Chechnya's troubled election

A Moscow-authored plan to restore law and order in the war-torn region of Chechnya is losing credibility fast. Local presidential elections slated for Oct. 5 are unraveling amid continuing conflict with rebels and allegations that the Kremlin has rigged the race.

In recent weeks four front-running candidates have mysteriously withdrawn or been ejected from Chechnya's troubled election, leaving the Kremlin-appointed acting president, Akhmad Kadyrov, as the almost certain winner.

"I am sorry that the Kremlin's earlier opinion that Kadyrov should face an open election has been substituted by another view [of] 'Let him win without competitors'," says Svetlana Gannushkina, a member of President Vladimir Putin's human rights advisory commission, who just returned from Chechnya.

The republic's presidential elections were supposed to be the crowning moment in a peace process launched by the Kremlin almost a year ago and aimed at convincing the world that Chechnya's decade-old independence bid is over and that the republic is returning to peace and normalcy under Moscow's rule.

Last March, a suspiciously high 96 per cent of Chechen voters turned out and gave 80 per cent endorsement to a new constitution, which grants Chechnya limited autonomy but cements it forever as Russian territory. While many experts were skeptical of the voting figures at the time, few doubted that many of Chechnya's exhausted and war-ravaged people yearned for peace - even on Moscow's terms.

Moscow's key objective was to sideline Chechnya's secessionist rebel movement and its leader, Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected in Chechnya's only free presidential polls, in 1997. The Kremlin has consistently refused to negotiate with Mr. Maskhadov, whom it accuses of backing terrorism, or to let his representatives take part in the republic's tightly controlled political process.

Chechen rebels continue kill about a dozen Russian troops weekly in Chechnya, and are thought to be behind a wave of suicide bombings this summer, which have killed about 300 people in Chechnya, nearby republics and in Moscow. In the latest incident, a powerful truck bomb exploded on Monday outside the headquarters of the Russian FSB security service in Magas, the capital of Ingushetia, next door to Chechnya, killing three people and wounding at least 25.

Critics say the Kremlin's failure to rein in its chosen strongman in Chechnya and ensure some semblance of free choice to Chechens has placed even the limited gains of its carefully-sculpted peace process in jeopardy. Kadyrov, a former rebel leader appointed by Moscow three years ago to head Chechnya's provisional government, has stacked official bodies with his own cronies and, human rights monitors say, launched a wave of violent intimidation of his rivals.

"The [Chechen population] is more scared of Kadyrov than of the military or terrorists," says Ms. Gannushkina, whose advisory commission sometimes contradicts the Kremlin. Ms. Gannushkina cites examples of campaign workers for rival presidential candidates who were beaten and detained by Kadyrov's security men.

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