18 December 2004	Saturday	05 Ziqa'ad 1425

MOSCOW: A decade of fighting, hostage taking and bombing in Chechnya has ripped families, friends and a whole nation apart. Mothers, young men, Chechens and Russians are left with one question: why?

Russia's vast military might was sent to crush the tiny mountainous region's independence drive 10 years ago this month and victory is still as far off as ever. Then-President Boris Yeltsin, in a national address on Dec 11, 1994, said troops were moving in to "protect (Chechnya's) citizens from armed extremism".

Soldiers from the army that lost hundreds of men in the next few months as it sin, differently. "The war was a mistake and I smashed into the gritty resolve of Chechen civilians describe the war, and Yeltdon't know what we should do with Yeltsin.

We couldn't shoot him straight away, but maybe we should put him on trial," said Sergei Shumakov, a soldier who limps heavily from a wound sustained in Chechnya two years ago.

"There should have been political and economic methods used at the start, but they just decided to send in the tanks. The civilians had already got guns and it all fell apart."

The 26-year-old walks with a stick as he limps through the grounds of a military hospital in Moscow. He was shot not by the Chechens, but by one of his own officers at a drunken party at a base in Chechnya's south.

As the lightly-armed rebels defeated Russia's army and won a three-year ceasefire from 1996, the weakness of the post-Soviet army and government was exposed for all the world to see.

PARENTS: Parents of the estimated 18,000 soldiers killed in a war that has also claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians are also angry. "There has been so much loss, and for what? Why did Yeltsin start this war? And this new man, (President Vladimir) Putin, is just repeating all the mistakes," said Tatyana Dyakon, whose only son Yevgeny was captured and killed by the Chechens in January 1995.

"My new (adopted) son David is 14 years old. So in four years time, he will go into the army and what can he expect? The same," she said by telephone from the town of Elista.

"It is shameful to live in such country, people say it is better than the Soviet Union, but it's not. It's a thousand times worse. We had dreams then, we had hope, we had work."

Putin, prime minister at the time, sent troops into Chechnya in 1999 to crush the chaotic de-facto independence it had had from 1996. Outgunned and outnumbered, extremist rebels increasingly switched to suicide bombings and hostage-taking raids. Such attacks on civilian and military targets have killed more than 1,000 people since 1999.

A wave of attacks linked to Chechens in 1999 gave Putin massive popular support in his bid to rein in the region, but many relatives of the victims blame official incompetence and corruption for their losses.

They say the government should have prevented attacks such as the Beslan school attack in September when 330 hostages died, and the 2002 Moscow theatre siege. "I have no objections to the terrorists, my objection is with the government," said Tatyana Karpova, whose Moscow flat is covered with pictures of her son Alexander, one of 129 people killed in the theatre siege.

ATROCITIES: Such Chechen atrocities have dulled foreign criticism of human rights abuses from Russian forces, and driven Putin to refuse any suggestions of peace talks.

His government has organised a referendum and two presidential elections in a unilateral peace plan designed to give Chechnya a government like any other region of Russia.

But Chechens have little faith in the administration and its security services which they say are riddled with corruption. "I fear for our brothers in the mountains. It was the soldiers that made them rebels in the first place by kidnapping and killing innocent people," said Murad, a construction worker recently visiting Nazran, a town just outside Chechnya. -Reuters