July 9th, 2000    
This Date's Issues: 4391 • 4392  •

Johnson's Russia List
#4392  
9 July 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. AFP: PUTIN PROMISES STRONG STATE, LIBERAL ECONOMICS IN NATIONAL 
ADDRESS.
2. The Observer (UK): Amelia Gentleman, Yeltsin blamed for Russia's 
ills. Putin finds a scapegoat for Chechen violence, rampant corruption 
and reliance on the West.
3. BBC MONITORING: RUSSIAN POLITICIANS WARILY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT PUTIN'S 
ADDRESS. 
4. The Russia Journal: Andrei Piontkovsky, Russia’s misguided 
democracy.
5. BBC MONITORING: RUSSIAN LIBERAL BACKS PUTIN ON TAXES, GOVERNORS, 
STATE POWER. (Interview with Yavlinsky)
6. AFP: No question of cancelling Russia's debt: France.
7. Washington Post: Sharon LaFraniere and Daniel Williams,
Chechens Describe a House of Horrors.
8. Los Angeles Times: Maura Reynolds, Putin Lays Out Guidelines 
to Centralize Power.] 

******

#1
PUTIN PROMISES STRONG STATE, LIBERAL ECONOMICS IN NATIONAL ADDRESS
Agence France Presse
08-Jul-2000 

President 
Vladimir Putin, in a confident debut national address Saturday, stressed that 
only a strong centralized state could deliver a booming economy, social 
justice and individual freedoms. 

Putin pledged a new "social contract" with Russia's long-suffering citizens 
and vowed to overthrow "the dictatorship of the shadow economy" that had 
plagued the country for years. 

Russia could lose another 22 million citizens over the next 15 years and 
degenerate from superpower to Third World status, Putin warned. 

"We are facing the serious threat of turning into a decaying nation," said 
the 47-year-old Russian leader.. 

Restoring strong central power was key to rebuilding Russia as a great power 
said Putin, who stoutly defended his plans to grab back power from Russia's 
often fractious regions. 

"Only a strong, effective if people don't like the word strong, state, a 
democratic state, is capable of defending citizens' democratic and economic 
freedom," he said. 

He accused regional bosses, who are resisting plans to oust them from 
parliament, of favoritism and failing to follow fair business practices. 

"The president of Russia must have the right to establish order and be able 
to interfere should regional leaders break federal laws," Putin said in 
reference to his efforts to win the right to fire the heads of Russia's 89 
regions. 

Putin's 50-minute speech in the Kremlin's Marble Hall impressed even some of 
his fiercest critics, who often interrupted state-of-nation addresses by his 
predecessor Boris Yeltsin with jeers. 

"When Yeltsin spoke, half the hall would break into laughter," said Communist 
Party deputy Vasily Shandybin. "Now for the first time, I was actually 
listening." 

"It was more than an annual message," said Irina Khakamada, a leader of the 
liberal Union of Rightist Forces (SPS). 

"This doctrine foresees an economic breakthrough. Russia will either be as 
Putin described it, or will cease to exist." 

Russian Orthodox patriarch Alexis II gave the address his "benediction." 

"The morality and spirituality of which the president spoke are indissociable 
from the tasks of the Orthodox church," Alexis II added. 

Yet Putin was careful to tread only lightly on the most sensitive issue 
facing his rule: the raging nine-month war in Chechnya that helped propel him 
to the presidency in March but which has since dragged on far longer than 
Putin had promised. 

Putin pointedly made no mention of recent suicide bombings in Chechnya that 
killed dozens of Russian troops, a jarring tactic which the rebels warn will 
only spread. 

That omission led Ingush President Ruslan Auchev to remark that "no one in 
Russia knows what to do with Chechnya." 

Instead, Putin presented himself as a champion of liberal economics and 
promised to divest the state from close links to at-times shadowy business 
leaders who had a close relationship with Yeltsin. 

"Our economic policy is very clear: less regulation and more business 
competition. We should not be supporting a select group of businesses but 
private business on the whole." 

His comments were aimed directly at foreign investors who have already 
praised the Russian government's recently-adopted 10-year economic strategy 
but have expressed doubts whether any of its goals will be met. 

Touching on domestic and international criticism of his heavy-handed 
treatment of media freedoms, particularly concerning the Chechen war, Putin 
sought to convince the country that he was in full support of an open press. 

"Without a really free media, Russian democracy cannot survive and civil 
society cannot flourish," he said. 

However, he accused business barons who control Russian media companies of 
publishing stories aimed at hurting rivals and the government. 

"Press freedoms have developed into a prized piece for business interests and 
for clan warfare," said Putin, suggesting the government had to find a way to 
end slanted journalism. 

"Censorship and interference in mass media activity are prohibited by law," 
the president reminded both houses of parliament. 

"The authorities respect this principle strictly," he stressed, adding: "But 
censorship is not necessarly state censorship, and interference is not 
necessarily administrative." 

Liberal deputy Boris Nemtsov, once a rising star and temporarily considered 
an heir-apparent of Yeltsin, said: "On one hand the president says the media 
must be free, on the other hand he gets indignant because they are somebody's 
porperty." 

"But that's the way things are," Nemtsov said: "This question is not clear in 
the president's mind. It's worrying." 

*****

#2
The Observer (UK)
9 July 2000
[for personal use only]
Yeltsin blamed for Russia's ills 
Putin finds a scapegoat for Chechen violence, rampant corruption and reliance 
on the West 
Amelia Gentleman, Moscow 

The Russian state needs to be strengthened radically if it is to reverse the 
sharp decline of the past decade, President Vladimir Putin said yesterday, 
coupling his solution for Russia's ills with an undercurrent of savage 
criticism aimed at his patron - former President Boris Yeltsin. 

