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Johnson's Russia List
 

 

November 13, 1999    
This Date's Issues: 3622  3623  



Johnson's Russia List
#3623
13 November 1999
davidjohnson@erols.com


[Note from David Johnson:
1. Fred Weir: Russia and Chechnya.
2. Washington Post: Ken Ringle, Soviet Scholars Left Out In the Thaw.
Experts Regroup After Their World Turned Upside Down.

3. Boston Globe: David Filipov, Russian bombardment sows terror in 
town. Jets, rockets in Chechnya targeting rural villages.

4. Reuters: New U.S.-Russia Cuban crisis unlikely - experts.
5. Bloomberg: Ukraine's Kuchma Appeals to Youth to Beat Communist 
Challenger.

6. The Guardian (UK): Ian Traynor, Russia set to destroy Grozny 
Russia warns Grozny's residents to evacuate city.

7. Itar-Tass: Russia Resists outside Pressure Over Chechnya.
8. Reuters: Russia court scraps registration of extremist bloc. (Spas)]


*******


#1
From: "Fred Weir" <fweir@glas.apc.org>
Subject: Russia and Chechnya
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 


The piece below will appear in forthcoming issue of In These Times.
You're welcome to run it. Cheers, Fred.


NAZRAN, Russia ­ If your only tool is a hammer, every problem
will probably look like a nail. President Boris Yeltsin has once again
rolled out the one intact instrument in the unraveling Russian Federation
that still sometimes obeys his edicts: the Army. With its professional
officer corps, and Soviet-era munitions stockpiles fit for World War Three,
Russia’s military has been unleashed against the rebel republic of Chechnya
to crack the Kremlin’s two toughest problems with one blow. By crushing
Chechnya’s 8-year old independence drive, it is hoped to put an end to
Russia’s post-Soviet orgy of regionalism and restore federal prestige. On
the wings of that victory the war’s prime author and Yeltsin’s heir
apparent, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, will -- so the plan goes -- be
vaulted into the Kremlin in next year’s presidential elections.
The Army, bitter and angry after a decade of neglect and
humiliation, appears almost eager to comply. Down along Chechnya’s rugged,
forested border with neighboring Ingushetia, where the high, snow-capped
Caucasus Mountains seem to hang on the horizon, a huge military machine is
mobilizing. Artillery batteries dug into hillsides pound the Chechen
border towns of Bamut, Ochkoi Martan and Sernovodsk, around the clock.
Helicopter gunships and Su-25 ground attack fighters sweep in over the
relative safety of Ingush territory to slam nearby rebel positions with
rockets and bombs. The roads are jammed with armored personnel carriers,
tanks and truck convoys headed for the front.
The young Russian recruits manning this war machine look
miserable and scared. Their uniforms are ill-fitting and filthy, their high
cavalry-style boots are completely unsuited to the onrushing mountain
winter, and they are often seen in the roads begging food and cigarettes.
But the officers seem calm and confident, even cocky.
On Oct. 27 a band of Chechen rebel fighters crossed the border and
ambushed a Russian patrol in broad daylight near Verkhni Alkum, a hill post
in southeastern Ingushetia. According to the Moscow media, dozens of Russian
soldiers were killed. A Russian Major, standing on the camp's perimeter a
few days later, admitted the attack occurred but shrugged away questions
about the price of war.
"We're fighting here so that these boys won't have to fight one
day in their own home towns," he said, gesturing toward a nearby group of
conscripts. "If we don't take strong measures now, all this instability
will spread". He had kind words for Putin. “He knows what he’s doing. It’s
time someone in this country faced problems head on”.
Then he offered an analogy that speaks volumes about the mindset of
the Russian military, as they commit more and more young men and resources
in pursuit of victory against the Chechen irregulars who own those forested
hills beyond the base. After World War Two the USSR fought a little-known
war against CIA-backed anti-Soviet insurgents in the Carpathian mountains of
Western Ukraine. "Those Ukrainians
were the same kind of bandits, fighting us in similar terrain," the Major
said. "It took ten years, but we ground them down and eventually wiped them
out. We'll do the same here".
The irony of that comparison apparently escaped him. Ukraine is
today an independent country and those long-buried guerrillas are being
rehabilitated and transformed into national folk heroes. The USSR
may have won the war, but it failed in the long run to create a society that
any of its diverse peoples cared to belong to.
Post-Soviet Russia now appears irrevocably headed down the same
path.
Its Achilles heel is here, in the North Caucasus. Six
impoverished and restive ethnic republics nestle up against the high wall of
the mountains, which separate Europe from Asia in this part of the world:
Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Karbardino-
Balkaria and Karecheyevo-Cherkessia. Of these, all but one are traditionally
Moslem. All are rent with internal discord, and it is growing worse under
the impact of the deepening cataclysm in Chechnya.
"This is a colonial war, and it will end as such wars usually do:
with the republics of the North Caucasus breaking free from Russia," says
Franz Sheregi, a senior analyst with the independent Institute of Social
and National Issues in Moscow. "They cannot be integrated into Russia,
except under a colonial system. And that means endless war and dissension".
The Ingush are closely related to the Chechens, and until 1991
were united in a single republic with them. But when Chechnya opted to
secede from the Russian Federation, Ingushetia decided to break away from
Chechnya and allied itself with Moscow. However, Russia has since forfeited
most of that goodwill.
A two year war to crush Chechnya's independence in 1994-96 killed
an estimated 80,000 people and ended in Russian defeat. Though Chechnya
defeated the Russian Army in the last war, it failed to build on its de
