Partial peace in Chechnya

Borrowing U.S. Senator George Aiken's 1966 exit strategy for Vietnam, Boris Yeltsin declared victory in Chechnya on Tuesday and said the war was over. Yeltsin's declaration to Russian troops during a lightning visit to Chechnya may prove as ephemeral as his earlier pronouncements about ending hostilities. But at least the Russian leader has a peace treaty of sorts in hand this time and he knows his re-election chances next month may hinge on whether the fighting stops.

There is nothing like a forthcoming election to concentrate the peacemaking energies of a beleaguered political leader. Yeltsin seems at last to be making a concerted effort to wind down a war he cavalierly started 17 month ago on the assumption that Russian troops would quickly crush secessionist rebels. When the Chechen fighters proved more resilient than Moscow expected, Russian forces conducted a scorched-earth campaign that has left more than 20,000 civilians dead.

Yeltsin seems to have found an unexpectedly cooperative interlocutor in Zelimkhan Yanderbiyev, the new Chechen leader. Unlike his unyielding predecessor, Dzhokhar Dudayev, who was killed last month in a Russian rocket attack, Yanderbiyev wisely recognized that further prosecution of the war would be ruinous. On Monday in Moscow he and Yeltsin quickly signed a treaty to end the fighting by the end of the month. If carried out, it would produce the first real cessation of combat since the war began.

The treaty does not address the underlying sources of the conflict, including the pivotal issue of Chechen independence. Yeltsin now says he would accept almost any form of autonomy for Chechnya short of full independence. It is not clear whether Yanderbiyev can sell that idea to his followers, or even if he speaks for many Chechen field commanders. There will not be a durable peace until the status of Chechnya is settled.

Ending a war is always harder than starting one. This war could have ended long ago if Yeltsin had summoned the courage to concede his mistake and cut his losses. That election expediency now compels him to make peace may not be ennobling, but it is better than more bloodshed.

-- The New York Times