Chechnya ‘Truce’ Starts With Russian Bomb Raids

She hid for eight days in a cellar to escape the shells and bombs exploding outside in the hell that Russian troops and Chechen rebels were making of her hometown, Grozny. But when her transistor radio told her a cease-fire would start at midday Wednesday, Lala Eldarova ventured out in a convoy of hundreds of civilians escaping the Chechen capital for the relative safety of the southern hills.

Disaster struck minutes after the truce was supposed to begin. Two Russian SU-25 planes swooped over the road and bombed the refugee column, crushing the latest hopes for an end to 20 months of war in separatist Chechnya.

“How we ran, shouting that at 12 o’clock we would at last manage to squeeze out of town! And now a plane has gone and bombed a place where there were only ordinary people!” the middle-aged woman said 15 minutes later, still breathless and on the verge of tears.

The blazing remains of a white Kamaz pickup truck and a passenger car, reduced to ash and twisted metal, were scattered over the steep hillside road on Grozny’s southernmost edge. No one was killed or injured, the refugees said, because passengers in both vehicles jumped free in time.

In brilliant sunshine, children scrambled down shepherd trails crisscrossing the wooded hillside. Adult refugees picked their way more cautiously toward the valley settlement of Gekalo to regroup.

Behind them, along the road, more cars and buses streamed out of Grozny, many with white rags tied to their aerials in the hope of averting Russian attacks. Passengers craned their necks out of their cars to watch the Russian helicopters circling threateningly overhead, but they kept moving.

“They say there is a cease-fire and then, exactly when the refugee rush hour is on, they bomb us,” Tamara Magomadova, a local official in Gekalo, said bitterly.

Whether a cease-fire had been agreed to at all remained in doubt. Russian soldiers at a checkpoint outside Grozny said they had heard talk of a truce but had received no orders to stop shooting at the outnumbered rebel army that overran the city this month.

A cease-fire agreement was announced late Tuesday by the separatists after talks between their commander, Gen. Aslan Maskhadov, and Russia’s acting commander in Chechnya, Lt. Gen. Konstantin B. Pulikovsky. Maskhadov said the truce would allow the combatants to pull out the wounded and let civilians trapped in the fighting escape Grozny, a sprawling city with a prewar population of 400,000 people that has borne the brunt of the war and its 30,000 deaths.

“We have had an order since 8 this morning to hold our fire, and that is what we are doing,” Chechen field commander Akhem Zakayev told reporters in southwestern Grozny.

Pulikovsky said Wednesday that he had made no agreement with Maskhadov, except to keep talking. But he noted that he had ordered his troops, unilaterally, not to shoot first. He accused the rebels of continuing to fight in Grozny, and said they blew up a railway bridge east of the city and attacked the crew sent to repair it.

Despite the bombing of refugees, people leaving Grozny said the fighting Wednesday was sporadic and less intense than on the eight previous days of the rebel occupation. But the separatists showed no sign they are ready to retreat.

Their punishing offensive began Aug. 6, a year and a half after they had abandoned Grozny to advancing Russian troops. The separatists, who had ruled the southern Russian republic for three years, have carried on fighting from the hills.

The confusion of Wednesday was a blow to Russian security chief Alexander I. Lebed, who began the latest of many peace negotiations with a daring late-night drive into Chechnya this weekend to meet with Maskhadov. Lebed returned to Moscow with a blueprint for a long-term settlement, which Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin signed Wednesday.

Lebed left Moscow today to return to Chechnya, Interfax news agency reported.

Pulikovsky’s remarks indicated resistance to Lebed’s peace initiative within the Russian army. Pulikovsky told Russian Television he broke off Tuesday’s talks when the rebels insisted on Chechnya’s independence--a position that should have come as no surprise. The talks were resumed Wednesday by lower-ranking officials.

Chechen businessman Rizvan Lorsanov, who met Lebed during the security chief’s visit earlier this week, said he was impressed by the courage and vision of the retired general, who took over as secretary of Yeltsin’s Security Council in June. “The big thing is that he has taken some real steps toward peace,” he said.

Maskhadov, speaking to journalists Wednesday, was less impressed. “If Lebed cannot pull off a cease-fire, then what hope can he be for peace?” he asked.