facto independence. Its elected president, Aslan
Maskhadov, proved incapable of establishing a viable government or doing
anything about the tiny republic’s economic ruination. Local warlords, based
in Chechnya’s fractious clans, made their living by kidnapping, smuggling
and stealing oil from Russia’s Caspian-Black Sea pipeline.
In August and September a top warlord, Shamil Basayev, launched
two invasions of neighboring Dagestan in an attempt to hook up with local
Islamic militants and perhaps break Chechnya’s isolation. They were beaten
back, at huge cost, by Russian forces and Dagestani militias. Then, in
September, a series of apartment blasts killed 300 people in cities across
Russia. The Kremlin was quick to blame Chechnya, but it has never been
established who planted the bombs.
In early October the Russian military invaded Chechnya in a
self-described "anti-terrorist" operation that soon turned into a
full-fledged effort to re-fight the previous war -- only "smarter" this
time. Some
200,000 Chechen civilians fleeing into Ingushetia carry horror stories of
savage and indiscriminate Russian bombardment of their homes, public places
and refugee columns. Though some of the tales may be
exaggerated, Ingush hospitals are full of women and children with limbs
blown off, bodies lacerated by shrapnel and eyes dumb with shell shock. “My
sense is that Russian forces are trying to hit Chechen military
targets but they are not being discriminating about where they aim,” says
Jim Ron, a member of a Human Rights Watch team that has been systematically
interviewing Chechen war refugees. “They don’t seem very concerned that they
are hitting so many civilians”.
For the Russian Army fighting “smarter” appears to mean avoiding
the bloody infantry assaults that cost them so dearly in the last war.
Instead they are pounding Chechnya’s towns and cities with heavy
weaponry, drawing a steel noose around them. “We will lay siege to Grozny,
Gudermes and other towns, and force the bandits to break up and flee into
the mountains,” said one Russian officer. “There they can
starve and freeze to death in the winter”.
That strategy sounds a bit like throwing Brere Rabbit into the
briar patch. The Chechens are a traditional mountain warrior society. Their
present military leaders, trained by the Soviet Army, cut their
teeth in Afghanistan. In the last war they proved extraordinarily adept at
breaking up their approximately 40,000 hardened fighters into small units,
scattering them for months in the hills, then massing suddenly where the
Russians least expected them.
“Moscow has to realize that it’s impossible to prevail in a
drawn-out guerrilla war in Chechnya,” says Emil Pain, a former Yeltsin
adviser who broke with the Kremlin over Caucasus policy. “I am very much
afraid that Russia will forget the hard-earned lessons of the recent past
and go all-out for a military solution. But Chechnya could only be conquered
at the price of oceans of blood, and even then it’s doubtful”.
If the war starts to go badly -- and indications are that it soon
will -- the Kremlin’s political calculations will also go awry. Putin has
climbed steadily in opinion polls as Russian forces have advanced in
Chechnya. By mid-November he enjoyed almost 30 per cent popular approval,
well above the 17 per cent commanded by his nearest rival, Communist leader
Gennady
Zyuganov. “For Putin, everything is connected with the war,” says Vilen
Ivanov, an analyst at the independent Social-Political Institute in Moscow.
“If there’s a military disaster, it will sink him. It may also end all
hopes of achieving political stability in Russia”.
Even if the war goes well, Russia will be left with its most
fundamental post-Soviet dilemma, which the bombs and bloodshed have only
aggravated.
Russia conquered the North Caucasus in the 19th century after
decades of guerrilla warfare. The Chechens were the last to surrender. In
World War Two Stalin deported tens of thousands of Chechens to the east as
punishment for their supposed collaboration with the Germans. But in later
Soviet times things settled down, and the Communist social
contract took hold.
"The elite from every ethnic group could gain advantage by joining
the Communist party and even found it possible to call themselves Soviet
citizens," says Sergei Kazyenov, a Caucasus specialist with the Institute
for National Security and Strategic Research in Moscow. "For all of its
flaws, the USSR had a unifying ideology and force".
But the Soviet Union is dead, and Yeltsin's Russia has failed to
appeal to its non-Russian citizens -- particularly the dark-skinned, Moslem
Caucasians -- with any new integrating principle. Worse, rising
nationalist forces are pressing a definition of Russianness that hinges on
Slavic ethnicity, Russian culture and Orthodox Christianity. This aggressive
nationalism is growing among Russia’s embittered officer corps, and the war
to subjugate Chechnya is giving them dangerous new political leverage. A
top Russian commander in Chechnya, General Vladimir Shamanov, recently
warned of “civil war” if politicians try to halt the Russian Army’s advance
with peace negotiations. “The officer corps will not survive another slap in
the face,” he said.
"The search for a long-term political solution has been totally
disrupted by the military action," says Kazyenov. "If we fail to create a
Russian civilization that embraces the Caucasian people, we will surely
lose them".
Liza Nagalayeva, a Chechen schoolteacher who fled her bombed and
burning home town in late October, put it this way: "We are a small people,
but we want our freedom. The Russians say we must be part of Russia. Once I
might have listened to them. But they talk only with guns and rockets, and
they will never win the argument that way".


*******


#2
Washington Post
13 November 1999
[for personal use only]
Soviet Scholars Left Out In the Thaw
Experts Regroup After Their World Turned Upside Down
By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer


Pity the poor Sovietologist. It's been 10 years since The Wall fell and the 
Evil Empire is clearly not coming back.


