Chechnya’s rigged election
OCTOBER’S ELECTION of a new president for the war-torn
Caucasian republic of Chechnya was record breaking in more ways than one. Of the
original list of five serious candidates, only one made it through to polling
day. The others were either disqualified by the electoral commission or were
bought off with senior jobs in the Kremlin.
So it was little surprise when the results showed an 81%
vote in favour of the candidate nominated by Moscow – Akhmat Kadyrov. Even more
substantive was the turnout of 85%! Particularly remarkable was the fact that so
many people managed to cast their votes without apparently even turning up at
the polling stations. According to observers from the human rights group
Helsinki Watch, the capital city of Grozny was deserted on polling day as
residents had fled, fearing a wave of terrorist attacks to undermine the
election.
One of these observers went to the normally crowded central
market place, which she found practically empty. When she asked where all the
people were, she was told: ‘What people? They all left town. It’s the elections
you know. Everyone’s afraid of a terrorist act, all the papers and TV are
talking about 5 October being a bad day’. When she asked the same person whether
he was going to vote, he replied: ‘Vote? What for? It’s already been decided.
The president has already been chosen. Only not by us but by Moscow’. With the
population itself proving reluctant to participate in the voting farce, other
‘electors’ had to be found. Federal troops serving in the republic were
registered and made up over 10% of the electoral roll.
As it was clear that the election was not going to be free
and fair, many international observers, including OBSE representatives, simply
boycotted the poll. Those who were present did so not to find irregularities but
to try and cover them up. Some tried very hard not to see what was going on for
fear of disrupting the friendly relationships between Russian president,
Vladimir Putin, and the West. So much so that some of the pro-Kremlin press were
talking of the elections marking a new phase in Russian/Western relations in
which the ‘recognition of the legality and legitimacy of the Chechen election
laid the basis for ending the continual insinuations about the rights of Aslan
Maskhadov’. Maskhadov was the president elected in the last election, and has
now been declared persona non grata by the Kremlin.
The elections were rigged. Not just by packing the ballot
boxes but by instilling fear in the opposition. Helsinki Watch asked an
observer, who was supposed to be representing one of the opposition candidates
at the polling stations, whether there were any irregularities: ‘There are’,
said the woman quietly shaking her head. ‘You know as well as I do’. What
irregularities? ‘We can’t say or we’ll have trouble. You are just a visitor who
will go home tomorrow but we have to live here. If I tell you now, tomorrow
they’ll tear my head off!’
This is an indication of the climate of fear that surrounded
the election, fear created by the Kremlin and, in particular, Kadyrov. In the
late 1980s he established the first Islamic institute in Chechnya and then
joined the Chechen side in the first war against Russia in 1993. Like the other
commanders, he was little more than a warlord, establishing his own little army
of loyal fighters. As one of the leaders of Islam in the republic he declared
jihad on the Russian army. He was later elected mufti, the main advisor on
Koranic law, of Chechnya. Only at the beginning of the second war, which was
started as part of the campaign to get Putin elected president, Kadyrov fell out
with Maskhadov and the other warlords and ended up siding with the Kremlin.
Now Kadyrov is running a regime of terror within Chechnya,
in which his former fighters are running protection rackets and ensuring that
his political opponents keep their heads down. The Moscow Nezavisimaya paper
wrote: ‘His personal guards are no longer afraid of the federal troops, and
behind their backs people call them ‘death squads’. It’s no secret that the
other warlords are getting worried about the strengthening of the Kadyrov clan’.
One of the leading mullahs complains that Kadyrov is no more
than a placeman for the armed forces. Kadyrov’s children, he says, wave around
dollars from Putin at weddings and Kadyrov himself spends so long in Moscow he
will no longer be a mullah but a priest. But, he warns, the Russians could soon
regret backing Kadyrov as he will provoke a real war. Indeed, despite ‘winning’
the election, a recent gathering of all Chechnya’s mullahs and Islamic leaders
passed a vote of no confidence in him.
These incidents give the lie to the claims by the Russian
leadership that things have settled down in the republic. The Russian deputy
minister of the interior claimed just before the election that ‘there is
practically no large-scale fighting or bands that could in any way affect the
situation in the republic’. Despite these assurances, the next day six more
federal troops were killed in an assault. Barely a day goes by without a bomb
attack or a firefight either within the republic or in one of the nearby
regions.
The Russian government boasts that an amnesty has been
declared and fighters should give up arms. It claims that refugees are returning
to the republic. As it happens, 400 people have now been amnestied: 140 from the
Chechen side, with the remainder being Russian troops who have committed various
crimes! Refugees currently living in other republics in tented towns are also
extremely reluctant to return. When a government delegation visited one of the
refugee camps just before the election to discuss conditions for returning, they
met with a very hostile response. Hardly surprising given the conditions in
Grozny. A reporter recently described how one family living in the city
survives: ‘When 14-year-old Asya returns from school she ducks under a sign
warning of mines, steps through a broken doorway and climbs a dark staircase
past empty apartments where wind blows through the scattered walls’. Her mother
complains that Asya has been losing her hair because of the tension of life in a
war-zone. Her younger brother has an eye ailment and her sister is going deaf
from the constant sound of explosions. One NGO reports that over 8,000 people
have been killed by mines in the past three years.
It is difficult to see a way out of this catastrophic
situation. So many people have been killed or displaced, forced to become
refugees in other republics, that it is no longer possible even to assess what
the wishes are of Chechens themselves. Nevertheless, they must have the right to
self-determination. However, as the experience of life in the republic between
the two wars showed, even the de facto independence of those days turned into a
nightmare. The Chechen warlords established their own regime and divided up the
republic’s wealth and assets between themselves.
The Russian government used the little republic as a pawn in
its struggle to dominate the oil-rich Caucasian region. Under Stalinism,
Chechens were deprived of even basic national rights, now that capitalism has
been restored in the region, extreme poverty and war have compounded their
difficulties. Freedom from military repression, dictatorship and economic
depravation can only be guaranteed if the struggle for the rights of refugees,
for democratic and national rights in Chechnya, is linked with the struggle for
the socialist transformation of society in the other Caucasian republics and in
Russia itself. This would be based on the nationalisation of oil and other
natural resources under democratic workers’ control and management in a
confederation of genuine workers’ states in the Caucasus.
Rob Jones
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