Russia and Chechnya: Vote for the devil

Date: 11/10/03

A blatantly rigged election heralds more strife in Chechnya - and more bad news for believers in Russian democracy

AKHMAD KADYROV (shown above) is now the elected president of Chechnya - just as Saddam Hussein was once the elected president of Iraq. Officially, Mr Kadyrov won 81% of the votes on October 5th, on a turnout of 88%. In fact, the election was so plainly fixed as to be farcical, were the outcome not so tragic for Chechens. It also augurs ill for elections to Russia's parliament, the Duma, in December, and to the Russian presidency in March.

Mr Kadyrov is a former mufti of Chechnya and one-time ally of separatist rebels with whom Russian forces have fought two wars since 1994. For the past three years he has been the Moscow-appointed administrator. In that time he has built up his own ragtag private army, made up of former rebels, ex-policemen and soldiers. “Two years ago things were clear - there were federal forces and rebels, and the federal forces were committing most of the worst human-rights abuses,” says Tanya Lokshina of the Moscow-Helsinki Group, a Russian human-rights organisation. “Now it's more confused; there are also Kadyrovites of all stripes, and a lot of the abuses you hear about are theirs.”

Kidnappings and murders are common. “Yes, we leave the house not knowing whether we'll come back in the evening, but you get used to that,” says a local television worker, who gives his name only as Magomed. Most abuses go unpunished (save by retribution from the victim's own clan) and often unexplained. The armed men at roadblocks or tearing around in cars firing in the air may be soldiers, police, Kadyrovites or rebel sympathisers - and their victims may be random.

In the run-up to the election, Mr Kadyrov's opponents were frequent targets. Among them were the head of a small village who had spoken out against vote-rigging; two workers for an opposition candidate, Malik Saidullayev; and the son of another, murdered on September 9th as he drove into Grozny, the capital. Armed men came to Naip Khayauri's house to tell him they had killed his son (and to rake his house with gunfire) in a car bearing no number-plates but plastered with a campaign poster for Mr Kadyrov. When Mr Khayauri checked on the case nearly a month later, he says a prosecutor told him there was none. He asked who had killed his son. “You know perfectly well who killed your son,” came the reply, “and you want me to tell you?”

The Kremlin was determined that Mr Kadyrov would win. Russians' war-weariness over the fighting in Chechnya helped to propel Vladimir Putin into the Russian presidency in 2000; he will not let the place threaten his re-election in March. At one point Mr Kadyrov had three plausible challengers, all living in Moscow but with strong support in Chechnya. At Mr Saidullayev's mansion in Alkhan-yurt his campaign manager, Mukhamed Arsanukayev, says his boss was persuaded to run by Sergei Yastrzhembsky, an aide to Mr Putin. But by September, another Kremlin official was pressing Mr Saidullayev to withdraw. He refused. A court then disqualified him, because some voters who signed his candidacy petition had not put “Chechen Republic” in their addresses. The other two main contenders - Khusein Jabrailov, another businessman, and Aslanbek Aslakhanov, the Duma deputy for Chechnya - promptly got the message and quit.

In Chechnya itself, government workers tell of being ordered to vote for Mr Kadyrov or lose their jobs. Polling-station officials known to have opposition sympathies were visited at home, with grimmer threats. People were told to support Mr Kadyrov if they wanted their pensions, or pay-outs from a fund set up to compensate war victims. Mr Kadyrov is said to have given cars to local officials. Television stations virtually ignored other candidates; the new election law requires equal coverage for all, but the courts refused to consider their complaints. Mr Arsanukayev even tested this system out by submitting complaints with identical wording to those filed, successfully, by Mr Kadyrov's staff.

All this, one might think, would be enough to scare people into backing Mr Kadyrov. Yet on election day, Grozny's streets were empty compared with the days before and after, even though both were holidays. At a polling station in the city's bombed-out centre, a member of Mr Kadyrov's campaign team admitted that “since the main participants departed, the elections have lost all interest and attraction for the voters. The turnout is minimal...most people would rather vote for the devil than Kadyrov.” He estimated that only 50 people had voted at that station by mid-morning, though the official register already showed 350. A guard at another station estimated that no more than 700 people had voted by day's end. The official tally: over 1,900, 200 of whom voted in the final hour (when the guard counted ten), with nearly 90% backing Mr Kadyrov.

The official results attained Soviet-style absurdity. Turnout in the deserted capital was 98%. It was the same in the nearby Zavodskoy district, a stronghold of Wahhabites, the Islamic radicals whom Mr Kadyrov has sworn to wipe out. Abdullah Bugayev, one of the remaining opposition candidates, got 6% overall, but barely more than 1% in the north-western Nadterechny district, one of his supposed strongholds. “One would hope,” declared an official from Russia's federal elections committee, “to see such levels of propriety, lawfulness and glasnost in many other regions.” He was not being ironic.

Rule of awe

Mr Kadyrov's enthronement allows the Kremlin to close a chapter of Chechen history. A referendum in March (also rigged, though perhaps unnecessarily) reiterated Chechnya's status as part of Russia, after it had declared independence in 1991. Mr Kadyrov replaces Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected in 1997 but is now just one of many rebel commanders. The local and federal authorities are in talks to grant Chechnya what Mr Putin has called a “high degree of autonomy”. This will allow him to claim that he has brought the Chechen conflict to an end - even though dozens of Russian soldiers continue to die each month - in his re-election campaign.

What then? Mr Kadyrov is despised not only by the populace, but by many in the Russian army, for his old links with the rebels, as well as by the rebels he later turned against. That makes him a weak leader, easy to blame when things go wrong. Shamil Beno, a Chechen foreign minister during the republic's brief period of independence, thinks that Mr Kadyrov will be out before his term ends.

Yet a weak leader in a lawless republic is likely to use any means he can to keep control. So Chechnya will carry on much as before: a corrupt, unstable mess of competing armed bands, fighting over oil, selling arms and terrorising the population.

A blatantly rigged election heralds more strife in Chechnya - and more bad news for believers in Russian democracy.