GROZNY, Oct 4: Russian troops in Chechnya imposed a security clampdown on Saturday to prevent rebel attacks as fear gripped the republic on the eve of a presidential election that the Kremlin’s handpicked candidate and current administrator, Akhmad Kadyrov, is set to win.
An estimated 540,000 registered voters in the republic will have a choice of six other candidates on Sunday, but three of them are supporters of the 52-year-old former Muslim religious leader.
All his serious rivals were either disqualified or persuaded to withdraw from the race, in which Mr Kadyrov is the undisputed front-runner despite deep unpopularity.
“The people from the administration told us we’d better turn up. And for all of us here, everything depends on the administration,” said Usman, 50, from Katyr-Yurt, a village just west of the capital Grozny.
The pro-independence Chechen guerillas, who have been fighting Russian troops since Oct 1999, “will also keep an eye on us, and if we vote, we will be branded as traitors”, he added.
The Russian authorities massively tightened security, deploying 15,000 soldiers to guard the 425 polling stations around-the-clock and using sniffer-dogs to check for bombs.
All traffic along the main streets of Grozny was banned from Saturday and the roads throughout the republic closed to trucks to try to prevent attacks which have been on the rise in recent months.
Police and military cordoned off all government buildings, with no vehicles allowed to park closer than 1.5 kilometres away. Troops searched all trains into Grozny. Markets and schools were also shut down.
As tension grew in the bombed-out city, a Chechen journalist working for a Russian television news agency was shot dead on Friday by four masked gun-toting men while driving in his car, police said.
The election is the centrepiece of the Kremlin’s peace efforts in the troubled region, where it launched “an anti-terror operation” four years ago, the second war between Russian troops and Chechen guerillas in a decade.
But critics say the election is nothing but a fig leaf, a way for the Kremlin to legitimize Kadyrov as the man in charge of the restive Caucasus republic and to further marginalize rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, whom Chechens elected president in 1997.
Throughout Grozny, giant photographs of Kadyrov are on display featuring the former Chechen rebel who switched sides after the 1994-96 war and was appointed to run Chechnya three years ago shaking hands with President Vladimir Putin.
The OIC and former Soviet republics are the only governments sending observers to the election. Kadyrov is the only candidate who has had airtime on local television.
“If I don’t vote, I will lose my job and they’ll put me on a black list and then at night they’ll come and get me at home and I’ll disappear. What choice do I have?” asked Grozny resident, 45-year-old Musa.
With Moscow’s forces accused by rights groups of rape, murder and torture, armed men rule the streets of Grozny at night and people often disappear without a trace.
Previously civilians blamed Russian troops for such arrests and kidnappings. Today, they just as often name Kadyrov’s 10,000-strong armed security force.
The Kremlin hopes that the election will be the final endmark to the “anti-terror operation” it began in Oct 1999 to “wipe out the terrorists in the shithouse,” in the famous words of then prime minister Putin, who launched the war.
The war has bled Russia of its soldiers — 5,000 by official estimates, 12,000 according to rights groups; killed thousands of civilians and made refugees of tens of thousands of Chechens fleeing the fighting.
But Mr Maskhadov vowed in an interview with French daily Le Monde published on Friday that “we will rid our country of the occupiers and put an end to relations between Russia and the Chechen state, no matter how difficult the task.”
Ramzan, 27, said he was resigned to Kadyrov’s election but it would change nothing in the war-ravaged republic.
“All this is just a charade which will bring no good, only more hate and conflict,” he said. —AFP