The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.5           February 5, 1996 
 
 
Chechens Humiliate Russian Army  

BY MAURICE WILLIAMS

More than 100 Chechen independence fighters escaped Russian president Boris Yeltsin's bungled and bloody assault on the tiny village of Pervomayskoye. "The Chechens fought like lions," one of Moscow's special forces officers told Newsweek. Some Chechens had slipped across a frozen river from Chechnya to attack the Russian troops surrounding their colleagues.

The latest episode in Moscow's brutal war against the Chechens began January 9 when Chechen guerrillas took hostages in a hospital after failing to capture a Russian helicopter base in Kizlyar. With a promise of safe passage, the rebels released most of the hostages and headed for Chechnya with the rest.

Russian forces stopped their convoy at Pervomayskoye, a Dagestani town of farmers, and encircled the village with thousands of troops, reinforced with tanks and artillery. Moscow unloaded every conceivable weapon on the town for three days between January 15 and 17.

According to the interior ministry, 26 Russian soldiers and 153 Chechen fighters were killed in the onslaught. Moscow pulverized the village, using the pretext that all the hostages were killed. "They have executed the hostages," claimed Aleksandr Mikhailov, the chief spokesperson for the military operation on the day the assault was launched. Russian officials conceded later that no hostages were killed by the Chechens in the deadly standoff, a fact confirmed by the hostages themselves.

"They force us into such measures, pushing us into a corner and leaving us no other way out," said Salman Raduyev, the rebel leader of the Chechen action in Kizlyar. Raduyev eluded Moscow's relentless pounding and reemerged January 22 vowing to continue the independence struggle. "They call us bandits but we are not bandits. We are Allah's warriors fighting for our independence," Raduyev said in a location near his hometown of Novogroznensky, Chechnya.

Pervomayskoye was the only place the Chechens could run when they were attacked. "As soon as [the Russians] decided to settle this problem by force, we decided to break out of the village," said Chechen military chief of staff, Aslan Maskhadov. Maskhadov announced January 21, that all the remaining hostages captured in the raid would be released by January 23, except for 17 policemen. "The police we will keep as prisoners of war," he said. "We will use them in exchange for our men captured in Pervomayskoye."

A group calling themselves "Chechen resistance fighters" who commandeered a Turkish ferry boat January 16, surrendered January 19. They said they had no intention of harming anyone and were trying to bring the plight of Chechnya and the other mountain republics in the Caucasus region to world attention.

Thousands of supporters demonstrated in Istanbul as the rebels walked ashore after releasing more than 200 hostages held aboard during the crisis. Several hundred drove to the place where the ferry docked. They danced traditional mountain dances and chanted "Free Chechnya! Free the Caucasus! Chechnya will be Russia's grave!"

Moscow criticized the Turkish government's handling of the affair as Yeltsin warned that he had "plenty of helicopters." Turkey's prime minister Tansu Ciller admonished the Russian government saying, "The basic solution to all the problems in the Caucasus should be reached through peaceful ways and by [respecting] human rights." Ultrarightist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky suggested that Moscow should punish Turkey by helping Kurdish fighters who have been victims of Ankara's war against their struggle for independence.

Yeltsin declared more war on the Chechens, pledging to "wipe out" strongholds of Chechen leader Dzokhar Dudayev. "Now we have to take aim at Dudayev's bases where there are no civilians and give them a real blow to stop terrorism on Russian soil," said the Russian president. "Mad dogs must be shot down," he bellowed, further exposing the Great Russian chauvinism hated by all oppressed peoples in the region.

Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov said on Russian television January 22 that "the operation in Chechnya will now be toughened." Moscow will once again try the same method that has failed for two years - crushing the Chechen resistance by sending more soldiers to the region.

The Chechnya crisis has deepened fissures within Russia's ruling caste, reflected in the recent resignations from the presidential council of Otto Latsis, Izvestia's political analyst; and Yegor Gaidar, a former acting prime minister in the Yeltsin administration. "I am convinced that gambling on Yeltsin after what happened would be suicide," Gaidar stated, urging Yeltsin not to run for president.

Economist Grigory Yavlinsky, one of the procapitalist opponents of Yeltsin, led a call for a no-confidence vote January 16 at the first session of the new Russian parliament, spearheading a resolution condemning the assault.

"It is time to face the fact that we are in a real civil war now in Russia," said Yavlinsky. This was not a hostage crisis. It is a hopeless war, and it was started by Boris Yeltsin."

Yeltsin, who was elected president of the Commonwealth of Independent States January 19, has set up a staff to run his national campaign. "Probably I will agree to run for the presidential elections," Yeltsin told a conference of international investors on January 22.

Fighting has resumed in Chechnya as Yeltsin's war widens. The New York Times reported battles flaring up in several villages near Grozny, the Chechen capital. "After this the whole northern Caucasus will explode," said the leader of the group that captured the Turkish ferry. "We want complete independence of the northern Caucasus, otherwise there will be war."

Many editors and writers for the big-business media have run to Yeltsin's political rescue. Chrystia Freelander of London's Financial Times, for example, slandered the Chechens struggle as a "Pandora's Box" that has "led to ugly acts of international terrorism." Freelander said the Chechens will "emulate Palestinians, Kurds, and Irish Republicans." She acknowledged, however, that the "deep- seated support for the rebels in Chechnya" makes it almost impossible for the Kremlin to crush their resistance without "annihilating the Chechens as a people."

 
 
 
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