Quietly, tide of opinion turns on Chechen war

Every Thursday evening Lena Batenkova and a handful of other intrepid souls picket in Moscow's Pushkin Square, within sight of the Kremlin, to protest the war in Chechnya.

She's been arrested twice and often taunted for her alleged lack of patriotism, but Ms. Batenkova feels she is doing what she must to keep alive a spark of public debate over the war in Chechnya. "We are ready to picket as long as it takes, until the Chechen war is resolved peacefully," she says. "We need to talk to everyone about it."

It could appear to anyone following Russia's major media - highly influenced by the Kremlin - that Batenkova's group represents a tiny, quixotic minority. Yet independent pollster Yury Levada says that 60 percent of Russians agree with her group's central demand - that the Kremlin sit down and talk with the Chechen rebels - and that increasing numbers doubt the possibility of a military solution to the five-year-old war.

Although substantive discussion of Russia's most painful policy issue has been forced to the margins in recent years, many experts say it is not at all certain the majority prefers it that way.

"Where public debate is still possible, it goes on in a lively fashion," says Alexei Simonov, head of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, an independent media watchdog group. "The problem is that the subject of Chechnya has been driven out of most public spaces. The whole climate in this country is undergoing a deep recession."

More than 100,000 people, mostly civilians, have died since the first Chechen war began a decade ago. The second conflict has seen separatist insurgents turn to ruthless terrorism, such as September's bloody school siege in Beslan, while human rights groups charge that Russian forces and their local Chechen allies employ death squads and political prisons.

Russian mainstream media depict Chechnya as "returning to normal," and the ongoing military campaign as having no alternative. The deadly terrorist strikes here are portrayed as the work of "international terrorists" with no direct connection to the conflict in Chechnya - a view expressed by President Vladimir Putin.

"The subject of Chechnya is considered to be too sensitive for our president, and therefore the media largely refrain from any critical discussion of it," says Yury Goland, an expert with the independent Institute of International Economic and Political Studies. "It's largely a matter of self-censorship."

Mr. Goland argues that, while Kremlin control of the media is real, the overriding problem is that Russian society has ignored the war in Chechnya. "I think there is a public consensus that we cannot allow any negotiations about Chechnya's secession, for fear it would create a domino effect and spread to the rest of Russia. So people wearily agree that the use of force is the only way, and they don't want to hear anything further about it."

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