Making his first state of the nation address since his election in March, 
Putin warned that Russia was on the verge of becoming a Third World nation if 
its economic problems were not urgently addressed. He said the cure lay in 
reasserting the state's authority and implementing liberal economic reforms. 
He devoted the first half of the 50-minute speech to a harsh assessment of 
the key threats and difficulties facing Russia. At the root of all these 
problems was the weakness at the state's core which had developed under his 
predecessor. 

The conflict in Chechnya, the dire problems wracking Russia's economy, 
proliferating corruption, the crippling lack of co-operation between Moscow 
and the nation's many regions - all were the direct result of weak rule. 
Yeltsin, who was expected to make a rare public appearance to listen to the 
speech in the ornate Marble Hall of the Kremlin, chose not to attend. 

'We have to recognise that the state itself was largely responsible for the 
growing strength of the unofficial, shadow economy, the spread of corruption 
and the flow of great quantities of money abroad,' Putin said at the start of 
the speech, before promising that under his rule there would be no more empty 
promises and hollow declarations. 

'An inefficient state is the main reason for our long and deep crisis - I am 
absolutely convinced of this.' 

Yeltsin named Putin as his heir when he appointed him prime minister last 
August. He went on to boost his protégé's presidential chances with his 
premature retirement on New Year's Eve, at a time when Putin's popularity was 
soaring, crucially curtailing the time opposition candidates had to put up a 
fight. Until now Putin has stayed loyal to his benefactor; the extent to 
which he remains beholden to the powerful backroom figures who worked with 
Yeltsin in his final years remains unclear, but yesterday's address was a 
bold attempt by the new president to distance himself from his predecessor. 

In a text which confirmed Putin's fondness for using an iron fist, the 
president repeatedly stressed that the only way out of the current morass, 
was to reassert state authority and gather power back from the regions to the 
centre. 

Putin's authoritarian tendencies have caused some unease at home and more in 
the West. Clearly aware of these sensitivities, he accompanied his demands 
for a strong state with assertions of his commitment to democracy within 
Russia. 

'The battle between strong power and freedom is an old one, and at the moment 
this debate is giving rise almost daily to speculation on the themes of 
dictatorship and authoritarianism,' he said. 'But our position is clear. Only 
a strong and democratic state can defend the civil, political and economic 
freedoms of the population.' 

Putin also grappled with two other issues which have caused international 
consternation during his months in power: free speech and the war in 
Chechnya. Growing visibly angry and raising his voice as he focused on the 
continuing row over press freedoms, he asserted that freedom of speech 
remained an 'unshakeable value in Russian democracy'. However, he went on to 
undermine his own comments by declaring that political and business interests 
were manipulating the media and using it to attack the state. 'We must 
guarantee journalists' freedom that is real and not just for show,' he said. 

He defended the Russian army's brutal campaign in Chechnya, arguing that if 
firm measures had not been taken, the unrest in the region would have led to 
the further disintegration of Russia, and stressing that 'international 
terrorism' needed to be fought. 

In another apparent condemnation of Yeltsin - who once told regional leaders 
to 'take as much autonomy as they could swallow' - he described the situation 
he inherited in Chechnya as 'an extreme example of the government's failure 
to assert its authority over the regions'. 

Looking pinched and slightly nervous, Putin began the most important speech 
in his career so far by listing what he saw as the most acute problems faced 
by the nation. In the first place he highlighted the alarming consequences of 
Russia's demographic crisis. He said that with the population shrinking at a 
rate of 750,000 people a year, the size of the nation could decrease by up to 
22 million over the next 15 years - losing one seventh of the total 
population. 'If the current tendency prevails, the survival of the nation 
will be under threat,' he warned, adding that Russia could end up a 'senile 
state'. 

The country's standing in the world would be jeopardised as a result of the 
dwindling birthrate in conjunction with the still feeble economy - with 
Russia dropping further and further behind the West, he said. 

'The matter is not only a question of national pride. The question is far 
more acute and more dramatic: will we be able to survive as a nation, as a 
civilisation, if our well-being continues to depend on the goodwill of the 
world economy?' 

He went on to devote the bulk of his speech to laying out in detail how his 
government could remedy the economic crisis, noting six fundamental 
principles - guaranteeing property rights; stopping the preferential 
treatment of some businesses over others, and ending unnecessary state 
intervention in business; lowering the tax burden; simplifying the customs 
system; developing banks and other economic infrastructure; and reorganising 
the welfare system by reducing the number of benefits handed out. 

******

#3
BBC MONITORING
RUSSIAN POLITICIANS WARILY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT PUTIN'S ADDRESS
Text of report by Russian NTV International television on 8th July 

[Presenter Andrey Norkin] After Putin's address to the nation in the
Kremlin, the head of state held a meeting behind closed doors with leaders
of the government, parliament and the presidential administration. The
president's plenipotentiary envoys to the federal districts and to both
houses of parliament also attended the meeting. 

As I have already said, the meeting was closed for the press. But there was
no shortage of comments for the mass media on Putin's address by 1400 [1000
gmt]. Here are just some of the comments. 

[Kursk Region governor Aleksandr Rutskoy] The meaning and the contents of
the address correspond to reality. The most important thing is to implement
this address in real life, not just in words - then everything will be
normal. 

[Tycoon Boris Berezovskiy] The overall impression is of course positive.
But anyway, these are just words. It is important how this idea will be
carried out. I have already seen instances when all the words were right,
but the implementation was wrong. These are the only doubts I have. 

