Chechnya is a shattered land crying out for peace. The presidential elections scheduled for Oct. 5 seem unlikely to answer that cry. This is because there is strong reason to believe that they have been stitched up in advance to give victory to the current local government head, Akhmad Kadyrov, who is the Kremlin’s chosen candidate. The decision of the Russian Supreme Court to reject, on what amounts to at best a technicality, the candidacy of Malik Saidullayev, the man most likely to beat Kadyrov, was the first sign that the fix was in. When Aslambek Aslakhanov, another leading contender among the ten candidates, announced that after talks with Russian President Putin, he was withdrawing his own nomination, the suspicion that Moscow was seeking to rig the vote, became almost overwhelming.
What is crucial for these elections is that the Chechen people can feel that their vote has really counted for something. If they believe that they have been defrauded of their right to choose, then the way is left open for the men of violence to continue a struggle which historically, since the Czars first invaded the Caucasus, neither side has ever been able to win. This election is thus doomed to be a worthless exercise which will play into the hands of hard-liners on both sides. There are still Russian generals and planners who believe that they can crush Chechen resistance once and for all. And there are still Chechen resistance fighters who believe that as long as they maintain their ruthless campaign against the Russian military machine, in the end, the Kremlin will cut and run. Both sides are deluded.
Russian planners cannot abandon Chechnya without triggering further would-be breakaways among other ethnic groups within Russia. The days when Russia could countenance large parts of the former Soviet Union going their own ways are over. There are strategic and economic — oil and gas — reasons for maintaining a strong position in the Caucasus.
The way in which Moscow has managed to keep its influence, interests and in some cases, military presence, in the former Soviet republics demonstrates that it could probably still maintain a large measure of control over a Chechen state that had been granted limited but genuine autonomy. However, such a settlement can only be reached by negotiations. A key part of such talks will be the confidence the Chechens have that they are being dealt with fairly. Fixing the election of the country’s president is hardly likely to inspire such confidence. Rather it gives the signal that the Kremlin is prepared for the shedding of even more blood as it sets out to impose its rule on an unwilling and resentful people.
When it comes to Chechnya, the Russians appear to have learned nothing and forgotten everything.
