Point of no return of Russian military
By Manfred Quiring
MOSCOW (DPA): Judging from a televised speech broadcast last Saturday night in Chechnya, the Kremlin seems to have rediscovered Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov.
In time to mark the first anniversary of the beginning of the second Chechen war on Aug. 7, President Vladimir Putin's deputy commander in the southern federal administrative district, Gen. Vladimir Bokovikov, has ordered Maskhadov to step down immediately. Bokovikov added, however, that he doesn't count the Chechen president among the "real enemies of the Chechen people."
Those enemies, the general told the people of Chechnya, included field commanders Shamil Bassayev and Emir Hattab, who, he said, "don't think for a minute about the consequences of the past war, or about the victims in the civilian population."
Hattab's and Bassayev's invasion of Dagestan last August with a force of around 1,200 men was one of the factors precipitating the second war in Chechnya. Depending on the source,reports claim that somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 civilians died in the first Chechen war from 1994 to 1996.
For Chechens, Aug. 6 is a day of victory. That's the day when, in 1996, Chechen fighters recaptured Grozny, their capital city. The subsequent treaty of Gudermes deferred the issue of the region's autonomy until the year 2001, and laid down a timetable for the withdrawal of Russian troops and the delivery of reconstruction aid.
But the events of 1996 were not going to repeat themselves, General Bokovikov warned the Chechen people in his televised address.
Such public appeals expose the helplessness of Russian policy in the northern Caucasus, and they cannot hide the fact that the Russian military finds itself trapped in a dead-end street there. The "anti-terrorist campaign" has bogged down, and has been accompanied by numerous human rights violations.
A year ago, hopes still ran high that the adventure in the northern Caucasus could be wrapped up quickly with relatively few losses - and with maximum impact.
Amidst a surge of nationalistic feelings reinforced by Chechen acts of violence, and a devastating series of bombing attacks on Russian apartment buildings that were likewise attributed to Chechen extremists, the Russian population suddenly supported a war that it had rejected just a few years before.
A wave of enthusiasm over the youthful, hard-hitting newcomer carried Vladimir Putin into the Kremlin. But the toll in pain and suffering has been high, with thousands dead or injured. And the brutality is increasing. Two Russian officers were decapitated as revenge for the rape and murder of a young girl, and a car bomb explosion on Sunday killed two women and injured three others in the southern Russian province of Dagestan.
Tragically, a solution is nowhere in sight.