[MP Boris Nemtsov] If everything the president has said is to be carried
out, I can say that we'll be striding in seven-league boots. As far as
human rights and freedoms are concerned, frankly speaking, I did not quite
understand him. On the one hand, the president says that the mass media
should be free, but on the other hand, he is indignant that they are owned
privately. But the media always belong to someone. The main thing is to
prevent them from belonging to only one person. The main thing is to create
competition between the owners, the main thing is for the state not to
dominate on the press market. 

I had an impression that the president was not absolutely clear in this
matter, and this is quite an alarming signal. 

[Kemerovo Region governor Aman Tuleyev] This is one of the best addresses I
have ever heard: its soberness, its evaluation, its critique and its
realistic assessment of the situation. But on the other hand, the
president's address is not in tune with the government's actions. 

The government should already be acting in the light of the president's
address. For God's sake, they've been in office for six months already. 

For instance, do you remember the president saying that Russia is its
people, and the authorities are here to serve the people? The main task is
to increase people's well-being. But what is the government doing? Lately,
prices have been up, tariffs are 2.5 times up in Siberia, prices for
municipal and communal services are to go up. Oil, kerosene and petrol
prices will go up this autumn, and so will the prices of tobacco and
alcohol. The number of people living below the poverty level will increase
by 30 per cent. 

This shows how words do not coincide with actions. The president is saying
one thing, and the government at the same time is doing something
absolutely opposite. 

[Yabloko leader Grigoriy Yavlinskiy] If any part of the address is carried
out, it will be very good. But at present in Russia it is only real actions
that matter, and not words. Words no longer have any meaning at all.
Therefore, addresses can only be judged by what is happening in the
country, but not by what symbols are being voiced. 

[Sverdlovsk Regional governor Eduard Rossel] What can I say? I can only
repeat that I can sign five times under what the president has said: in the
economic, legal and social sections. But there have to be actions to
reinforce this address, measures to implement the address so that it won't
stall on the level of just a report. 

[Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov] On the whole, I had a good impression that
the president tried not to bypass or avoid any of the most acute problems -
Chechnya, the economy, demography, foreign policy, federalism and so forth.
It is clear that the president is really trying to find a way out of the
crisis together with society and the political elite. But, of course, there
are some pronouncements that make me feel doubts. For instance, when he
said that there is a wrong kind of freedom of speech and there is the right
kind, the real one. I do not know what is the real one. I only know that it
is either freedom or it is not. Just like salmon cannot have the second
degree of freshness [quote from Russian writer Bulgakov's novel `Master and
Margarita']. 

[Chuvash President Nikolay Fedorov] I did not really understand at all what
the president meant when he said that the state must be strong. If we
continue his line of thought and if I understood him correctly, when he
says "the state" he means only the president and the Kremlin, but he does
not see the parliament, the judicial power in the real meaning of the
words. Words have one meaning, deeds have another, and they are absolutely
opposite so far. How successful will he be in bringing them together - if
he really wants to cope with the president's mission successfully? I think
we must wish him every success. 

***** 

#4
The Russia Journal
July 8-14, 2000
SEASON OF DISCONTENT: Russia’s misguided democracy
By Andrei Piontkovski
Columnist Andrei Piontkovsky notes that “guided democracy” is not the path
for Russia.

Among the trendy terms currently bandied about by the Russian "political
elite," none are more fashionable than "controlled democracy" or its
variants – "manipulated democracy," "patronized democracy," and "guided
democracy." 

Russia’s statists pronounce this slogan with sincere rapture, not bothering
to hide that it is just a fig leaf covering the transformation to the
longed-for dictatorship of the Strong Leader, the iron hand guiding Russia
toward grandeur and prosperity. 

The liberals, or rather, former liberals, look with mingled hope and
anxiety upon this "manipulated democracy," this authoritarianism of an
Enlightened Ruler, as the only way to prevent a potential slide into
dictatorship.

Both are wrong, liberals and statists. "Manipulated democracy" is not a
vaccination against dictatorship, it is a surrender to the aggressive
forces of a totalitarian comeback. The idea’s liberal supporters hope to
join the ranks of the "manipulators" – the Enlightened Ruler’s wise
advisors. But their hopes will be rapidly dashed as they find themselves
among the manipulated, pushed aside from the throne by the Enlightened
Ruler’s more decisive colleagues.

The statists, however, won’t get to savor their victory for long. Their
model will not see a renaissance for Russia, but will drive it into a
definitive dead end. And the problem is not that Russia will have
contemptuously thrown overboard such universal values as democratic
freedoms and human rights. A large part of the population would reconcile
themselves to sacrificing these values in the name of more tangible aims
such as economic progress.

The problem is that it is precisely from a social and economic point of
view that this model is lacking. Its supporters like to emphasize what they
see as the positive experience with manipulated democracy in Southeast
Asian countries, in particular South Korea of the 1980s and ’90s. But for a
start, these countries used such methods to resolve the particular
historical task they faced – transition from a peasant to an industrial
society. Russia resolved that task in the 1920s and ’30s, using the
Stalinist model of controllable democracy.

Secondly, when, at the end of the ’90s, the Southeast Asian countries faced
the challenge of transition to a post-industrial society, the model of
controllable democracy and an economy based on corporations such as the
Korean chaebols with their privileged links to power proved itself bankrupt
and led to the financial crisis of 1998. South Korea at that point
abandoned the controllable democracy model as unfit to cope with the
challenges of the 21st century.

The modern economy, the e-economy, calls for an atmosphere of maximum
creative freedom, innovation, the ongoing emergence of new companies with
new technological ideas, and not the political and economic omnipotence of
state-oligarchic mammoths.

Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, professional provocateur Gleb Pavlovsky is still
busy teaching Enlightened Ruler Putin how Russia should develop.

