As Chechen War Escalates, So Does Cynicism

In the 2 1/2 weeks since Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin won reelection, in part by halting his war against separatists in Chechnya, the conflict has resumed in full force with no letup in sight.

Russian artillery and warplanes pounded rebel-occupied villages near the town of Shatoi on Saturday, pressing a daily offensive that has left dozens of civilians dead and at least 850 others homeless across the mountainous southern republic.

Separatist rebels have been striking back with fatal ambushes against Russian officers and their Chechen collaborators.

The conflict took several turns for the worse last week. There was an atrocity on each side, a fruitless appeal for peace by visiting U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the theatrical return of a wounded separatist commander who claimed responsibility for two bus bombings in Moscow.

This sudden collapse of efforts to end the war has stunned Russians and Chechens, deepening a mood of cynicism about the hawk-turned-peacemaker they reelected on July 3 only to watch him revert to a hawk.

Tim Guldimann, a Swiss mediator in Chechnya, said in an interview Saturday that the two sides are going through the motions of trying to resume negotiations but have lost trust in each other.

“I wouldn’t say it’s the end of all hope for peace, but it will be very difficult to reestablish even the imperfect cease-fire we had before the election,” said Guldimann, who heads a mission to Chechnya from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The war, which has claimed about 30,000 lives since December 1994, is so unpopular in Russia that many believed last spring that Yeltsin could not be reelected.

But he surprised everyone by receiving separatist leader Zelimkhan A. Yanderbiyev in the Kremlin on May 27 to sign the cease-fire, and by flying to Chechnya the next day to tell his army that the war was over.

Hopes for a lasting settlement rose late last month when Yeltsin fired his most hawkish Kremlin advisors and named retired Gen. Alexander I. Lebed to head his Security Council.

Running for president as a critic of the war, Lebed had finished third in the first round of voting June 16.

But after his support helped Yeltsin defeat a Communist rival in the runoff, Lebed adopted the stance that had prompted Yeltsin to invade Chechnya in the first place--that Moscow must use all means to keep the Muslim-dominated republic from seceding.

The government’s new offensive began July 9 after Lebed, fresh from consultations with Yeltsin, met with the top Russian commander in Chechnya.

“You resumed the bloody Chechen war the day after the official voting results were announced,” human rights activist Sergei A. Kovalev told Yeltsin in an open letter. “It was the war you promised to end that ensured your victory in the election. I knew . . . your promises were a lie. But the country believed you.”

The Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, urged Yeltsin on Friday to hold new, televised negotiations with the separatists.

But the influence of parliament is limited, and Russians are not known to organize themselves effectively to pressure their leaders between elections. Even inside the government, the usually dovish Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin has fallen in line with military leaders who assert that rebel bands acting beyond Yanderbiyev’s control used the cease-fire to rearm and then provoked the Russians to attack.

“We intend to continue negotiations,” Chernomyrdin said. “But no one may violate the accords. Terror will be neutralized.”

Meeting here with Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin last week, Gore pressed for restoring the cease-fire. But U.S. officials said he got nothing more than a commitment to keep using the OSCE as a mediator.

Imperial Russia fought for decades to subdue the Chechens in the 19th century. Foreign diplomats and Russian specialists believe today’s war may be settling into a cyclical pattern of fighting and negotiations.

“Look how long the fighting in Northern Ireland has been part of the British landscape, and they’re pursuing a much more enlightened policy than the Russians are at this point,” said a senior Western diplomat in Moscow.

“These conflicts have a certain rhythm,” he added. “They go through a period of heightened combat followed by a period of negotiations as one side or the other becomes weary of the war and needs to regroup. We’re in a new period of warfare in Chechnya. I would expect it to continue for a while.”

Even if the Kremlin is determined to fight on, it is unlikely to win a military victory.

The guerrillas--who by the government’s low estimate number nearly 4,000--move freely at night, even in the Chechen capital of Grozny. In two attacks there Friday, they fired a grenade into a car, killing a Russian army officer, and attacked an official of the Moscow-appointed Chechen government, killing two of his bodyguards.

Yeltsin has done little to isolate the separatists by winning or buying Chechen hearts and minds. Despite his campaign promise to revive Chechnya from the ruins of war, little money has arrived.

“The Russians have to do something to show the people they are serious about trying to help, but they’re not doing that,” the Western diplomat said. “Their only option then is basically to destroy everybody in Chechnya.”

This Russian offensive, according to mayors of the assaulted villages, is indiscriminate and brutal. Forty-three civilians died in two villages, Gekhi and Maskhety, within a 48-hour period.

On Tuesday, Russian soldiers in two armored personnel carriers reportedly opened fire on three cars on the outskirts of Grozny, killing 13 Chechen civilians, then setting their bodies on fire. Witnesses said some who had survived the shooting were stabbed to death.

Two days later, authorities found the bodies of four Russian officers and six soldiers whom the Russian army said were enslaved, tortured and executed by Chechen rebels.

Then, as rebel officials were disavowing the rush-hour bombings of two buses in Moscow this month, separatist commander Salman Raduyev reemerged from medical treatment abroad to claim that his men had planted the bombs that wounded 33 people “in honor of my return.”

Raduyev, who was reported dead by the Russians after a March 3 ambush but lost only an eye, appeared before cameras in Chechnya with his surgically altered face partly hidden by sunglasses. He said he had recuperated in Germany, recruited 800 Muslim fighters from the Balkans war and acquired 10 Stinger antiaircraft weapons for “large-scale combat actions” against Russia.

Russian officials predicted Raduyev would unleash more terrorism.

On Friday, the day after his appearance, a bomb was planted in the main rail terminal of Voronezh in central Russia, but its detonator merely propelled it across the room without causing an explosion.