‘Second War’ Is Underway in Chechnya

“The only way to end this war,” explained the Russian captain with the hard blue eyes and blond-stubbled sneer, “is to kill every last Chechen.”

A fellow officer at the checkpoint, slightly embarrassed, amended the sentence: “Every last Chechen who opposes a peaceful settlement.”

“No, I mean kill every last Chechen, period,” the captain insisted, then spat in the snow. “Every last Chechen is an enemy. They disappear, hide their rifles and become ‘peaceful civilians.’ Then next time you see them, they’re trying to kill you.”

The officer spoke from brutal experience in Chechnya, where he helped destroy the rebel capital of Grozny last winter and Gudermes, the secessionist republic’s second-largest city, last month. His outburst echoed the resurgent hard line that has buried a summer peace agreement, pushing both sides back to full-scale ethnic warfare.

Hostile attitudes die hard in the Caucasus Mountains. Heavy fighting resumed in Chechnya last month, killing hundreds of civilians and feeding a conviction among Chechens, who have already lost 20,000 compatriots in this war, that peace will never come until the Russians in uniform--every last one of them--are driven away.

More than a year after 40,000 Russian troops poured into the tiny Muslim republic and deposed him, separatist leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev is eluding capture, speaking apocalyptically and deploying his well-equipped rebel army for a second winter of resistance.

“War is art, and here the upper hand belongs to the strong in spirit,” Dudayev declared at a recent clandestine news conference. “Let the Russians go out the way they came in and everything will be OK. [Otherwise] this barrel of dynamite will explode.”

The new fighting, which Chechens are calling the “second war,” is bound to inflict more damage on Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, whose decision to invade Chechnya on Dec. 11, 1994, diminished his prestige and moral authority at home and abroad. Chechnya will weigh on the unpopular leader as he ponders whether to seek reelection in June.

But no matter who sits in the Kremlin next summer, the mind-sets and missed opportunities that undid the July 30 accord are likely to drain Russian blood and resources in Chechnya for years to come.

“The Russians are far from controlling the Chechens, far from it,” Manuel Bessler, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross mission in Chechnya, said recently after the army had subjected 60,000 civilians in Gudermes to days of indiscriminate shelling. “I am astonished at the Russians’ ability to make new enemies. They have learned not one lesson.”

War has ebbed and flowed through the Caucasus for centuries, so it was never certain that the pact between Russians and Chechens to stop shooting, swap war prisoners, disarm and hold free elections would get very far. Still, the agreement was welcomed by both peoples as the best hope to break the pattern of Russian conquest and Chechen rebellion.

It was struck after Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin brokered a peaceful end to a rebel hostage-taking raid on the Russian city of Budennovsk and proclaimed “a new political era” in which “the Russian state, almost for the first time in its history, puts the lives of its citizens above political expediency.”

Much has gone wrong since then.

In token numbers, rebels began disarming and Russian troops began leaving last summer. Exploiting a clause in the agreement permitting each village to have a 25-member “self-defense force,” Dudayev dispatched fighters throughout Chechnya to fill these positions.

This allowed his army of several thousand fighters, who by late spring had been driven into the mountains and kept on the run, to regain footholds on the plains within striking distance of Grozny. The cease-fire began unraveling as rebels tried to form defense forces in larger towns and push aside the police installed by Moscow.

Disarmament came to a halt after Russian commanders gave the rebels an ultimatum to hand over 60,000 weapons, far more than they admit having. Endless disputes over the number of Russians held by mercenary warlords beyond the control of Chechen negotiators blocked a POW exchange.

The central issue of the war, Chechnya’s degree of independence from Moscow, was to be settled in negotiations between the Kremlin and the victor in internationally supervised Chechen elections--a vote Dudayev had a real chance of winning.

But talks on the conduct of elections broke down when Lt. Gen. Anatoly Romanov, the Russian military commander, was gravely wounded Oct. 6 by a bomb planted in Grozny by unknown terrorists. The two sides haven’t met at all since Dec. 10.

And the war returned in full when Yeltsin decided to bypass the peace process and organize Chechen elections unilaterally--and Dudayev chose to boycott them. With a bravado that is never taken lightly in the Caucasus, rebel commander Aslan Maskhadov declared, “If we are men, we cannot allow these elections.”

Hundreds of rebels entered Gudermes on Dec. 14 with a warning that sent people straight to their basements: “You surrendered the city to the Russians. Now we will force the Russians to destroy it.”

The Russians obliged, and the rebels retreated 10 days later, leaving at least 267 civilians dead, most of them killed by Russian shelling. Dozens of civilians died in rebel attacks on three other towns, all aimed at disrupting four days of voting that ended Dec. 17.

The election, stained by fraud as well as blood, effectively abolished the peace pact. Kremlin candidate Doku Zavgayev, the declared winner, is dealing with the conflict on terms worked out between him and Yeltsin. They aim to turn the talks into an inter-Chechen affair involving Zavgayev and rebel field commanders, bypassing Dudayev’s emissaries and ending the Kremlin’s direct involvement.

Zavgayev also won Moscow’s pledge to launch its stalled reconstruction program with a $20,000 grant for each of 30,000 families made homeless by the war, plus $2 billion to rebuild Chechnya’s shattered infrastructure.

“People are weary of arms, of violence, of fear,” Zavgayev said in Moscow after the election. “They are ready to hand in their arms in exchange for security and jobs.”

He won’t find it that easy to stop the war.

Despite a year of Russian efforts to divide them, most field commanders remain loyal to Dudayev. What’s more, Zavgayev does not control the Russian army, and it has no plans to leave. Money from Moscow is only a promise, like the $700 million previously pledged for rebuilding that never materialized.

And for all the respect he earned as Chechnya’s capable Soviet-era ruler, Zavgayev, 55, who was ousted by Dudayev in late 1991, is widely despised now as a puppet.

While most Chechens boycotted the vote, Zavgayev’s election was managed Soviet-style. The voters who went to the polls--a tiny minority--were allowed to cast more than one ballot. The Russian army cast thousands. Before the polls closed, Zavgayev was declared the winner with 95% of the vote, defeating two unknown candidates. Turnout was reported as 68%.

In this devastated city, it is not hard to find Chechens who never had much use for Dudayev but are now convinced that Russians want to destroy their land out of greed or ethnic hostility.

“They need this war to make money,” said Khamzat Gerikhanov, 43, who worked several weeks on an aborted home rebuilding project last summer and was never paid. “Officials get wild amounts of money to rebuild apartments, hospitals, roads and schools, and they just put it in their pocket. They don’t care about human life. All they care about is the ruble.”

Ramiza Taymayeva, 45, an accountant for the Gudermes school system, had a similar thought after braving Russian artillery fire to flee the city on hands and knees.

“Dudayev and his men have always talked about genocide, about dark forces trying to annihilate the Chechen nation,” she said. “At first, I didn’t believe it, but I’m beginning to think it might be true.

“Frankly speaking, we are being shot at from both sides,” she added, her voice rising in anger. “We are waiting any day for our death.”