packed two similar parcels in explosives and hidden them in Moscow, where they could be set off to create “mini-Chernobyls.”

Basayev is a man to be taken seriously. In June he brought the war home to Russia with a bloody seizure of more than 1,000 hostages in the southern city of Budennovsk and escaped to the mountains of his homeland.

A peace accord signed after his raid was supposed to lead to rebel disarmament, Russian troop withdrawals and new talks aimed at deciding Chechnya’s degree of independence through elections. But none of that happened, and the two sides stopped meeting after Russia’s military commander was gravely wounded in an Oct. 6 attack.

As the stalemate drags into winter, Chechens are bitter that Russians not only still occupy their land with thousands of troops but have done so little to repair what their bombs destroyed. More than 10,000 people still live in basements in Grozny, the Chechen capital, relief workers say.

Moscow’s unilateral call last month for elections in Chechnya on Dec. 17 has brought a sharp increase in the fighting and pushed the misery of Russia’s unfinished war back onto television here.

Seeking a voter mandate to keep his job, Zavgayev is running against two candidates: newspaper editor Mavsar Aduyev and Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, who led the Russian Parliament to its bloody 1993 clash against the army of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Many Chechens who oppose the Russian invasion hope the election will settle the separatist question. With that in mind, Zavgayev has urged Dzhokar M. Dudayev, the separatist president ousted from Grozny by the invading Russians, to get on the ballot, even though he is wanted by Moscow on charges of treason and terrorism.

But Dudayev has instructed his fighters to sabotage the voting and launch a winter offensive.

And so a year after Yeltsin gave the Chechens an ultimatum to disarm and accept Moscow’s rule, the Kremlin has set up a new confrontation two weeks from now.