On Day Two of Chechnya Truce, Foes Start Talks

As their soldiers shifted from warfare to joint monitoring of a day-old truce, Chechen separatist and Russian leaders opened the first talks in more than a year Saturday on the issue that started the conflict--the republic’s demand for independence.

The talks centered on a Russian-proposed treaty allowing both sides to save face after more than 20 months of fighting and 30,000 people dead. Russian troops would leave, but tiny Muslim-majority Chechnya would remain part of the Russian Federation, with as much autonomy as its voters opted for in a future referendum.

Russian security chief Alexander I. Lebed and Aslan Maskhadov, the chief of staff of Chechen separatist forces, were reported near agreement on political points of the draft but at odds over whether Chechnya should keep an independent army. Their talks in the Chechen village of Noviye Atagi were to continue today.

The talks began Saturday after nearly 600 Russian and Chechen soldiers, their gun barrels pointed downward, lined up together in a field not far away and signed an oath as peacekeepers.

“This war has cost us a great deal, and now in our hands we have the chance to end the war or to continue it, to kill people or not,” Russian Maj. Gen. Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov said during a televised ceremony initiating the patrols. “Let us put our grudges behind us.”

The soldiers then launched joint patrols in Grozny, the Chechen capital, overrun by separatists Aug. 6 in the worst fighting since the war’s first month. Russian and Chechen troops began leaving Grozny under Thursday’s truce accord, which for the first time put the ruined city under shared military command.

The cease-fire and Saturday’s peace talks grew from a determined initiative by Lebed, a general turned politician, to save his army from its worst humiliation of the post-Soviet era. This month’s two-week rout in Grozny cost the army more than 500 lives and could well have led, defense analysts say, to its disintegration and total defeat in Chechnya.

After appearing to obstruct his protege’s peace bid with untimely criticism and contradictory orders, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin telephoned Lebed late Friday to offer his support. Yeltsin said through a spokesman Saturday that Lebed was authorized to press toward a settlement “that will describe the Chechen republic as an integral part of Russia.”

Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, a rival of Lebed’s for power in the Kremlin, said he and Yeltsin congratulated the security chief for resolving “the first part of this problem.”

The second part--a lasting peace--will be much harder. Chernomyrdin and other officials here said Lebed’s proposal, endorsed by Yeltsin, calls for election of a Chechen regional government and a constitutional assembly after the withdrawal of 90% of the 40,000 Russian troops now in the republic.

Chechnya’s degree of autonomy from Moscow would be spelled out in a draft constitution and put to Chechen voters in a referendum. Chernomyrdin insisted in a televised interview that outright independence could never be an option and that the vote should be delayed until the passions of war cool. Other sources said the Russians proposed a five-year delay.

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Maskhadov has signaled a willingness to settle for less than the full independence that the Chechens demand and in fact exercised for three years until Yeltsin declared war in December 1994. On Saturday, the Chechen military leader said: “We must help Gen. Lebed end this war.”

The biggest obstacle to a settlement, according to Russian news agencies and television reports, is the Chechens’ insistence on maintaining their ruthlessly effective guerrilla army as an independent force. Moscow wants the guerrillas formed into Chechen regiments of the Russian military.

A deep distrust between the two forces was evident Saturday and could easily undermine any political settlement before the Russians’ troop withdrawal is scheduled to be completed in the coming weeks.

Before the assembly of peace patrollers, for example, the Chechen side deleted from its written oath a promise “to unconditionally obey and execute orders” of any higher commander on the Russian side.

To minimize friction, Lebed chose only soldiers who had not seen combat in Chechnya to make up the Russian half of the joint patrols, which will work from a central headquarters and four district police stations in Grozny. Russia’s Ovchinnikov will be their commander, with Maskhadov as his deputy.

“I don’t think this will last for long, and I don’t like it at all,” Chechen field commander Adam Sukhardzhiyev told reporters at the ceremony. “I will not agree to stand long with Russians at the same checkpoint.”

“Let’s wait and see. Maybe we will become friends,” said a 24-year-old Russian soldier, Yevgeny Budarin. “It’s hard to believe this can work, but maybe it can.”

Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency, in a midday dispatch, called Saturday “perhaps the most peaceful and calm in Chechnya” since the war started. But later it reported a rebel attack on a Russian truck column moving through Grozny to pick up an artillery brigade. The attack wounded three Russians, Tass said.