"Several large business groupings will emerge, and with the state, will
develop economic strategy through a process of ongoing consultation," he
said. "These will be large conglomerates following the South Korean model,
which the state will support on foreign markets."

He would have done better telling his client that the last two South Korean
presidents, who controlled democracy in ongoing consultation with several
large business groupings, were both sentenced to lengthy terms in prison. 

(Andrei Piontkovsky is director of the Center of Strategic Research.)

*******

#5
BBC MONITORING
RUSSIAN LIBERAL BACKS PUTIN ON TAXES, GOVERNORS, STATE POWER
Source: `Segodnya', Moscow, in Russian 6 Jul 00 

Grigoriy Yavlinskiy is the only leader of a Duma faction received by
Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin who was honoured with a detailed conversation
lasting many hours. The points of coincidence in the programmes of the
unsuccessful candidate and the actions of the winner have raised a number
of questions in the mind of `Segodnya''s correspondent Sergey Mulin. 

[Mulin] Grigoriy Alekseyevich, as far as I understand it, Yabloko is
currently not in opposition. The authorities have already taken on board
all of your main ideas: The president is trying to restrict the governors'
absolute power and integrate them into the system of state power, and the
government is reducing taxes.... If you were president, would you do the
same or something different? 

[Yavlinskiy] The course of action with regard to taxes, the governors, and
the strengthening of state power as a whole is all right. Some essential
points, however, are not there. I would have done some things differently.
Speaking of taxes, I have, as you know, always been in favour of lower
taxes and I even proposed a lower tax rate, but I would have designed a
somewhat different mechanism - to make sure that lower tax rates are a
result of legalizing the shadow economy. With regard to the governors, I
believe that it is absolutely necessary to dismiss them from their posts if
they violate laws or the Russian constitution, but this should only be done
on the basis of a court decision. There are only very few events (a
rebellion, for example) on the basis of which the president should have the
right to dismiss a regional leader directly. 

The actions that are being undertaken can make sense only if the
independence of the judicial system and mass media is strengthened
simultaneously. Once the state power is strengthened in actual fact, even
tougher measures with regard to the regions can be considered provided that
such fundamental issues as economic decentralization are also being tackled
simultaneously. 

The state should ... protect human rights and simultaneously - I find this
to be an extremely important circumstance - strengthen discipline in the
state apparatus proper. Democracy in Russia is possible only in the event
there is dictatorship within the state apparatus. 

[Q] But where is Putin creating dictatorship at this point? 

[A] Everything in the state apparatus still remains the same. No changes
are taking place there either at the level of personnel or structurally. 

[Q] Don't you have a feeling that the president is in a very great hurry to
get somewhere, hence his poorly considered and incomplete draft laws and
the hasty attempt to bring the governors into line. Which boat is he afraid
to miss? 

[A] I would be inclined to explain this in terms of the peak of public
support the president currently enjoys, because he was only elected two or
three months ago. This is the reason why Putin is trying to resolve the
most complicated problems now - later everything will become increasingly
difficult. Consequently he has got down to the most difficult work. His
reasoning must be that it is necessary to create the instrument first and
then put some particular policy into effect with the help of that instrument. 

[Q] In October 1991 Yeltsin also received extraordinary powers from the
Congress of People's Deputies to carry out economic reforms, and you know
yourself what came of it. Do you know what kind of reforms Putin is going
to implement? 

[A] I cannot say at the moment what Putin is going to do substantively. My
opinion is that the president should be given a chance. He has been elected
and he should be given time to begin making good on his promises to the
voters. It is impossible to do this right away, and therefore in our
conditions he should be given six months or so and not 100 days as is
common practice in the West. For me this means mid-October or early
November - by then everything will be clear. Putin has promised a lot,
including things that may prove to be useful for the country. 

The second circumstance lies in the following: I think that words should no
longer play any role in Russian politics. There are politicians who are
outside of the executive power for whom words are deeds. It is their work.
But for those who are within the executive power everything is precisely
the other way around - deeds are their only raison d'etre. 

You can say anything about Chechnya, but the situation there is reaching
deadlock. You can speak as much as you like about freedom of expression in
Russia, but if in our country we are resorting to actions aimed at
intimidating journalists, then it is simply nonexistent. You can clamour as
much as you like about the need to strengthen power, but unless actions are
undertaken to compel the governors to comply with the Russian constitution,
everything will be pointless. 

Taking into account the president's age.... 

[Q] It seems to me that he is the same age as you, right? 

[A] He is even six months younger than I. I would prefer Russia to
gradually give up its Byzantine practices in politics. Under a president
who is not a senile Politburo member, it is time we ceased reading between
the lines as to who stands where and what it implies or who sits where or
who licks whose boots. Politics should largely be implemented in full
public view. 

[Q] The old nomenklatura, joined by the democratic intelligentsia, came to
power together with Yeltsin. What is the formula of the present-day,
Putin-led ruling class and whose interests does it serve? 

[A] For the time being everything is as it was as far as the authorities
are concerned. With regard to the political elite, it has suffered a whole
series of defeats and is therefore in disarray. Including on account of its
own, I would say, erroneous orientations in the course of the elections -
not so much the presidential as the parliamentary elections. 

******

#6
No question of cancelling Russia's debt: France

FUKUOKA, Japan, July 8 (AFP) - 
Russia's hopes for debt forgiveness were rebuffed by the world's richest 
countries Saturday, who instead demanded Moscow carry out promised reforms.

The Group of Seven, following a meeting of finance ministers here, said 
Russia had to vigorously undertake structural reforms and foster a sound 
environment for domestic and foreign investment.

