It is the war Moscow pretends no longer exists. Hundreds of miles south of the wrecks of two airliners, blown out of the sky by suicide bombers on Tuesday night, human life is at its cheapest in the Russian republic of Chechnya.
Moscow's Soviet-style explanation that 90 passengers had died from coincidental technical fail-ures is a denial tactic they have honed in Chechnya for years. Officially, there is no war here, amid the verdant hills of Russia's southern borders where dozens of troops die each week in clashes with hardened militant separatists. Officially, life is getting better.
PHOTO: AP
Yet when Chechnya is asked today to vote for a replacement to President Akhmad Kadyrov, assassinated in May, the Kremlin will be hard put to claim that things are "returning to normal." Perhaps President Putin himself recognized the doublespeak when he remarked on a visit in May that the capital, Grozny, a city blasted by two Russian onslaughts, looked awful from a helicopter, and demanded that repairs be expedited.
The city yesterday seemed more under siege than in the throes of an election. Parents collected their children from intensive care wards, thinking they would be safer at home than in a hospital during the election. Troops and police blocked off roads. A market trader said a young man in the traditional separatist camouflage told her: "Get out of here by 2pm, or we won't be responsible for what happens to you."
Tomorrow, Chechnya will be asked to vote in Alu Alkhanov, the Chechen interior minister. When President Kadyrov was killed in a supposedly separatist bomb blast, Putin mourned, yet insisted it was no setback to his policy of handing control of the war-torn republic over to pro-Moscow Chechens. He forwarded Alkhanov as Kadyrov's replacement. He will be the second president of Chechnya in a year and a man the separatist movement had pledged to kill.
Few believe that Alkhanov, chosen for little other than his ties to Kadyrov's ruling clan, can prevent a slide into another chaotic war. The pro-Moscow Chechen security forces Kadyrov created are also bickering now that they no longer have the late president's thuggish yet respected personality to bind them together.
This private army, known as the Kadyrovtsi, is run by his son, Ramzan, and three senior commanders. Ramzan has reportedly fallen out with the most senior of these, Movladi Baisarov. He accused Baisarov of withholding some of the country's lucrative oil revenue from him.
Last Saturday night the separatist militants, a force Moscow discounts as demoralized, took over parts of Grozny and then disappeared into the night. Some accounts suggest up to 400 militants launched a coordinated attack, one police officer saying that 58 police were killed, together with more than a dozen civilians.
Across town, Ruslan, a police captain guarding polling station 412 with 10 men, said he came under attack at 10pm from 60 militants. Two of his men died before their attackers fled.
The renewed militant offensive served to highlight the growing animosity between the two forces charged by the Kremlin with protecting the republic: Chechen troops who had fought against the Russians in the first Chechen war and Russian troops. Two attacks occurred within 100 meters of the Russian air base, Khankala, yet the Russians did not intervene.
All the same, Moscow played the incident down, a military spokesman saying only that 50 rebels had been killed.
Yesterday, fears were rising that the Kremlin -- after a blast on the Moscow metro, a presidential assassination and the downing of two passenger airliners -- would make a third, and purportedly final, show of force over Chechnya.
Yet whether Putin responds by giving the extremists in the Russian army another chance to achieve a final victory over the Islamic extremists among the militants, Tuta Batayeva's eyes will probably still be red with despair.
Fleeing militants last week shot her son Isa, 43, dead outside their home. She said: "We don't know who is good or bad any more. They all look the same and nobody protects us. And whoever you vote for, they still ensure the killing goes on."
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