Do you think people worry about Chechnya? Sure...Post-Yeltsin era is really going to be test for all your predictions..Want to retract some, before late..<gg>
Yeltsin Aides Leading War in Chechnya
By David Hoffman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 7, 1999; Page A1
MOSCOW, Oct. 6?When the last
war in Chechnya began nearly five
years ago, President Boris Yeltsin
slipped out of public view as
Russian generals plunged
disastrously into a ground war in the
rebellious southern region.
For two weeks, Yeltsin was
hospitalized for what aides
described as a routine nose
operation. Now, as an estimated
50,000 Russian troops have
advanced cautiously into northern
Chechnya, Yeltsin has again all but
disappeared.
Leaving the matter entirely in the
hands of his generals and Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin
failed to show up this week for a meeting of the Kremlin security council,
which he chairs and which approved a revised national security document
calling for increased defense spending.
His absence is just one of the echoes of 1994 that has raised questions
here about whether Russia has learned the bitter lessons of the last
conflict, which left tens of thousands of civilians dead. Yeltsin has called
the two-year Chechen war his gravest mistake.
Yeltsin has been in and out of view for years as he struggled with ill health
and sought to keep his distance from painful and unpopular developments
here. He has been sidelined, often for months at a time, with a heart
condition, and sources say he still suffers from circulatory problems,
although he claimed recently to be feeling well.
His low profile also may be driven by a desire to avoid difficult situations
and let cabinet ministers take the heat. He has fired five prime ministers in
the past 18 months, often waiting in the wings and then acting abruptly.
There are also big political stakes -- fallout from another military failure in
Chechnya could reverberate into next year's election to choose Yeltsin's
successor.
Analysts and politicians here say the latest advance into Chechnya -- to
create a "security zone" across the region and bar Chechen guerrillas from
promoting rebellion in adjacent Russian territories -- carries the risk of a
drawn-out battle against seasoned Chechen defense forces. And, they
said, Moscow will find it more difficult to arrange a negotiated settlement
than in the last war because Chechnya is more fragmented and weaker
than it was three years ago.
"We have a Catch-22," said Vladimir Averchev, a member of the centrist
Yabloko faction in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma. "While
in principle everyone agrees we should do everything to find a political
solution, it's unclear how to do it, and with whom."
On paper, Yeltsin sits atop what Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here, has described as a
"super-presidential regime," in which he has exercised power as the
hands-on arbiter between key interest groups. But Shevtsova noted in a
recent book on Yeltsin that the political structure is breaking down
because of Yeltsin's ill health and because others no longer respect his
decisions. The leader of the upper house of parliament said recently that
Yeltsin controls nothing in Russia beyond the Kremlin walls.
Yuri Korgunyuk, an analyst with the Indem Center for Applied Political
Studies, a research organization here, said that Russia is using a carrot and
stick approach with Chechnya, what Russians call the whip and
gingerbread. "It is more or less understood what is meant as a whip," he
said of the military's measured advance into Chechnya. "It is so far
completely unclear what is meant as gingerbread. There is no concrete
plan here. They are not raising the question -- 'All right, we will seize,
occupy Chechnya. And what is next?' How is this problem going to be
resolved next?"
The latest fighting broke out in August after Chechen guerrillas crossed
into the neighboring Russian region of Dagestan, seized several towns and
declared their intention to establish an Islamic state there. Russian troops
repelled the guerrillas but a string of deadly bomb attacks on Russian
apartment buildings that the Kremlin blamed on Chechen militants led
Moscow to order airstrikes on key Chechen installations and to deploy
troops at the border. Thousands of civilians have fled the fighting, and
Russian troops now occupy the northern third of Chechnya.
In some ways, the mistakes of the last war still reverberate here. Putin
suggested installing a pro-Russian puppet government in the region, a
comment redolent of the reliance Moscow placed on unpopular
surrogates in the earlier conflict. Military leaders also have spoken of a
quick "surgical" strike and a quick victory, much as they miscalculated
before.
But in other ways, this Chechen conflict is different from the last.
Averchev recalled that the earlier war was seen by the Chechens as a
brutal attempt by Moscow to impose its will and crush independence
sentiment there. This time, he said, Russia is on the defensive, reeling from
the attacks in Dagestan and the apartment house bombings, in which
nearly 300 people died. He said Russian public opinion has "changed very
seriously" in part because of what happened in Chechnya after the first
war, when the region sank into a state of lawlessness in which kidnapping
and the slave trade have thrived.
In field tactics, too, the Russian advance has been different from that of
1994, when army commanders threw into battle ill-trained conscripts who
were unprepared for the terrain, the foul weather and the ferocity of their
foes. This time the army has advanced cautiously.
Averchev said the military now realizes that public "support for this
operation is conditional" on mitigating losses among Russian troops.
Korgunyuk said that the military learned a lesson from the public
resentment over the last war "that is necessary to at least prevent the rise
of anti-military moods inside Russia itself and to try to bypass the issue of
human losses among the soldiers, including new recruits." He said the
army had accomplished this so far by "strict military censorship and by
cutting off other sources of information about the military operation."
Politicians and analysts also worry that Moscow has no strategy for a
negotiated settlement of the conflict. Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov
has been severely weakened by internal opposition, while the leader of the
Dagestan incursion, guerrilla commander Shamil Basayev, has vowed
more attacks on Russian territory.
Yeltsin is also politically weaker than ever, and his disappearance from
view may signal his uncertainty, Korgunyuk said. "Yeltsin indeed has this
trick," he said. "When he does not know how to solve a problem and
hesitates between this or another variant, it is sometimes impossible to
drag him out with pincers. He keeps silent for a long time."
¸ 1999 The Washington Post Company
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