GROZNY, 7 October 2003 — The Kremlin’s candidate Akhmad Kadyrov won a landslide victory in Chechnya’s presidential election but few voters yesterday believed he would bring a rapid end to the fighting that has devastated their republic.
Kadyrov won 81.1 percent of the vote cast in Sunday’s poll on a turnout of 83.46 percent, the head of the republic’s electoral commission Abdul-Kerim Arsakhanov told reporters after 77 percent of the ballots had been counted.
He said the vote had been “absolutely free: No pressure was put on people to vote one way or the other.”
Russian authorities, who have presented the election as evidence that the situation in the breakaway republic has returned to normal, are likely to view the result as confirmation of their policies in Chechnya.
President Vladimir Putin told a government meeting in televised comments that the result “testifies that people in Chechnya hope for positive changes in life” and called for “work with Chechnya’s leaders and public to divide powers between the republic and the federal center.”
However critics including Russian opposition politicians and rights groups have dismissed the election as a farce, denouncing the strong institutional bias in Kadyrov’s favor and the withdrawal or disqualification of his main rivals.
After the vote, Kadyrov reaffirmed his refusal to hold talks with separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, elected president of Chechnya in January 1997, and predicted that rebel supporters would “switch sides in two or three weeks or a month”.
He said his first priority would be “ensuring the safety of Chechnya’s citizens and eliminating the terrorists,” the standard term used to designate Chechen rebels.
“It is essential to revive the economy and to address the problem of returning refugees and combat crime,” he said.
Russian media yesterday were divided in their assessment of the poll, some critical and others welcoming the election of a new Chechen authority.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta and the business daily Kommersant both stressed the lack of genuine opposition to Kadyrov, while the liberal Gazeta pointed to the resemblance to Soviet-era elections “with their turnouts of 99.998 percent.” But Izvestia said that “even if the new authority is imperfect, it will still be legitimate.”
The official turnout figure appeared barely credible to journalists who had visited several polling stations and observed few voters.
Echoing widespread disillusionment, a Grozny resident in his late 50s said he had not bothered to vote. “It makes no difference who wins. I don’t believe things will get better. They could even get worse. Kadyrov will just look after his own,” he said.
Another voter in her 40s said she had decided to vote for Kadyrov at the last minute despite his failure to improve things in the past in the faint hope he might prove her wrong.
Moscow-based independent analyst Vladimir Primylovsky believed such hopes were certain to be dashed. “This was a dishonest election that gives Kadyrov almost no legitimacy. At best it will allow the situation to stagnate, but there’s every chance it will make things worse,” he said.
European capitals have been muted in their comments on the election, but the chairman of the pan-European human rights watchdog the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap De Hoop Scheffer, slammed the lack of choice in the poll.
“In the run-up we saw a lack of real pluralism and candidates, the absence of media pluralism,” De Hoop Scheffer, who will take over from George Robertson as NATO secretary-general on Jan. 1, said in Warsaw after opening the OSCE’s annual rights conference.
Russia’s 30,000 troops permanently stationed in the republic were allowed to vote, but Chechnya’s diaspora, including more than 50,000 Chechens living in Moscow, were barred unless they were prepared to make the long and hazardous journey to their homeland.
The poll came almost exactly four years after 80,000 Russian troops poured into the Caucasus republic in what Moscow called a lightning-strike “anti-terror operation” to crush a separatist insurgency but which has since degenerated into a grinding guerrilla war.
The current conflict, the second war between Russia and Chechen separatist rebels in a decade, has left 5,000 Russian soldiers dead — 12,000 according to rights groups — and killed thousands of civilians.
Putin Ally Wins Runoff: Russia’s second city of Saint Petersburg elected the Kremlin’s candidate as governor in a runoff poll, results showed yesterday, but a low voter turnout was seen as a rebuff to President Vladimir Putin ahead of national parliamentary elections.
With 100 percent of the ballots counted in Sunday’s poll, Valentina Matviyenko was credited with 63.2 percent compared to 24.2 percent for deputy city governor Anna Markova, according to election commission officials. But the low turnout, with only 28.25 percent of Saint Petersburg’s 3.7 million registered voters casting votes, came as a disappointment to the Kremlin, which had thrown its weight behind Matviyenko.
Last month the Kremlin’s favorite was given a shock in the first round when she failed to win an outright victory with 48 percent despite strong backing from Putin, a native of the city, as fewer than one in three electors (29 percent) turned out to vote.
Ahead of Russia’s parliamentary elections on Dec. 7, the ballot was seen as a possible barometer of Putin’s fortunes, with the pro-Putin United Russia party running neck-and-neck with the Communists in opinion polls.
