December 18, 2003	Thursday	Shawwal 23, 1424

MOSCOW: As more and more Russians die in suicide attacks blamed on Chechen rebels and the death toll mounts in the war-torn republic itself, the “Chechnya question” remains conspicuously absent from political discourse here.

Nine years after Moscow sent its first troops into the Caucasus republic to crush separatists, Chechnya has become a high-profile but taboo subject in Russia — nobody talks about it but everyone knows it’s there.

Nothing demonstrated this better than President Vladimir Putin’s reaction to the latest suicide blast, in which a woman bomber killed five people in the heart of Moscow last week.

As Western governments roundly condemned the attack, Putin made only a vague reference to it in a Kremlin speech, in which he denounced “terrorism” and said Russia was waging a daily fight against it — “including today”.

The muted reaction was all the more striking because the blast went off less than 200 meters from the Kremlin’s red walls — Putin may even have heard it.

Meanwhile, a demonstration to commemorate the start of the first Chechen war in 1994 attracted a mere 50 people to a square in Moscow’s center.

Most passers granted the demonstrators a momentary glance; many rolled their eyes; in the space of nearly an hour not one stopped to even challenge their signs like “Chechnya, forgive us.”

And mention of the conflict and its casualties raging in a corner of Russia was completely absent from the campaign preceding last weekend’s parliamentary election.

It would be as if the Basque conflict evaporated in Spain during a campaign or if nobody in Britain mentioned Northern Ireland before a poll.

The fact that Putin is closely associated with the Chechen war — he launched the second offensive as prime minister in 1999 and was elected president on the back of support for it in 2000 — makes the silence all the more odd.

The obvious question is why.

Part of the reason is that Russia’s state-controlled television pays scant attention to the war in the Caucasus republic.

While rights groups and news agencies send out nearly daily reports of civilian abductions and killings of pro-Moscow troops and police, television news broadcasts quote Russian military officials as saying proudly they had confiscated arms or killed “bandits.”

Another reason Russian politicians are keeping mum is that Putin has a famously short temper when it comes to criticism of his Chechnya policy and opponents of the powerful leader tend to end up in the most unfortunate of circumstances.

When critically questioned on Chechnya — usually by foreign reporters on trips abroad — the former KGB agent’s face hardens and his remarks shed any hint of a diplomatic sheen.

In his most famous outburst, Putin once told a French reporter that he could arrange his castration after the man asked him to comment on human rights violations by Russian forces in Chechnya.—AFP