All those years invested in Kremlinological esoterica. All those decades 
riveted by the arrangement of tiny overcoated figures atop Lenin's Tomb. All 
those long leaden winters poring over Politburo speeches for Cyrillic hints 
at what just might possibly presage the early beginnings of post-detente 
neo-Stalinist dissident revisionism. And what has it brought the 
Sovietologist? The ashcan of history.


Once he was the guru of gravitas in Washington, his every utterance weighed 
and measured at cabinet meetings and dinner parties. He could tell us, we 
just knew he could tell us, how close we were to appeasement or Armageddon, 
how far from becoming a radioactive blot on the matrix of Marxist Leninism.


Now he's a quaint historical relic, rather like an expert on the political 
implications of the Tokugawa shogunate. If you were used to regular 
talking-head status on "The McNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" (and even that now flies 
under different colors!), this can be a bitter pill.


"The world sort of changed out from under us," sighs Carol Saivetz, executive 
director of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 
Cambridge, Mass. Her organization has dropped from 4,000 to about 3,300 
members since the Berlin Wall came down. Graduate studies programs are drying 
up all over the country, Russian scholars say, together with government 
grants that once financed them. "It's been hard for some people to retool," 
Saivetz says.


The Sovietologist was once the most important adviser in every 
administration--recall that celebrated '70s phrase: "I wonder who's Kissinger 
now?" But George W. Bush's adviser on Russia and Transcaucasia? Who cares? 
Feminist Naomi Wolf gets bigger headlines.


Angela Stent, a Georgetown University professor on loan to the State 
Department, refers to herself as a "recovering Sovietologist." She says 
students of the former Soviet Union have always been polarized between 
political and military experts understandably obsessed with short-range 
developments, and scholars of history and culture wedded to a longer view.


Today, she and others say, the polarization has not only increased, but the 
ground has shifted in other ways. For example, in the Cold War days, academic 
specialists on Soviet states like Uzbekistan and Ukraine were looked on as 
folk-culture fringe groups, rather like those 1960s Peace Corps veterans who 
served once in Peru and have dressed in Quechua ponchos ever since.


But in the post-Soviet world of the 1990s, "those people are now center 
stage," says Stent, as power has devolved to the now independent states from 
once all-powerful Moscow.


This has led to a certain wistful nostalgia for the simplicities of Cold War 
autocracy.


"I'm writing a book right now on Russian foreign policy," says Saivetz, "and 
I can tell you it would have been a hell of a lot easier 15 years ago. Today 
I have to deal with the influences of everything from Muslim regionalism to 
Caspian pipelines. It's a whole lot messier than in the old days."


Not everyone, however, chooses to deal with the mess.


"The Soviet Union may be dead but Kremlinology is alive and well," says Leon 
Aron, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of 
an upcoming biography of Boris Yeltsin. "On any given day in Washington you 
can find dozens of experts who can tell you how much Yeltsin had to drink 
last night or the size of the balance on his daughter's credit card in 
Switzerland. They can't accept the present-day irrelevancy of that kind of 
analysis because they practiced it during the Cold War for so long. . . . 


"Those people go to Moscow, just like they used to, read only Moscow 
newspapers and talk just to Moscow intellectuals because that's what they 
always did. And they think that tells them what's happening in the new 
Russia."


Such "Cold War orphans," he says, know nothing about regions like Novgorod, 
"where a very interesting governor named Mikhail Prusak has cut taxes and 
done some amazing things that have doubled the standard of living almost 
overnight."


Furthermore, Saivetz said, Sovietologists still frozen in a Cold War mindset 
find it hard to realize that the communist past of a country like Hungary is 
less likely to influence its future than will its proximity to a unifying 
Europe.


Oh, the agony of shifting paradigms!


It's not that Sovietologists are out of work, exactly. You can study Russia 
either because it's too strong or because it's too weak. We used to count 
Russian submarines because they might nuke us to oblivion. Now we count them 
because they're rusting to pieces and might make Icelandic cod glow in the 
dark.


You can argue for a sense of urgency either way. It's just, you know, not the 
same.


Murray Feshbach, Georgetown University's longtime dean of Soviet Union 
demographics, says hard-liner Sovietologists miss not only the structural 
simplicity of the state they studied for so long but the sense that there was 
much in the communist world they could profitably ignore.


Hard-liners in and out of the government, he said, paid "relatively little" 
attention to Soviet population statistics during the Cold War, in part 
because of their obsession with Soviet politics and the possibilities of 
democratization.


"I'm always accused of being a pessimist" about conditions in Russia and its 
former satellites, he says. Those preoccupied with the military strength of 
the Soviet Union, he said, couldn't believe the country's internal conditions 
could be as bad as his numbers seemed to indicate.


But while others were debating the extent of changes in the Soviet Union, he 
predicted in a 1989 article the collapse of the Soviet empire. "I thought it 
would happen slower and become something like a confederation," he said. But 
not because of military pressure or democratic trends. The key piece of data, 
he says, was the declining Russian birth rate. It showed that the Soviet army 
was increasingly relying on non-Russians for the manpower with which to 
continue subjugating its satellite states. Obviously, he said, something was 
going to give.


Nowadays, he says, he's still accused of being a pessimist about conditions 
in the former Soviet Union. But he says those now starry-eyed about the 
long-range possibilities of democracy and capitalism ignore the fact that the 
Russian birth rate is still in the tank, and health conditions are actually 
getting worse.


"The social issues just don't concern them," he sighs. "Everything is just 
economics and politics."


Feshbach admits that statistical data emanating from the former Soviet Union 
has always been a bit on the slippery side, so evaluating it has been as much 
an art as a science.