"In these regards, we encouraged the Russian authorities to reach an 
agreement with the IMF on the implementation of a strong economic program 
focused on structural reform," the ministers said in a summary statement 
after the meeting.

French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius bluntly told reporters before the 
start of the meeting in this southern Japanese city that "cancelling the debt 
is not on our minds." 

"The issue before us is the implementation of reforms," Fabius added.

Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who is attending the meeting, 
outlined a vast reform package endorsed by President Vladimir Putin only days 
before the G7 gathering.

"It looks like a lot to do in a very short time," Fabius said of the plan, 
adding the key word was "feasibility."

Russia has also been in the doghouse over its allegedly lax approach to 
money-laundering, one of the major issues being discussed by the G7 finance 
ministers.

Italian Treasury Minister Vincenzo Visco said the Russians had promised to 
reinforce laws on financial stability and money laundering.

"It is a positive and useful thing, we will see if it is adopted," he told a 
press conference.

The G7 finance ministers are preparing the ground for the July 21-23 Group of 
Eight summit in Okinawa, southern Japan, gathering the leaders of Britain, 
Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Putin is expected to push for a cancellation -- or at least generous 
rescheduling -- of the 42-billion-dollar debt the Russian Federation 
inherited on the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But a senior French official told AFP that the legitimacy of the debt's 
inheritance was not open to debate.

The Russians "can repay without any difficulty because they don't have any 
balance-of-payment problem," he said.

US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers agreed.

"What we can take very substantial satisfaction from is what has happened to 
Russia's capacity to pay," he told a press conference, adding Russia had 
increased substantially its reserves and significantly improved its fiscal 
position.

He said while there were encouraging developments in Russia's economic 
programme, the most important factor was the implementation of the IMF reform 
program to ensure a system built on the rule of law and property rights.

Western states and the International Monetary Fund also want to see radical 
tax changes, an end to massive capital flight and deep reform of the 
financial sector devastated by the default on domestic debt, which triggered 
the August 1998 crisis.

The Russian finance minister said before his departure Thursday for Japan 
that he would present Moscow's "economic programme and our vision of the 
steps that need to be taken to ensure growth."

"I hope the western world will have greater confidence in Russia" after the 
G8 summit, Kudrin told reporters.

Russia had changed and would only borrow to repay existing debts, not to 
finance spending, he added.

******

#7
Washington Post
July 9, 2000
[for personal use only]
Chechens Describe a House of Horrors
By Sharon LaFraniere and Daniel Williams

URUS-MARTAN, Russia. For a former girls' orphanage, the Russian command 
post in this dusty Chechen town is a fearsome-looking place. Sandbags are 
piled high against the outside walls and stuffed into windows of the 
three-story brown brick building, and snipers lurk on the roof. 

What goes on inside is even more disturbing, according to the town's 
residents and other witnesses. Ask Zemilkhan Elmurzayev, a slim, 20-year-old 
Chechen man who said he spent a week imprisoned there in May on suspicion of 
being a guerrilla rebel.

In a basement holding cell, he said, a group of 10 drunken soldiers cornered 
him and demanded that he confess. When he refused, the Russians mocked him 
for being "proud." Then they beat him into unconsciousness, revived him by 
dousing him with douses of water, and raped him for about two hours.

"I pleaded that this was not necessary. But they assaulted me over and over," 
Elmurzayev said in an interview two weeks ago. "I thought to myself, 'I will 
die here.' "

According to other witnesses, some Chechens have died. For six months or 
more, the command post has doubled as a detention center for Chechens 
suspected of siding with the Muslim militants battling Moscow for Chechnya's 
independence. A half-dozen former prisoners--interviewed here, in a nearby 
village and in the neighboring region of Ingushetia--describe the center as a 
horror house of severe beatings, rapes and occasional killings.

It is also a lucrative moneymaker for the Russian soldiers stationed here in 
the heart of the rebellious region, about 12 miles southeast of the capital, 
Grozny. One of the few ways for imprisoned men and women to escape the 
beatings is for their families to buy their freedom.

On a sunny Monday afternoon two weeks ago, knots of mothers and wives 
gathered outside the huge iron gates, trying desperately to broker the 
release of their relatives with the Russian soldiers. Freed prisoners said 
the price varies from $100 to as much as $1,000. Sometimes the final price is 
far higher. A 68-year-old former tractor driver said Russian soldiers stole 
$76,000 worth of his family's possessions, including two cars, while he was 
held captive.

The mistreatment of detainees, described by human rights groups as well as in 
witnesses' interviews, is only part of the toll on civilians of Russia's 
10-month war in Chechnya. The war also has included at least three 
large-scale shootings of civilians, the worst of which occurred in Aldi on 
Feb. 5, plus an untold number of civilian deaths from months of artillery and 
aerial bombardment.

The U.S. and Western European governments were outraged over Russian human 
rights violations at the height of the conflict. But as attention has 
dwindled following Russia's capture of Grozny on Feb. 6, allegations of 
continued and systematic abuse and extortion at detention sites have gone all 
but ignored at official levels.

Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, asked to visit 
several detention centers in April, including Urus-Martan. But Russian 
officials, citing security and weather, took her to only one center in Grozny 
that held two female prisoners. Officials from the International Committee of 
the Red Cross and the Council of Europe's anti-torture committee have visited 
a number of centers, but they conveyed most of their findings only to the 
Russian government.

For an upcoming report, Human Rights Watch researchers interviewed almost 
three dozen people released from prisons and jails in and around Chechnya. 
Peter Bouckaert, a spokesman for the group, said the Russian government has 
"cleaned up" Chernikozovo, its largest and most notorious detention center 
for Chechens, but "the abuses have just moved to other centers."

