Citizens Urge Military Move on Chechen Rebels

Threats flew across the snowy steppe of southern Russia on Thursday, as soldiers closed in on the Chechen rebels holding more than 150 hostages, while frustrated citizens urged the government to stop talking and start shooting.

Fed up with on-and-off negotiations between Russian officials and the Chechen commandos, hundreds of civilians marched through the streets calling for decisive military action to end the three-day standoff and annihilate the rebels.

But with Russian tanks and helicopters ringing the Chechen militants, a tense calm prevailed as night fell--to the disappointment of an increasingly hawkish populace.

In spontaneous demonstrations throughout the southern republic of Dagestan, which borders Chechnya, citizens shouted for revenge against the rebels who have twice raided rural Russian towns in flashy hostage seizures.

“Right now the majority of the Russian people are looking for firm action from the government,” said military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. “A military offensive is inevitable.”

But despite the intensifying calls for action, top Russian leaders stayed on the sidelines Thursday.

Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin flatly refused to talk with the rebels. Local authorities in Dagestan were left to conduct the negotiations in a town so remote it lacks direct phone lines to Moscow.

Abandoning grandiose calls for all Russian troops to pull out of Chechnya, the rebels pressed one central demand: free passage back to their mountain hide-outs. The Russian soldiers blocking their route cheerfully agreed to move--as long as the Chechens released the hostages. That offer was unacceptable to the militants, who insisted on keeping their captives with them as a shield against Russian ambush.

Late Thursday, the Chechens offered to release women and children but vowed to take the men with them. Rebel leader Salman Raduyev insisted that foreign journalists and aid workers join the convoy as well, the Reuters news agency reported.

As the fruitless negotiations dragged on, Russian television reported that 400 Chechen fighters were marching toward their hostage-holding comrades in the tiny town of Pervomayskaya. Russian soldiers headed out to meet them, setting up another standoff.

With their reinforcements stalled about 150 miles away, the 250 militants in Pervomayskaya found themselves outnumbered. A double ring of Russian soldiers surrounded their convoy of 11 grimy buses.

At first, the rebels literally hid behind their captives, so that any Russian gunshot would have to pierce an innocent before felling a terrorist. Later, the Chechens threatened to shoot the hostages if the Russians approached any closer. By midafternoon, they had changed tactics again, promising to release the women and children if the Russians would back off.

In response, Dagestani Deputy Interior Minister Gennady Shpigun denied that Russian tanks had been closing in at all. “The vehicles were simply warming up their engines,” he told the Itar-Tass news agency.

As the gray sky darkened to black, the Chechens moved their 26 women and children hostages to the shelter of a local school. But they kept the men on the buses, periodically turning on the engines to provide some warmth.

The hostage crisis began Tuesday when the Chechens raided a maternity home in the Dagestani town of Kizlyar. They released most of the captives when local authorities promised them safe passage back to their mountain havens but forced 160 hostages onto buses for the bumpy ride back to Chechnya.

The rebels seized at least 40 more hostages Thursday, most of them Dagestani police officers.

The convoy has been stalled on the Dagestani-Chechen border for two days. A blown-up bridge and the brawny Russian military prevent the Chechens from continuing their homeward journey. The rebels reportedly released a few hostages Thursday but continue to guard the rest at gunpoint.

A representative of the international humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders visited the hostages Thursday and pronounced them in decent health, despite a biting wind and daytime temperatures of 15 degrees. Locals have been dropping off food and warm clothing for the captives.

No such kindness has been shown the rebels. Even in the Chechen town of Gudermes, the home of militant leader Raduyev, citizens gathered Thursday to protest the hostage-taking.

And an Interior Ministry official in Moscow warned that a fierce lynch-mob mentality endangered Chechens living throughout Russia, even those who had nothing to do with the raid.

Whereas Russians once admired Chechen leader Dzhokar M. Dudayev as a brave freedom fighter upholding his people’s independence, they now reject him as a terrorist bandit, explained Alexander A. Pikaev, a senior researcher at the World Economic Institute.

Like many other commentators, Pikaev urged the Kremlin to crack down hard on the Chechens.

Giving in to the rebels’ demands for safe passage to Chechnya might save the current group of hostages, he said, “but a threat [of future terrorism] will hang over the lives of thousands of other citizens. . . . Public opinion is ready to support decisive military action.”

Analyst Felgenhauer agreed: “Yeltsin needs to produce a military victory in Chechnya--like Dudayev’s head in a sack, perhaps.”

Felgenhauer predicts that, even if, out of concern for the hostages, the Russian troops do not pounce on this particular group of rebels, a major anti-Chechen offensive is in the works.

But one government analyst, Viktor I. Borisyuk of the Presidential Analytical Center, predicted that the Kremlin will have better luck taming the Chechens at the negotiating table.

“Partisan wars and terrorist wars are always unsuccessful,” he said. “Let’s remember the experience of Ireland, of the Basques in Spain, of the Palestinian and Israeli war. . . . The only practical resolution of the question is political negotiation.”