GROZNY, 11 March 2004 — Two buses with journalists emerge from a military fortress and lumber through the ruins of the Chechen capital, escorted by troops while sappers sweep the road ahead for mines and booby traps.
At dusk, heavy machine-guns fire toward a nearby hill and combat helicopters swoop overhead.
But this is not a war, we are emphatically told, shortly before half a million voters in Chechnya are due to join the rest of Russia and decide if Vladimir Putin should rule the country and their tiny, devastated homeland for another four years.
Despite Moscow’s continuing campaign against Islamic separatists — termed a counterterrorist operation by the Kremlin — the propaganda machine is running at full throttle before the incumbent leader’s anticipated landslide victory on Sunday.
“I think 100 percent of people here will back Putin... There is no alternative to him,” says the Chechen republic’s pro-Russian President Akhmat Kadyrov.
Hundreds of troops, policemen and civilians still die here each year and Chechen terrorist attacks cause further carnage in outlying regions and Moscow. But Kadyrov dismisses fears that the militants can upset Putin’s big day inside his republic.
“They don’t have the resources. There is not a single village here that is not in our control,” he insisted from behind several lines of defenses surrounding his administration headquarters in Grozny.
Putin was first elected on a wave of popular support for the full-blown military assault on Chechnya that began in autumn 1999.
Today, as Russia approaches the tenth anniversary of the start of the first war of secession in late 1994, citizens seem curiously able to abstract the Kremlin’s failure to resolve the Chechnya problem from their unwavering support for Putin.
In a survey of 1600 Russians in the past month by the Romir polling organization, 62 percent negatively assessed federal policy in Chechnya in the past decade against 31 percent who supported it. Yet Putin’s rating nationally still holds at more than 70 percent. The pre-election mood in the republic is at once fearful and apathetic. There is little evidence that the local population will turn out in droves to back Putin, as his campaign chiefs here claim.
Some residents believe that having tackled the separatists head-on, only he can now improve daily life. But many others say they won’t cast ballots for Putin or any of the fringe candidates. “Putin is adept at answering questions about Chechnya, but it’s all just words,” says one Grozny native, who like most people requested anonymity, such is the fear of reprisals. “Whether or not I vote or not is irrelevant. Ninety-nine per cent of people here realize their vote changes nothing,” he adds.
“Why should I vote for Putin, so they can drop more bombs on us?” seethes a woman refugee whose home was destroyed in the fighting.