Memorial, a Russian group with a strong human rights focus, has compiled a 
list of 300 missing prisoners, some of whom haven't been seen for six months. 
Oleg Orlov, chairman of Memorial's human rights arm, said "tortures, 
beatings, cruelty" there are "heightened by the Russians' sense of total 
impunity and the bitterness born of the war."

For their part, Russian officials say roundups and detention are necessary to 
quash an elusive enemy. Through ambushes and suicide attacks, rebels kill 
roughly 20 soldiers a week, almost as many as in the peak of the war. Last 
week's total was even higher: 61 servicemen dead, including two killed when a 
suicide driver crashed a truck laden with explosives into the Urus-Martan 
command post. The military is reacting to the attacks, as it frequently does, 
with roundups.

If Chechen civilians get caught up by mistake, Russian officials said, that 
is the price they pay in a war in which guerrillas blend into the civilian 
population. Gen. Vyacheslav Tikhomirov, commander-in-chief of Russian 
Interior Ministry troops, attacked critics of the military's brutality while 
he was attending a funeral for Russian soldiers. "Let them come over here and 
look into the eyes of the mothers and fathers," he said.

Many Chechens say vicious treatment of prisoners appears only to lay the 
groundwork for more conflict. "The soldiers make fighters themselves, with 
their own bare hands," said Hoyamed Zuhayev, a 43-year-old Chechen who said 
he was released from the Urus-Martan center with four broken ribs and six 
missing teeth after his family gave the soldiers $400 worth of guns.

Moscow says it is fully capable of investigating mistreatment of civilians. 
Yet despite the lengthy record compiled by human rights groups, Vladimir 
Kanavalov, the Russian human rights commissioner, said in an interview that 
he has yet to confirm a single instance of abuse or corruption at the 
detention centers.

He acknowledges that Chechens may be afraid to tell him the truth. "We ask 
about whether they got medicine, the temperature of the cells, the food, 
whether they were forced to confess to someone else's crime. So far we have 
not received any information about torture or beatings," he said. The 
military prosecutor's office says it is prosecuting just three cases 
involving military crimes against Chechen civilians. In the most celebrated 
case, a colonel accused of raping and strangling a young Chechen girl may 
soon be amnestied, according to Russian media reports.

Kanavalov said that detention centers are under better control now than at 
the height of the war six months ago and that a system of laws and courts is 
beginning to emerge from the ruins. He said 1,176 Chechens have been 
imprisoned since the start of the war, and that a group of 29 lawyers is now 
active in the Russian-occupied parts of the republic.

Those figures, however, are incomplete. The number of prisoners includes only 
those detained in Justice Ministry prisons. Many more are held in the 
Interior Ministry's 18 sites, which include abandoned train cars, a poultry 
farm, a former coffee shop and a stadium, as well as Urus-Martan's converted 
orphanage. Also, the 29 lawyers work in only one town, Gudermes.

In the case of Chernikozovo, Moscow seems to have implicitly acknowledged its 
human rights problem by replacing the leadership. Torture of prisoners there 
came to the public eye partly via the reports of Andrei Babitsky, a reporter 
for the U.S.-government funded Radio Liberty who was detained and beaten 
there.

But allegations of similar treatment continue to emerge from other detention 
centers that feed into Chernikozovo, particularly from the basement holding 
cells at Urus-Martan.

Urus-Martan, with about 33,000 residents, is typical of Chechen towns in the 
mostly pacified northern and central regions. Some streets are impassable, 
many roofs are missing and faucets yield no water. But candy and soda are for 
sale at kiosks, and the buses are full of passengers. Shooting is heard, but 
only sporadically. Most residents spend their days trying to sweep the war's 
rubble out of their yards and resurrect their damaged homes.

The former orphanage sits close to a muddy river, across from a run-down 
school with bullet-holed window panes. The dirt yard is strung with jagged 
tin cans, and fortified with giant logs and concrete barricades.

Two weeks ago, Zima Badayeva waited all day outside the black iron gates 
strung with spiked wire, hoping for news of her 24-year-old son, Jambula. In 
her small black purse, she carried his birth certificate and other documents, 
carefully wrapped in plastic. "They say after a week, maybe they will know 
something," she said, her face stained with tears. "But I am afraid after a 
week, there will be nothing left of him."

Zuhayev, the former prisoner who was released after his family gave guns to 
the Russian soldiers, said in an interview last week in the nearby village of 
Stari Atagi that a man in a cell near his was beaten to death in January. He 
died after three days, his legs broken, Zuhayev alleged.

Evidence of cruelty is limited to such anecdotal accounts of former 
prisoners, sometimes buttressed by their medical records. Including those 
interviewed by Memorial and Human Rights Watch, 15 Chechen men have alleged 
they were beaten or raped there, and several said they saw corpses being 
dragged away.

They all blame their treatment there on Interior Ministry soldiers, known as 
OMON, from the city of Penza, about 350 miles south of Moscow. Elmurzayev, 
the Chechen youth who said he was victimized by 10 soldiers, was brought in 
on May 6. He said the soldiers first prodded his anus with a rifle. He was 
handcuffed, thrown on a bed and repeatedly assaulted.

"I lost consciousness over and over, and they threw water on me. I sometimes 
lost control of my body," he said.

On May 13, he was released during an "amnesty," he said, but only after his 
mother paid $300 to his captors. He said he recovered from his injuries in a 
hospital in Nazran, a large town in Ingushetia west of Chechnya. A medic 
there confirmed that Elmurzayev had spent two weeks at the clinic being 
treated for trauma.