For example, until about 1991 no Westerner had ever seen the results of the 
Soviet Union's 1937 census. "The census had been taken, but Stalin ordered it 
thrown out because it showed too many people had died" in the Stalinist 
purges of the 1930s, Feshbach said. "It also showed an amazing number of 
people had chosen to move to Siberia."


Nowadays, Feshbach says, he has access to the 1937 census plus a lot of other 
data, but it's data with only slightly fewer holes than in the old days. 
Birth and death figures out of Chechnya? Dream on.


The fall of communism has brought other changes as well. Some experts who 
thought they hated Russia because they hated communism, Aron said, have had 
to come to the uncomfortable conclusion that what they really hate is 
Russians.


"Most scholars always differentiated between Soviets and Russians," he said. 
"But there is a segment of Sovietologists who argue that Russians are 
inherently Soviet, incapable of democracy, of self-rule, or even the 
acceptance of a plurality of opinions."


Others, academic Marxists from the 1960s, he says, have had to temper relief 
over the end of the Cold War with their distress at seeing capitalism take 
root on the streets where Lenin once ground his boot heels.


"To these people Gorbachev represented the elusive bluebird of socialism with 
a human face," said Aron. "They have never forgiven Yeltsin for killing their 
dream."


"There is obviously more than one way to be a hard-liner," said Abraham 
Brumberg, a former Sovietologist with the United States Information Agency. 
"I've always believed being a hard-liner is a matter of temperament more than 
ideology."


Nostalgia for the Cold War remains very much alive among his colleagues in 
and out of the government, he says. But it's not nostalgia for brinkmanship 
or arms racing. "It's for the illusion of a simpler morality: We were good, 
they were evil. That was always too simplistic, but. . . ."


"That sense of a moral compass gave meaning to the Sovietologist's life. 
Today that compass is lost" in the confusion of democratic change, Aron said, 
"and there's a real sense of yearning there."


In academia, the seismic shifts in the once firm geology of Slavic studies 
have been coming with such accelerating speed that entire disciplines are 
shaking down.


Three years ago, Saivetz says, "I was at a meeting of the American Council of 
Learned Societies and the president of the Middle East Studies Association 
came up to me and said, 'I have a bone to pick with you. I want Central 
Asia.' His argument was that the former Soviet states in Central Asia, like 
Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan--with their Islamic populations and oil 
economies--had more in common today with Middle Eastern states than they do 
with Russia. He thought we should redraw the traditional lines of scholarship 
that way."


That could happen, which would leave the Sovietologists' rear guard even 
further behind. But Stent says things could be worse.


The people really left behind by events are not on this side of the former 
Berlin Wall, but on the other.


"It's all my longtime contacts in the former Soviet Union that you have to 
feel sorry for," she says. "Under communism, they had a privileged life. They 
were well paid. They got to travel. They had prestige. They were the people 
who studied and understood America. Now, when anybody in Moscow can get a 
passport and a plane ticket to New York or Washington," she says, "those 
people are all out of work. Who cares what they think?"


Pity the Americanologist, she says. 


*******


#3
Boston Globe
13 November 1999
[for personal use only]
Russian bombardment sows terror in town 
Jets, rockets in Chechnya targeting rural villages
By David Filipov


SLEPTSOVSKAYA, Russia - It was 10 in the morning when the Russian jets came, 
as the people of Samashki were climbing out of their cramped basement 
shelters after another terror-filled night, thinking that the bombing had 
finally stopped. They were wrong.


Stunned Chechen families ran for the cover of their houses as two jets 
strafed a central road, Cooperative Street, firing rockets. Two women and 
three children in the Abdulkadirovs' home died immediately. An explosion blew 
off the leg of 12-year-old Zelimkhan Yakuev as he ran for cover. Dozens more 
were killed or wounded as they tried to escape.


''There was no warning. The Russians told us they were not going to attack 
Samashki. They lied,'' said Khava Avturkhanova Thursday in a hospital in the 
town of Sleptsovskaya, on the border of Chechnya 6 miles west of Samashki. 
She was tending to her daughter, Madina, 22, one of dozens of people injured 
in the Oct. 27 attack. Nearby, a Russian battery fired salvo after salvo in 
the direction of Samashki as warplanes dropped bombs in the distance.


Russian leaders claim they are conducting an operation to wipe out terrorist 
bases in Chechnya, and bring the separatist Caucasus region back under 
Moscow's control. Journalists and other independent observers are not being 
allowed into Chechnya to see for themselves.


Samashki, a town of 12,000 about 20 miles west of Chechnya's capital, Grozny, 
provides an example of what the Russian forces are doing. In numerous 
interviews, refugees and wounded who have fled the town described a 
systematic bombing and artillery campaign apparently aimed at killing as many 
people as possible, no matter who they are. Some Russian observers agreed.


''Present tactics in Chechnya imply war crimes are committed on a daily 
basis,'' commented Pavel Felgenhauer, a Russian military analyst in Moscow. 
''The Russian Army in Chechnya is rapidly becoming an army of war criminals - 
like the Yugoslav Army of President Slobodan Milosevic.''


People from Samashki know something about atrocities and brutal tactics. 
Nearly 500 people were killed in two attacks by federal troops during 
Russia's 1994-1996 war in Chechnya. Nearly every house was badly damaged or 
destroyed.


But those interviewed said this time the damage is much worse. Among the 
weapons the Russians are using, refugees said, are ''Grad'' and ''Uragan'' 
antipersonnel rockets, which spread showers of shrapnel over a wide area, and 
ground-to-ground tactical rockets. The way the Chechens see it, this is 
ethnic cleansing from the sky.


