New Chechen president faces tough task

By JIM HEINTZ
The Associated Press

MISHA JAPARIDZE / AP Surrounded by bodyguards yesterday, newly elected Chechen president Maj. Gen. Alu Alkhanov, center in dark tie, leaves the central election commission in the capital, Grozny.

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Related stories Chechen roommates suspects in airline bombings

However ominous the directive sounded, it was portrayed as a move to reduce Chechens' fears rather than increase them. This is a land tormented by intense poverty and by lawlessness on both sides of a guerrilla war, and many people think Chechnya needs hard actions to right its problems.

Alkhanov framed his challenge delicately yesterday, the day after being elected with nearly 74 percent of a vote marred by violence and allegations of fraud.

His most-important task "is that the course of stabilization, the course of peaceful existence, the course of restoration continues," Alkhanov said at a heavily guarded news conference. "And it will continue only in the presence of an effective power structure."

Yet Alkhanov faces a tough challenge. As Moscow's obvious favorite among the seven candidates, he is seen as the point man for a Russian government widely despised by the region's predominantly Muslim population, which has chafed under Russian rule since the 1859 conquest by czarist armies.

Ordinary Chechens may have little sympathy for increasingly radical Islamic rebels who have been fighting Russian forces for nearly five years, but people also fear and resent Russian soldiers, Chechen police and other security officers who, often operating in masks, allegedly have abducted and killed hundreds of civilians.

"The population can't understand who they are dealing with — law-enforcement officers or bandits," Alkhanov said when explaining his shoot-on-sight order Thursday. "Law-enforcement officers have no reason to hide their faces if they are acting in accordance with the law."

Restoring a sense that Chechnya is under the rule of law is key to the Kremlin's strategy for bringing peace to a region a little smaller than Connecticut. Unable to defeat the guerrillas and unwilling to negotiate with them, Russian President Vladimir Putin is banking on undermining support for the separatists by establishing a semblance of civil society.

Those efforts made little progress, or even deteriorated, under Alkhanov's predecessor, Akhmad Kadyrov. His son, Ramzan, took command of a security force that allegedly abused civilians with impunity. While the Kremlin said Chechnya was stabilizing and was safe for refugees to return to, those who came back often found themselves gripped by fear at night and despair by day, as they waited months in squalid temporary housing for promised compensation.

Bloodshed continues unabated. Some 30 people were killed in a night of attacks on police stations and patrols in Grozny on Aug. 21, and suspicions are strong that Chechen fighters or their supporters bombed two Russian airliners that crashed nearly simultaneously last week.

Kadyrov and his son also undertook the controversial policy of having the police and security forces absorb rebels who laid down their arms. They argued that would exploit former rebels' knowledge and give them work in a region where three-fourths of the estimated 1 million people are unemployed.
 
Alkhanov supported the initiative, even though many in the Kremlin opposed it, including Said Peshkoyev, Putin's deputy envoy to the region, who complained to the Moscow News, "How can we possibly arm those who only yesterday were committing crimes?"

That question took on new resonance when Kadyrov was assassinated in May by a bomb that many people suspect was set off with the complicity of someone in the security forces.

It is unclear whether Alkhanov intends to continue the policy of giving ex-rebels security jobs, but he is eager to find other ways of boosting employment for his people, who live largely without electricity or telephone service.

He has proposed making Chechnya a "free economic zone" to attract private investment in its war-ruined cities and factories and to create "a dynamic banking system." How much freedom the Kremlin would allow for such creations is unclear, however.

Alkhanov appears to be inclined to follow orders from above. He is a career police official dating from the Soviet era and, unlike one-time rebel supporter Kadyrov, he has never allied himself with the separatists.