Jamal Movtayev, a gangly man of 45 with a shock of black hair, was detained 
in Urus-Martan for three days the same week. He said a Russian man falsely 
accused him of holding him hostage. Movtayev was held with about nine others 
in a 3-by-12-foot cell, with a single small wooden bench to sleep on.

On a broken chair in his dirt yard last week, he displayed the X-rays taken 
later of his broken foot, and the medical report on his two broken ribs. His 
wife told a female interpreter that his genitals were badly bruised, and he 
said he still feels pain from his kidneys. He spent six days in the 
Urus-Martan hospital.

"They forced us to crawl on our knees, like a dog," he said. "There were six 
or seven huge men there, and they beat us with gun stocks, feet and fists, 
mainly in the kidneys and on the chest. This happened every night, and their 
superiors closed their eyes to it. After the first night, I could no longer 
walk."

"They beat us because we are Chechens," he said. "If you are Chechen, you are 
a bandit to them. They see no difference."

Age was no defense for Suliman Tasuyev, a 68-year-old former tractor driver 
with short white hair, one drooping eyelid and a booming voice. He and his 
35-year-old son, Magomed-Haji, were rounded up with about four dozen other 
men from their homes in Stari Atagi and taken to Urus-Martan in late January. 
The soldiers lined the men up against a wall and demanded that they hand over 
their gold rings and pry out their gold teeth, he said. Then they beat them.

"They were breaking ribs," Tasuyev said. "They were breaking bones. I was 
shouting, 'I am a 70-year-old man! What are you doing, you bastard?' And then 
one of them climbed on my back and started jumping."

Anderbek Bakayev, a hospital surgeon in Stari Atagi who treated Tasuyev after 
his release, said several of his ribs appeared to be broken. Of the other 
civilians detained at Urus-Martan, he said, "almost all of them suffered 
injuries." Tasuyev would not say how he was freed, but his son said his own 
release cost the family about $1,000.

That wasn't all. The elder Tasuyev has sent the prosecutor's office a list of 
$76,000 worth of possessions he says soldiers took out through his family 
compound's 10-foot-tall, hand-carved wooden gates. It includes a 1997 
Mitsubishi sedan, a 1994 Isuzu, three video cameras, a mobile telephone, a 
television set, a chain saw and a mink coat.

Even those who aren't held at the Urus-Martan command post are subject to the 
vagaries of the soldiers stationed in the town. Eleza Temirsultanova, a 
19-year-old mentally disabled woman who has epilepsy, disappeared from her 
home on Jan. 24. Her mother, Abba Temirsultanova, followed the footprints of 
her black galoshes into a muddy field. There she found Eleza's blue-patterned 
socks.

Dressed in a blue housecoat with pink hearts, Eleza listened to her mother 
talk last week from a seat in the corner of the dining room. Her head was 
down, her heavy brows knitted into a frown. Her tongue protruded against her 
teeth. Prompted by her mother, she said all she could remember was that the 
soldiers beat her, threatened to kill her and imprisoned her.

A woman who requested anonymity told Human Rights Watch that Eleza was 
repeatedly raped at Khankala, a major Russian military camp outside Grozny. 
The woman, who was held at the base with Eleza, said soldiers pulled the 
young woman out of a tent three times at night. She said she heard Eleza 
screaming and saw her genitals covered in blood when she came back. Her 
clothes were so badly torn that the soldiers gave her military fatigues to 
wear, the woman said.

Eleza's mother finally located her on Feb. 11 at a hospital in Mozdok. "I was 
so glad to have found her," said her mother. Eleza showed no emotion at all, 
she said.

Such tales of rape by Russian soldiers are common. Murat Akhmetov, a dark 
muscular youth interviewed earlier this month in Nazran, said drunken 
soldiers raped him repeatedly after he arrived at the Piatigorsk prison 
earlier this year. "I still wake up screaming," he said. "I wanted to hit 
back, but to do that meant death."

Some civilians have ended up dead, such as Arbi Uvaisovich. A fat, friendly 
man of 32, Uvaisovich frequently bought gasoline and food from Russian 
servicemen in Stari Atagi. On Jan. 27, the soldiers showed up at his home to 
take his new Volvo. "That's our car," a family member protested. "It's your 
car, but we have the keys," the soldier responded.

Suddenly realizing Uvaisovich and three other relatives were missing, the 
family mounted a search. In vain. Two months ago, they discovered 
Uvaisovich's car for sale at an outdoor market in another town.

On June 15, shortly after the Russian army abandoned its camp site on the 
outskirts of their hamlet, a shepherd boy's dog found a hand sticking up in 
the grassy field.

Villagers uncovered the decomposed remains of the four men. They were buried 
atop one another, with a thin layer of dirt between them.

Issadi Uvaisovich said his brother Arbi's arms were broken, his chest 
crushed, legs shot up and chin blown away. His wife said his genitals were 
cut off.

His sister Maliko had one question.

"Will the people who killed him be found and measures be taken?" she asked.

Williams reported from Nazran and Achkoi-Martan, Russia.