''If the last war was a war against against Chechen fighters, then this is a 
war against the whole population,'' said Usam Baisayev, whose family operated 
a bathhouse on Cooperative Street, one of the few buildings still standing 
from the last war. Now it is gone, too. Baisayev's uncle, Isa, saw it blow up 
in a rocket attack last week.


The Baisayev family's 30 members are now living on the generosity of a friend 
in Ingushetia, crowded into a three-room hut and subsisting on thin soup and 
flat bread. They are among the 200,000 people who have fled the violence.


Anxious to avoid the bloody infantry battles that inflicted heavy losses on 
their troops during the last war, Russian forces have employed new tactics 
this time. They avoid entering Chechen towns, instead bombarding them with 
planes, artillery, and tactical rockets.


The Russians may also seek to depopulate towns like Samashki to deprive 
Chechen separatist militants of the support the towns provided in the last 
war. People from Samashki, though, said they were determined to stay out of 
the war this time. After the first Russian airstrikes in late September, the 
mayor, Leche Masayev, and town elders made the decision not to let Chechen 
fighters into town.


After that, townspeople said, the Russians said they would not fire on 
Samashki. Some who had fled for the neighboring Russian region of Ingushetia, 
like Khava and Madina Avturkhanova, came back in early October. It was a 
mistake.


The bombardment began in earnest on Oct. 22, when Russian troops sealed the 
border and a commander, General Alexander Belousov, announced that there were 
only ''bandits'' and ''terrorists'' in Samashki. That night, tank rounds and 
cloudburst shells landed first north of the center, then to the south, then 
on Cooperative Street. One person was killed.


''The Russians were just taking aim,'' said Usam Baisayev. ''After the last 
war, we have all become experts in Russian military tactics.''


Baisayev, a former journalist for a Chechen newspaper, was in Samashki in 
April 1995 when Russian paramilitary police went on a rampage, throwing 
grenades into cellars filled with women and children and firing flame 
throwers at civilians in the street. They said 96 civilians were killed.


In March 1996, 500 civilians were killed during heavy fighting in the town 
between federal troops and Chechen separatists. Houses that had been rebuilt 
during the lull were destroyed, turning Samashki into a virtual ghost town.


When Russian troops withdrew in late 1996, people came back and rebuilt once 
again. What had once been a relatively prosperous agricultural town, by rural 
Russian standards, was now barely scraping by. People grew their own 
vegetables and tended cattle and sheep. The separatist government in Grozny, 
having won de facto independence after the Russian pullout, offered only a 
little help. For a while there was light and gas.


When the bombing started again this fall, Samashki residents thought they 
knew what to expect. But nothing could prepare them for what happened Oct. 
24, when the Russians began bombing in earnest.


At one moment, the Baisayevs were sitting in their makeshift home next to 
their bathhouse, listening to a Radio Liberty correspondent report that the 
Russians had just launched two tactical rockets toward Chechnya. Two minutes 
later, the rockets struck Samashki, followed by a hail of shrapnel from a 
salvo of Grad rockets.


Usam's aunt, Lena Baisayeva, an ethnic Russian, was getting dressed to 
prepare for a night in the cold bomb shelter the family shares with 70 other 
townspeople.


''Suddenly, the windows blew out and knocked me back,'' she said. ''I sensed 
a burning smell and it was suddenly light on the street, then it was foggy 
and you couldn't see anything.''


The two houses next to the Baisayevs' were destroyed. A girl who had fled 
fighting in northern Chechnya was killed. Samashki residents say the only 
reason more people were not killed was the deep ditches many people dug in 
their gardens, called ''wolf pits,'' something they learned from the last war.


''If you hide in a cellar, a direct hit on your house can bring the ruins 
down on you and trap you there,'' said Alikhadzhi Saitov, a Samashki refugee 
living in a chilly tent in the Ingush town of Karabulak.


But then the Russians changed tactics again.


''Now the planes and helicopters fly around in a circle, like vultures, 
waiting for anything to move,'' said Isa Baisayev, Lena's husband. ''They 
fire the rockets, and you never hear them coming until they hit.''


More civilians died each day. Old man Ramzan. Anzar, the goalie on the local 
soccer team.


On Oct. 29, the Russians promised to open the border with Ingushetia and let 
civilians flee. Dozens of people from Samashki joined a convoy of refugees 
from Grozny and other parts of Chechnya. But when they reached the border, 
the Russian troops turned them back. As the convoy passed Samashki, planes 
and helicopters closed in and opened fire, killing at least 25 and wounding 
more than 70.


Still trapped in Chechnya, the wounded were forced to go to a hospital in 
nearby Urus Martan. But the Russians bombed there, too.


''Each time, we had to carry the patients down to the cellar,'' Khava 
Avturkhanova said. It was only three days later that the Russians let her 
take her daughter Madina, who suffered two broken arms and a broken right 
leg, to the safer and better-equipped hospital in Sleptsovskaya.


Madina was also wounded in the last war, when a shell fragment broke her left 
leg. Khava's brothers and father are still in Samashki. She has no idea where 
her husband and two other children are.


The Russians have set up checkpoints on the border where they inspect all men 
ages 15 to 50 for signs that they have been fighting. Some men are led away 
by the Russians. Ingush police say they are being taken to a ''filtration 
camp'' in the main Russian military base 30 miles north of here.


Lena Baisayeva went back to Samashki Thursday. Someone has to tend to the 
cattle and check on what family belongings are left.


