TSENTOROI, Russia, 6 October 2003 — The Kremlin’s candidate in presidential elections in Chechnya, chief administrator Akhmad Kadyrov, denied he was a Russian puppet and vowed to shed light on the disappearances in his war-torn republic as he cast his vote yesterday.

“Kadyrov has never been a puppet of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin or of anybody else,” he told journalists at his home in Tsentoroi, surrounded by some 50 heavily-armed bodyguards.

As he addressed a cheering crowd of supporters in his fiefdom and birthplace earlier, the pro-Moscow leader pledged action on the dreaded “zachistki” or security sweeps, that have been terrorizing the Chechen population for years.

“I’m announcing the creation of a commission of inquiry into all cases of disappearances and other crimes committed on our land” since 1991 when Chechnya declared unilateral independence, Kadyrov said.

Russian soldiers are accused by human rights groups of committing human rights abuses in Chechnya, with civilians regularly disappearing after being abducted.

Official but unpublished government statistics found that 1,132 civilians were killed in Chechnya in 2002 and that 76 people were murdered and 126 abducted in the first two months of 2003 alone, according to US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Kadyrov, dressed in a traditional Chechen tall fur hat, said he expected “supporters of (rebel leader) Aslan Maskhadov to switch sides in two or three weeks or a month.”

He also rejected the possibility of peace talks with Maskhadov, who was elected as president of Chechnya in 1997 but has since been disavowed as a “terrorist” by the Kremlin.

Moscow’s handpicked man in the breakaway republic voted in a secondary school in Tsentoroi, a village of 5,000 people at the foot of the mountains some 60 km east of Grozny.

With seven candidates in the race for president, Kadyrov is all but assured victory after all his major rivals were either persuaded to drop out or were disqualified.

However, his popularity is precarious, given the little or no improvement in ordinary Chechen lives, daily attacks on pro-Russian officials, and rampant kidnappings blamed on his armed militia and Russian soldiers as often as on the guerrillas.

Kadyrov denied claims his supporters had threatened people to vote for him, dismissing them as “provocation and lies.”

“I am not the only candidate. To say that is an insult to other candidates,” he said, insisting the election was not a one-horse race.

Kadyrov finally said he would ask the Russian Parliament to vote to offer a new amnesty to rebels who lay down their weapons.

Under the previous amnesty, which ended on Sept. 1, only 170 rebels turned themselves in out of an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 who have been fighting Russian troops in the Caucasus republic in a brutal guerrilla war since 1999.

Petersburg Polls: Voters in Russia’s second city of St. Petersburg went to the polls yesterday to choose a new governor in a key test of support for Putin, who has invested considerable energy promoting the Kremlin’s favored candidate.

The Kremlin had been given an unexpected shock in the first round of voting in September, when its candidate Valentina Matviyenko failed to win an outright victory despite strong backing from Putin, a native of the city.

But after winning 48 percent of the votes in the first round, Matviyenko was still expected to romp home easily in the face-off with deputy city governor Anna Markova, who won only 16 percent of the votes.

All eyes were on the turnout after only 29 percent of the electorate bothered to cast their votes in the first round in a worrying sign of voter apathy.

Early indications were of a higher turnout this time around, though still at an embarrassingly low level.