Pro-Moscow Chechen Leaders Try to Portray a Return to Normality

Less than two years ago, Akhmad Kadyrov Street was one of the endless thoroughfares of rubble and weeds that crisscross Chechnya, the scar tissue of Russia’s systematic bombing campaign against the separatist republic. No more.

Today, shaded with trees and framed neatly with sidewalks, it features a new sports club, basketball court, gymnasium, orphanage, boxing gym and Chechnya’s only functioning hotel -- before the rubble takes over again at the end of the block.

A few blocks away, in a final, surreal attempt to build peace in a war zone out of concrete and bricks, officials have broken ground on a $7.8-million water theme park.

Those who have trouble envisioning children frolicking down water slides on streets regularly patrolled by armored personnel carriers and glowering Russians with guns can be forgiven for displaying a lack of imagination.

“Two years from now, it will be beautiful,” First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov said at a recent meeting with foreign reporters at the boxing club that bears his name. “The image of Chechnya as the bandits’ den,” he said, will be transformed to that of a nation of “peacemakers.”

As European leaders push for a negotiated end to the long-running separatist conflict, Chechnya’s pro-Moscow government is taking unusual pains to portray the effort as unnecessary.

“The fact that representatives of some democratic Western countries support these criminal actions of the so-called fighters for the freedom of the Chechen republic arouses no less than bewilderment,” Chechen President Alu Alkhanov said at a meeting of three dozen political, religious and clan leaders last month in the republic’s capital, Grozny.

“We share one and the same heroic and tragic destiny with the Russian nation ... and any attempt to force us to negotiate with bandits who have nothing in common with the Chechen people is aimed at eroding Russia’s statehood,” Alkhanov said.

Alkhanov has one of the world’s most dangerous jobs: He must negotiate the political byways of the Kremlin, which enlisted him to carry out Moscow’s plan to use Chechens to end the war and round up Chechens who still want to fight.

And he must survive the insurgents, who have put a premium on the murder of government members.

Alkhanov’s predecessor, Akhmad Kadyrov -- Ramzan’s father -- was killed in a bomb attack at a Grozny sports stadium last May. Alkhanov travels in an armored car with bodyguards and rarely leaves the heavily secured presidential compound when he is in Chechnya.

The compound, where last month’s session with reporters was held, was rebuilt after a bomb destroyed the original in December 2002. It is reached through a gantlet of zigzagging concrete barriers, double gates, barbed wire and parked tanks.

For all Russia’s claims that the war is over, more than 532 police and Interior Ministry troops were killed during the first nine months of 2004, most of them victims of the insurgency that has persisted despite two wars and more than 10 years of Russian efforts to end it.

And if the conflict is over -- and few Chechens believe it really is despite Russia’s killing of rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov last month -- even more are uncertain of what comes next.

“The first war claimed the life of my only son. The second war left my daughter handicapped. I have such a sediment of grief in my heart, I don’t know how to sweep it aside,” said Rukyat Shavkalova, who makes her living selling nuts and candy bars at the Grozny market.

“My house was destroyed by the first war, and what I had left was destroyed by the second. So I sit home with my daughter. I come here to sell things, and this is my life,” she said. “We have suffered both from the hands of the rebels and the hands of the federals. And I, frankly, don’t see the way out of it.”

In Gudermes, about 22 miles east of Grozny, officials hope that building recreational outlets for youngsters will provide an alternative to the unemployment, boredom and fury that each year drives new insurgent recruits into the mountains.

“I know that as soon as you leave Chechnya, you look at children’s faces and you see smiles. Since 1991, this has been taken away from us. We’re trying to bring back the smiles that were taken away from us,” Kadyrov said.

“This facility has made it possible to return quite a few Chechen athletes who had moved to other regions of Russia back to Chechnya,” said Umar Abdulvadudov, the sports complex’s head coach.

As for the water park, he said: “You don’t have to ask if it will be built. I know Ramzan, and he’s connected with this project very closely. He doesn’t throw words to the winds, and if he says it will be built, I’m pretty sure it will be realized.

“After all,” he said, “How much longer do we have to travel to other places to enjoy ourselves?”

After the slaying of rebel leader Maskhadov, the pro-Moscow government argued that a complete end to the war was not far off.

“There’s one devil less,” said Kadyrov, whose rough band of security forces has tracked Chechen insurgents through mountains and villages all over the republic, often leaving a trail of death and disappearances of Chechen civilians in their wake.

If radical warlord Shamil Basayev is similarly brought to heel, Kadyrov said, “it will not end, but it will be 99% over.”

“It is my dream to catch Basayev, but Basayev is a strong strategist, he’s a good warrior, and he has help from somewhere outside -- I don’t know where,” he said. “My dream is not to kill him, but to catch him and show what kind of a man he is.”

Few Chechens believe that killing the warlords will end the war. The conflict has seeped too far into the fabric of the republic, many say. Even Alkhanov expresses this worry when asked to explain the large number of kidnappings, disappearances and day-to-day violence that still plague the republic.

“You must realize that two wars do not disappear without a trace,” he said. “To our deepest regret, wars do not give birth to virtue. Wars teach killing and crime.”

Yacoub Dadayev, a 21-year-old history student in Grozny, says he sees evidence of this every day.

“Let me just tell you this story: Yesterday we were coming back from Gudermes. There was a clash between the traffic police and the local security police. It seems that the security services violated some traffic laws and got stopped by the police, and they started firing over each other’s heads. This was their way of explaining who was right,” Dadayev said.

“It was ridiculous,” he said. “People are suffering at the hands of the terrorists, and they are suffering at the hands of the authorities.”

But Layla Khakima, a 27-year-old mother of two, said her family was not yet ready to give up on a future. They live in a shelled-out building with no plumbing and survive on what her husband can collect by scavenging for scrap metal.

Khakima has decorated her chilly apartment with red plastic roses. “We believe that now that Maskhadov’s dead, the people he’s been helping to hide and fight will either stop fighting or will be found by the federal troops. Because these people are the biggest obstacle to a normal life here,” she said.

“As the number of these people gets smaller, life will get better for us,” she said. “We have a bit of optimism, and a huge hope.”