However great the danger, the people of Samashki know that one day they will 
have to go back and live there again.


*******


#4
New U.S.-Russia Cuban crisis unlikely - experts
By Charles Aldinger


WASHINGTON, Nov 12 (Reuters) - A tentative Russian air force plan to fly 
long-range bombers to Cuba next year is unlikely to provoke any confrontation 
like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, U.S. military officials and defence 
experts agreed on Friday. 


Russia has not flown big bombers to communist Cuba for nearly a decade, but a 
Russian air force spokesman told Reuters in Moscow on Friday that Tupolev-160 
nuclear-capable bombers could visit Cuba and Vietnam next year if funds were 
available. 


``We're obviously going to monitor this situation closely and talk to Russia 
about it,'' said State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin. But he emphasised 
that he was reacting to press reports and not official statements from 
Moscow. 


U.S. military officials said privately that the move could simply be muscle 
flexing by the proud and almost destitute Russian military. 


Private experts said it could be a political card being played for home 
consumption before next year's Russian elections, or a move to emphasise 
Moscow's refusal to accept U.S. calls to modify the 1972 anti-ballistic 
missile (ABM) treaty. While Tu-160s can carry nuclear cruise missiles, 
analysts said it was extremely unlikely they would be armed with such 
weapons. 


They said the Russians had a right to fly in international air space and that 
any visit by the Tu-160 ``Blackjacks'' was unlikely to spark any 
confrontation like that of 1962, when Washington discovered Soviet nuclear 
missile sites in Cuba. 


Then-President John F. Kennedy threw a U.S. naval blockade around the island, 
demanding that the missiles be returned to the Soviet Union. After days of 
tension, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to Kennedy's demands. 


Russians stopped flying nuclear-capable anti-submarine warfare planes and 
strategic bombers to Cuba and Vietnam in 1991, a Defence Department spokesman 
said. 


In Russia, the weekly military newspaper Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye 
quoted the head of long-range aviation forces, Mikhail Oparin, as saying that 
new missions to Cuba and Vietnam were planned next year and would surprise 
NATO. 


Asked to comment, Russian air force spokesman Col. Nikolai Baranov told 
Reuters: ``If the government considers it essential to do this, the military 
will do it ... If they give us the money we will fly, if not we won't fly.'' 


``The Russian military is very proud and they are hurting. This may be a way 
to say, 'We're not a paper tiger,''' one U.S. air force officer, who asked 
not to be identified, told Reuters at the Pentagon. 


``I don't think this signals a return to Cold War stuff by a long shot. But 
we can certainly deal with any threats from a military standpoint,'' he said. 


``It's both military and political. But it certainly doesn't signal any kind 
of new nuclear confrontation,'' former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Robert Hunter 
said. 


``We simply have to cool over this and understand that our perfectly rational 
desire to build a missile defence might not be seen by Moscow or our European 
allies as rational,'' said Hunter, now with the private Rand Corp. think 
tank. 


The United States has asked Russia to agree to amend the 1972 ABM treaty so 
that Washington could build a national defence against limited missile attack 
from rogue states. 


Russia has so far refused and has warned that other arms agreements could 
suffer if the United States breaks out of the ABM treaty unilaterally. 


Before the break-up of the Soviet Union, Soviet strategic bombers used to fly 
regularly past Iceland and Newfoundland and parallel to the Atlantic coast of 
the United States to Cuba -- testing the readiness of U.S. air defences along 
the way -- before returning home. 


Such flights have not taken place on a regular basis in nearly 13 years, 
according to the combined U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defence 
Command (NORAD). 


This year, older Russian turbo-prop ``Bear'' bombers flew toward both the 
Alaskan and northeastern U.S. coasts, but remained in international air 
space. U.S. fighter jets challenged the bombers off Alaska and they turned 
back. The Clinton administration said the eastern flights were part of 
previously announced Russian military exercises. 


*******


#5
Ukraine's Kuchma Appeals to Youth to Beat Communist Challenger

Kiev, Nov. 13 (Bloomberg)</A
> -- Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma appealed to young voters who fear a 
return to communism to go to the polls tomorrow and back his economic reforms 
in a runoff election against Communist Party leader Petro Simonenko. 


Kuchma, seeking a second five-year term, said he will enable young couples to 
receive cheap loans for new housing and education. Thousands of young 
Ukrainians took to the streets Friday in the nation's biggest cities to 
support Kuchma. 


The 61-year-old president has warned of a communist threat since he and 
Simonenko finished first and second in the initial round of voting Oct. 31. 
In the past two weeks, the hryvnia has fallen about 8 percent on concern that 
Simonenko could win. 


``Kuchma's victory depends on whether his potential supporters, including 
youth, will be voting actively enough,'' said Oleksandr Pavliuk, head of the 
Kiev center of the East-West Institute. ``We give President Kuchma a 99 
percent chance of winning the runoff.'' 


Ukraine's Central Electoral Commission expects between 60 percent and 63 
percent of those eligible to vote will cast ballots Sunday. In the first 
round, turnout was 69 percent. Polling stations will be opened throughout the 
country from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. in Kiev on Sunday. 


Rallying Support 


After the first round, when 13 candidates participated, Simonenko and Kuchma 
began trying to persuade supporters of the other candidates to support them 
in the second round. In addition to Simonenko, candidates from the Socialist 
Party, Progressive Socialist Party and Peasant Party advocated similar 
policies. 


