By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — On July 9 Russian forces launched a huge new offensive in the republic of Chechnya, putting an end to a shaky six-week cease-fire. With lulls due to bad flying weather, the Russian military has continued pouring bombs and rockets onto villages in southern Chechnya that it claims are "heavily fortified insurgent bases".
Political temperatures in the Chechen capital, Grozny, have been high since a particularly shocking episode on July 15. Witnesses described Russian troops going on a rampage in two armoured personnel carriers, shooting at vehicles, stabbing wounded people to death, soaking their bodies in petrol and then setting them on fire. At least 13 people were killed.
Ironically, Russian opponents of the war had been rejoicing only a few weeks earlier at what seemed an important advance along the road to peace. After gaining only a narrow plurality in first-round presidential elections on June 16, incumbent Boris Yeltsin sacked a string of unpopular officials known for urging tough military action in Chechnya. The "party of war" within the Kremlin appeared to have suffered an irreversible defeat.
The Moscow authorities had signed a cease-fire agreement on May 27, and a tentative peace accord had been concluded on June 10. "The war has ended", Yeltsin declared during his campaign, pledging that the Russian forces would respect the agreements.
Other promising signs seemed to include the president's decision to make former general Alexander Lebed his chief security adviser. A bitter critic of the Chechnya war, Lebed during his own presidential election campaign had called for the withdrawal of all Russian forces, and for a referendum in Chechnya on independence.
But by mid-July, the hopes of earlier days had turned to dust. "It can now be said with certainty that the peace accords ... have suffered a total collapse", the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta stated on July 23.
Since the second-round elections on July 3 put Yeltsin back in office, the "party of war" has returned to life. The president, as before, functions as its patron. Ironically, its central figure is now Lebed, who has more say than anyone but Yeltsin in deciding policy in Chechnya. To consolidate his position, Lebed performed a swift backflip and began voicing positions directly opposed to those he had proclaimed a few weeks earlier.
Now that the elections are past, there is no reason for administration "hawks" to conceal their thinking on Chechnya. On July 16 it was the turn of interior minister Anatoly Kulikov. "These diehard groups of mercenaries and criminals must be wiped out", Kulikov reportedly said of the Chechen fighters.
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, in the past often presented as a "dove" on Chechnya, also endorsed the offensive. Chernomyrdin blamed the situation on the rebels, who he claimed were "provoking federal forces to launch massive new military actions".
Authoritative reports contradict Chernomyrdin's assessment. The English-language Moscow Times, which is generally sympathetic to the Yeltsin administration, stated on July 12: "... evidence on the ground suggests that it is the Russian side that has contributed most to the escalation of violence over the past week ..."
The paper quoted Charles Blandy, a consultant to the Conflict Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst Military Academy in Britain. In his view, the efforts by the Yeltsin administration in May and June to obtain a cease-fire were never more than a vote-winning stunt.
In the decision to resume large-scale hostilities, security chief Lebed emerges as having played a key role. Lebed has close, long-standing ties with Lieutenant-General Vyacheslav Tikhomirov, the commander of Russian troops in Chechnya, and the two conferred in Moscow immediately before the new offensive was launched.
Throughout the war, Yeltsin has bluntly rejected the Chechen fighters' key demand: for their republic's right to self-determination. When Lebed demanded and won broad control over security issues in Russia, he also accepted responsibility for defending Yeltsin's line in Chechnya, with all its brutal implications.
Yeltsin is thus managing to shift much of the political burden of the war onto his security chief, at the same time as preventing Lebed's power from getting out of bounds.