No End In Sight

If Putin has much at stake in Chechnya, it is partly because he himself has often drawn the connection between the secessionist republic's future and his own. To demonstrate his alleged commitment to a political solution, he held a referendum in March that gave Chechens the opportunity to approve a new draft constitution that reaffirmed Chechnya's status as an integral part of Russia, but promised wide autonomy and self-rule. The vote — official turnout was 90%, with 96% supporting Moscow's proposals — is to be followed by presidential and parliamentary elections in December. But Frank Judd, a member of the British House of Lords who served as the Council of Europe's lead rapporteur for Chechnya until he quit in protest over the referendum, says the poll was a fiction. "Where was the freedom? The opportunity for people who had doubts to voice them? What kind of ballot integrity was there?" The referendum would lead to a solution, Judd snorts, "if pigs could fly." In a more measured assessment, a U.S. State Department official called it "a start."

Putin promised that the referendum would bring peace and stability to the region, but of course it has not. The abductions routinely carried out by the Russian army have actually increased since the vote. "We know for a fact that the reprisals have grown much worse after the referendum, contrary to what the Russians promised," says a senior U.S. diplomat. "We raised the issue with the Russians and told them they must do something to shore up their pledges." But with the U.S. fighting its own war on terror, the Bush Administration is hardly going to publicly castigate Moscow for its excesses.

"There is no way this can be resolved without international intervention," says Ruslan Khasbulatov, a professor of economics and former head of the Supreme Soviet, the early Yeltsin-era Federal Parliament. Rebel leader Maskhadov's representative, Maigov, insists that his boss "is ready to take part in talks without any preliminary conditions." Maigov concedes that international terrorist networks, probably including al-Qaeda, have established themselves in Chechnya. But their presence "is the effect of the war rather than its cause," Maigov says. "Only by putting an end to the violence directed against the Chechen people can we put an end to the wave of suicide bombings that is now bound to grow."

Force has so far failed to achieve anything in Chechnya, except fomenting more violence. After the March referendum, more than 200 Chechens disappeared in nighttime raids by Russian death squads, prompting reprisal bombings from the militants. Although Putin referred to "acts of terror" during last Friday's State of the Nation address, he didn't speak of the bombings earlier in the week. The only mention of Chechnya at all was his offer of amnesty to those who lay down their arms by August and praise for the referendum that, as Putin put it, showed "that the Chechens consider themselves a part and parcel of the multiethnic Russian people. The referendum drew a line under the period when all the power in Chechnya was usurped by bandits and citizens were deprived of basic human rights. All that is behind us now." It's hard to imagine Putin really believes that.