Simonenko said he expects as many as 80 percent of those candidates' 
supporters to vote for him in the second round. Still, Pavliuk at the 
East-West Institute said he expects Kuchma to win by at least 7 percentage 
points. 


For some voters, Kuchma's warnings about the communist threat posed by 
Simonenko are the most important factor. 


``I am not interested in politics at all, but this time I have to vote, 
because I am very much afraid of communism,'' said Marina Parfenova, 24, a 
secretary. ``All young people I know feel the same way, simply because 
Communists offer us only existence instead of real life.'' 


Kuchma also has tried to build support by naming Yevhen Marchuk, a former 
prime minister who finished third in the first round of voting, as director 
of his National Security and Defense Council. Kuchma says he'll accelerate 
economic and political reforms and bring down unemployment in the country of 
50 million. 


No Default 


Both candidates have said they will avoid defaulting on Ukraine's $3.2 
billion in debts due next year, though Simonenko has said he will stop state 
asset sales, and will investigate and may prosecute members of the current 
government for corruption and misuse of foreign loans. 


In the first round, Kuchma won 36.5 percent of the vote, while Simonenko had 
22.2 percent and Marchuk 8.1 percent. 


Simonenko, 47, also is trying to appeal to young voters. He promises free 
education and free medical care and says the party now backs free speech and 
private property. 


He says Ukraine should join a ``union of independent states of Russia and 
Belarus,'' and that Ukraine should continue to borrow from international 
lending institutions, though it should refuse to follow the policy advice of 
lenders such as the IMF. 


Since the first round, Simonenko has emphasized his promises to tackle 
corruption. 


`Chaos' 


``Someone should put an end to this chaos,'' said Serhiy Poliychuk, 37, an 
engineer working for aircraft making company. ``I want a better life for my 
children.'' 


Simonenko's promises of better social support also are appealing to many 
Ukrainians, who have seen the economy, and their standard of living, decline 
every year since independence in 1991. 


Kuchma, who pledges to move forward with free-market reforms, including sales 
of state assets, says that the economy is just beginning to show signs of 
growth. 


His government recently raised its projection of economic growth this year 
and now expects the economy to be unchanged in 1999 from 1998, after 
shrinking 1.7 percent last year. The economy will probably grow 2 percent 
next year from 1999, the government said. 


GDP rose by 0.3 percent in the third quarter from the same period last year, 
according to the government's preliminary data. 


``Ukraine's economy is on its way to growth today,'' Kuchma said in an 
interview with UT-1 state television. ``Revenue to the budget is increasing 
and investments will be undoubtedly coming to Ukraine as long as we are 
building a market economy.'' 


Back Wages 


Meanwhile, the government continues to fall behind in paying wages and 
pensions, and arrears now are estimated at more than 6 billion hryvnia ($1.2 
billion), according to the parliament. Ukraine's foreign debt is now at more 
than $12 billion, up from $350 million in 1994, when Kuchma was elected a 
president. 


The hryvnia, which the central bank has said it will keep at a rate of 
between 3.4 and 4.6 per dollar through the end of 1999, has plunged since the 
first round of voting, falling outside the bank's limit. 


``The hryvnia is living through serious stress,'' Viktor Yushchenko, governor 
of the National Bank of Ukraine, said in an interview on UT-1 television. 
``The hryvnia is not under monetary pressure, it's under destabilizing 
political pressure.'' 


The hryvnia fell to 5.07 hryvnia per dollar in interbank trading Friday, down 
from 4.97 hryvnia a day before and 4.53 hryvnia before the first round of 
elections. 


The hyrvnia's official exchange rate was 4.6264 per dollar Friday. 


Last month, the IMF postponed paying a $90 million installment of Ukraine's 
$2.6 billion, three-year Extended Fund Facility loan because the government 
failed to collect enough revenue and refused to raise state-controlled rents 
and utility charges. The IMF said it will continue talks with Ukrainian 
authorities after presidential elections. 


More Talks 


A World Bank team also is expected in Kiev in late November for more loan 
talks with the government. 


``If President Kuchma is re-elected, the pace of reforms in Ukraine will 
probably be unchanged from now, if not slower,'' said Patricia Bartholomew, 
head of research at Commerzbank Capital Markets Eastern Europe AS. ``Kuchma 
wants to implement political reform and this may take years to achieve.'' 


Kuchma, who has pledged to revise the Ukrainian constitution, also said he 
wants to hold a referendum to ask voters whether they favor a coalition 
government and if there should be an upper house of parliament. Currently, 
the president appoints the government. 


``First and the most important thing is that I will create an effective 
mechanism of state power,'' Kuchma said in an interview on Russian ORT state 
television Friday. ``Reforms are stalled because of disagreements between the 
government and the parliament.'' 


Kuchma said that his administration is developing an economic revival 
program, which is supposed to be implemented during the first 100 days after 
the election and is aimed at reforming bureaucracy and fighting corruption. 


*******


#6
The Guardian (UK)
13 November 1999
[for personal use only]
Russia set to destroy Grozny 
Russia warns Grozny's residents to evacuate city
Ian Traynor in Moscow 


Russia's war in the Caucasus escalated last night when the Kremlin ordered 
all civilians to abandon the Chechen capital Grozny, signalling that it was 
poised to raze the city. 


Moscow announced its biggest victory yet in the seven-week Chechen war - the 
capture of Gudermes, the rebel republic's second city - and said Gudermes 
would become the new Chechen capital. 


"The city of Grozny cannot be restored," said Nikolai Koshman, a Russian 
deputy prime minister who is Moscow's viceroy in Chechnya. "Grozny must be 
blocked from all sides and its civilians should leave." 