******

#8
Los Angeles Times
July 9, 2000
[for personal use only]
Putin Lays Out Guidelines to Centralize Power 
By MAURA REYNOLDS, Times Staff Writer

MOSCOW--In a grim address to his countrymen, Russian President Vladimir 
V. Putin warned Saturday that they are dying off, sinking into poverty and 
spinning into political chaos--and that the only way to reverse the trend is 
to increase the power of the central government. 
Putin's first state of the nation address delivered a reasoned, if 
bleak, diagnosis of the country's ills and made the case for his political 
prescription: curbing the independence of regional governors, reducing taxes 
and government subsidies, and "strengthening the state." 
In effect, Putin argued, the only way to protect democracy and build a 
market economy in Russia is to strengthen the hand of the president. 
"The debate about the trade-off between force and freedom is very old, 
as old as the world itself," Putin said. "These days, it generates 
speculation about dictatorship and authoritarianism. 
"But our position is extremely clear," he continued. "Only a strong--use 
the word 'effective' if you don't like 'strong'--only an effective and a 
democratic state is capable of protecting civic, political and economic 
freedoms." 
The 50-minute speech was Putin's most lengthy explication to date of his 
plan to redistribute the balance of power among different branches of 
Russia's government. The plan has encountered surprisingly stiff resistance, 
especially from the country's 89 governors, who enjoy broad autonomy within 
their regions; some run their territories like potentates. 
"Power should rely on the law and a single vertical line of executive 
power," Putin said. "What we have now are islands, separate islands of power, 
but we have not put up bridges between them. . . . The center and the 
regions, regional authorities and local government, are all still in 
competition for power. Those who would take advantage of disorder and 
arbitrary rule are keeping an eye on this mutually destructive fight." 
Liliya F. Shevtsova, a political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center 
think tank, described Putin's plans as "the old Russian model of undivided 
authority and autocracy." 
"In other words," she said, "in order for the state to operate 
effectively, everyone needs to line up and carry out the orders coming from 
the top." 
Putin's plan has provoked a nasty dispute between the two houses of 
parliament. While the lower house, the Duma, has easily passed three bills to 
implement the plan, the governors--who sit in the upper house, the Federation 
Council--have become increasingly defiant. They already have voted down two 
of the three bills, including one that would throw them out of parliament, to 
be replaced by full-time senators elected by regional parliaments. 
The governors, one newspaper quipped, are "refusing to commit hara-kiri" 
at the request of the president. 
Putin was elected president in March in a near landslide, and his 
extraordinary popularity seemed to assure him an easy relationship with 
parliament. The fact that his political allies earlier had won a commanding 
percentage of seats in the Duma seemed to promise an end to the kind of 
tiresome showdowns that characterized relations between the chamber and 
former President Boris N. Yeltsin. 
In Yeltsin's time, the governors largely were loyal to the president, 
who soon after taking power promised them "as much sovereignty as you can 
swallow." Putin's plans to rein in the governors have reversed the pattern, 
drawing the Duma's loyalty along with the governors' animosity. 
In addition to changing the structure of the Federation Council, Putin 
grouped the country's 89 regions into seven "super-regions" and named a 
viceroy to oversee each. The measure echoes a system of "governors-general" 
employed by the czars. 
"Throughout Russian history, every energetic new monarch or ruler 
started by seriously restructuring control systems," said Dmitri Y. Furman, a 
political analyst at the Institute of Europe, a Moscow-based think tank. 
"Old, lazy and corrupt governors-general and top regional bureaucrats were 
replaced by a new system of command. But the new system eventually eroded and 
grew roots in the swamps of local corruption. And the next ruler had to start 
all over again." 
Putin spent much of his address describing the deep, debilitating 
problems that have slowed Russia's development and threaten its future. He 
even brought up a painful topic most politicians avoid: Russia's population 
implosion. Putin openly noted that conditions are so bad that the population 
is contracting at an alarming rate and, if current demographic trends 
continue, the country will lose 22 million of its 146 million people in the 
next 15 years. 
Moreover, although the economy has improved noticeably in recent months, 
Putin acknowledged that the growth has been based on the high prices Russia 
currently has been getting for its oil and other energy exports. He noted 
that economic improvements in some previous years also were based on outside 
factors, largely loans from the International Monetary Fund and other foreign 
lenders. 
"This is not just a matter of our national pride," Putin said. "The 
question is more acute and more dramatic: Will we be able to survive as a 
nation, as a civilization, if our well-being again and again depends on 
foreign credits and the goodwill of leaders of the world economy?" 
He outlined six economic priorities, which closely match those of 
Western investors: protect property rights, end government subsidies and 
privileges, reduce red tape, ease the tax burden and curb tariffs, rebuild 
the banking system, and end the bloated and inefficient social welfare system 
in which the vast majority of the population is eligible for some kind of 
government handout. 
"Aid will be offered primarily to those whose incomes are substantially 
below the subsistence level," Putin said. "Ministers' children can do without 
child allowances, and bankers' wives don't need unemployment benefits." 
Lawmakers generally applauded Putin's economic proposals but noted that, 
so far, they are only intentions. 
"In effect, the president has laid out a liberal economic manifesto for 
Russia," said Boris Y. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and leader of 
the pro-market Union of Right Forces movement. "If everything he says comes 
to pass, we will begin to move forward by leaps and bounds." 
But Nemtsov expressed reservations about the political ramifications of 
Putin's plans: "The economic part is great. But as far as freedom is 
concerned, frankly speaking, I don't understand what he means." 
Putin insisted that he supports freedom of speech and freedom of the 
press, saying that "without really free media, Russian democracy cannot 
survive and civil society cannot flourish." 
But he complained bitterly that too many TV stations and newspapers 
promote the political interests of their owners. 
One topic that did not figure prominently in his speech was the war in 
Chechnya. Putin mentioned it only in passing and as an example of the failure 
of Russian federalism. Public support for the war remains strong but has 
declined noticeably in recent months. 
Analyst Shevtsova said that, by focusing on whether the government is 
strong or weak, Putin fails to see that it can be both at once. 
"Today's Russia--whose state budget is smaller than that of 
Sweden's--still deems itself a world superpower because it has nuclear 
weapons," Shevtsova said. "The notion of state power still is defined in 
terms of physical power, nothing else. This is a 19th century mentality that 
Russia still has not been able to leave behind." 

******