Is there no solution to the nine-year-old Chechen bloodbath?
Russian President Vladimir Putin declares that the only acceptable outcome is the one he seeks to effect through a puppet government imposed on the dissident republic through rigged elections.
All these assertions by Putin are false. I know this because I twice participated in secret meetings between members of the Russian Duma and representatives of the only government in Chechnya’s grim history ever chosen through reasonably fair elections — the one headed by Aslan Maskhadov between 1997 and 1999. Sponsored by the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, these unofficial talks were held in August 2001 in Caux, Switzerland, and a year later in Liechtenstein.
The first session brought together nine people. There was every reason to expect a hostile standoff. But it soon became evident that more united the two sides than divided them. Both believed a solution under which Chechnya could have maximum autonomy while remaining part of Russia would work. On this basis they agreed on a number of practical steps to take in the coming period.
The Russians and Chechens were sufficiently encouraged that they met again a year later. Again I was invited to attend. This time the Moscow group expanded to include Duma member Aslanbek Aslakhanov, a highly respected general, an ethnic Chechen and today a Kremlin official on the spot in the Beslan schoolhouse massacre; Rustam Kaliev, special adviser to the Duma’s commission on Chechnya; and two former speakers of the Duma, Chechen-born Ruslan Khasbulatov and Ivan Rybkin, who served as national security adviser to Boris Yeltsin. The Chechen delegation was headed by Maskhadov’s able vice premier, Akhmed Zakayev, who, like Akhmadov, was then living abroad.
This time the group went further, agreeing on the outlines of a peace plan and charging Khasbulatov, a lawyer by training, with drafting it. The peace plan on which Duma members and Chechen leaders agreed included the same formula worked out a year earlier: Chechnya’s continued legal membership in the Russian Federation, but with firm guarantees that it would enjoy the maximum degree of self-rule and autonomy.
Maskhadov was quoted as saying he would accept this outcome as the best way of preserving the ethnic existence of the Chechen people. This lay to rest the red herring of secession about which Putin preached to grieving parents in Beslan after the schoolhouse attack there. In Liechtenstein the two sides differed only on such secondary points as whether Russian or joint Russian-Chechen forces should guard the southern border or whether the rest of Chechnya should be demilitarized.
What happened to these initiatives? Putin brushed aside the proposals.
The Liechtenstein plan would still work today, and Maskhadov, while weakened, remains the only viable partner for negotiations on the future of Chechnya. He had nothing to do with the monstrous attack in Beslan and has denounced it as barbaric. Maskhadov is the only credible Chechen leader who champions the separation of religion from the state and favors modern secular education, even while respecting the Islamic faithful. In office he opposed the fundamentalists. Many Chechens backed his moderate stance.
It is true that the inexperienced Maskhadov failed to reverse Chechnya’s downward slide during his brief rule, but it is doubtful anyone else could have done better without assistance from Moscow or abroad, which was denied him.
— Frederick Starr is chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