The evacuation of the city will force tens of thousands more refugees into 
the bitter winter cold, compounding the crisis already unfolding among more 
than 300,000 people who have fled or are trying to flee the Russian 
onslaught. 


While Russian infantry moved into Gudermes and advanced to within 10 miles of 
Grozny, political and military leaders in Russia engaged in some of the most 
hostile anti-western rhetoric heard since the end of the cold war and the 
Soviet Union's implosion. 


Ahead of a 54-country summit next week to be attended by President Boris 
Yeltsin, President Bill Clinton and most European leaders, the Kremlin 
accused Washington of plotting to keep the conflict simmering in the 
Caucasus, to cripple Russia and strip Moscow of control over the highly 
strategic region on Russia's southern flank between the Black and Caspian 
seas. 


"The West's policy is a challenge to Russia with the aim of weakening its 
international position and ousting it from strategically important regions of 
the world, above all the Caspian region, trans-Caucasus and Central Asia," 
said the defence minister, Igor Sergeyev. "It is in the US national interest 
to have a controlled armed conflict constantly smouldering in the north 
Caucasus." 


The tough language coincided with a battery of anti-western actions or 
statements that set the scene for a showdown at the Organisation for Security 
and Cooperation in Europe's Istanbul summit. 


After being barred from visiting Chechnya on a fact-finding mission, the OSCE 
was told by Moscow that its mediation offers were unwelcome. Joschka Fischer, 
the German foreign minister, said Russia was committing "a blunder". Paavo 
Lipponen, the prime minister of Finland, which currently holds the European 
Union presidency, broke ranks with the western consensus by stating that the 
Chechnya conflict could no longer be viewed as Russia's internal affair. 


The centre of Grozny was flattened by the Russians four years ago, but 
despite the exodus of the past two months it remains home to tens of 
thousands. The precise population at the moment is unknown. 


Russia's deputy chief of the general staff, General Valery Manilov, said 
there would be no ground assault on Grozny. "If everything goes according to 
plan, the liquidation of the main components of militant formations may be 
finished by the end of the year." 


Across the political spectrum in Moscow, there was a hardening of the 
nationalist conviction that the West was bent on isolating and weakening 
Russia. 


A military newspaper reported that Moscow may send nuclear strategic bombers 
to Cuba and Vietnam. A key Kremlin insider said anyone not supporting the 
Russian military in Chechnya was a traitor. The head of the military's 
diplomatic service said that there was no point in engaging in dialogue with 
Nato about European security issues, the very agenda of the Istanbul summit. 


The ultimatum to Grozny's inhabitants reflected the tactics of the hardline 
military officers who appear bent on indiscriminately bombarding the city 
into submission by the end of the year, but who are re luctant to commit 
ground forces to the battle for Grozny because of the heavy losses the 
Russians suffered during similar assaults in 1994-96. 


Mr Sergeyev's cold war blast came at the end of a high-level three-day 
security review attended by the hawkish prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and 
the heads of the general staff. Mr Putin is to chair another high-level 
meeting on the Chechnya campaign today. 


Mr Koshman's ultimatum to empty Grozny followed yesterday's conference. 
"Everything that has been rebuilt there has recently been destroyed or blown 
up," he said. 


******


#7
Russia Resists outside Pressure Over Chechnya.


MOSCOW, November 12 (Itar-Tass) - Russia resents any foreign pressure over 
the anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya, Colonel General Valery Manilov, 
first deputy head of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, told 
reporters. 


Replying to a Tass query Manilov stressed that at a OSCE summit in Istanbul 
Russia "will not allow the problems of war concerning the West to be 
reoriented to Russia, or better say, Chechnya". 


According to Manilov, the military operation can be halted and the situation 
normalized only when bodies of state power and democratic institutions are 
restored in the rebel republic. 


The general said the Chechen people should receive unbiased information. It 
is very important to resist "the ideology of terrorism and extremism". 


According to the general, the military recognize the legitimacy of Chechen 
president Aslan Maskhadov and "are ready to talk to any constructive forces 
in Chechnya". 


But the core of militant groups should be eliminated by military force, he 
reiterated. 


The general did not exclude that the operation in Chechnya might be completed 
before the end of this year provided the aforesaid objectives are reached. 


Manilov said another serious challenge is to block the channels through which 
Chechen rebels receive new weapons and mercenaries. According to him, such 
routes mainly at Chechnya's Georgian border are still functioning. 


Moscow is currently involved in the talks with Tbilisi to provide joint 
guarding of this frontier, however, no progress has yet been made. 


Manilov confirmed that Shamil Basayev as well as some other warlords are on 
foreign tours raising money to buy new weapons and recruit new mercenaries. 


******


#8
Russia court scraps registration of extremist bloc

MOSCOW, Nov 12 (Reuters) - A Moscow court ruled on Friday that a bloc headed 
by extreme right-winger Alexander Barkashov had registered incorrectly and 
could not take part in December parliamentary polls, RIA news agency said. 


It said Zamoskvoretsky district court found that the Spas (Saviour) bloc 
presented wrong information about its regional branches when registering as a 
national movement, a condition needed for any party to qualify for 
parliamentary polls. 


The decison by Spas, whose leader also heads the ultra-nationalist Russian 
National Unity movement, to run in December 19 poll has fuelled a major 
public scandal. 


Under Russian law, only political parties which have branches in more than 
half of the country's 89 regions can register as national organisations. 


RIA said the court found that of 47 branches declared by Spas, nine were 
non-existent. 


******
 

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