In an official statement, the Russian army claims to have killed nearly a hundred partisans since December during "mopping up operations" in the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya. According to the Russian human rights group Memorial, during those military actions 37 civilians lost their lives in just one village, a place called Zozin-Yurt. And this week the Russian chief of staff, General Kvashnin, declared that the army has now smashed all Chechen guerrilla units, leaving only isolated groups of fighters. He added that there would be no further negotiations with the insurgents, a remark which apparently referred to contacts in Moscow last November between a representative of President Vladimir Putin and a spokesman for Chechnya's elected chief, President Aslan Maskhadov.

Little credence need be placed in the Russian general's self-satisfied claim of success. One can only hope that President Putin will not let himself be blinded by it and that his views on the possibility of negotiations do not match those of the Russian military leadership. He must surely be aware of how often Moscow has been left with egg on its face by false predictions of victory in the Chechen war. At the start of the first Chechnya campaign, then- Defense Minister Gratchev announced that Grozny would be taken within a week. But that carelessly launched war ended in a fiasco which, after a year and a half, compelled the Yeltsin regime to conclude a peace settlement with the Chechen separatists.

In the autumn of 1999, Putin launched a new campaign of conquest. Once Russian troops had entered the shattered capital, Grozny, Moscow announced that the war was practically over. Two years later, the fighting in Chechnya continues. Some 80,000 Russian troops are stationed on Chechen territory (which is less than half the size of Switzerland), and new deaths are reported daily on both sides. The total of fatalities is estimated as running into the tens of thousands, a great majority of them civilians. More than 300,000 inhabitants of Chechnya - about one third of its former total population - are now spending their third winter vegetating in refugee camps under miserable conditions.

Since his meteoric rise to the position of chief of state two years ago, Vladimir Putin has demonstrated an ability to learn in some areas. One wonders why he has not employed his usual energetic focus to promote a constructive solution to the war in Chechnya, which is such a burden to Russia. The fact is that Putin initially benefited enormously from the second Chechnya campaign. In the fall of 1999 the Russian public was angered and made profoundly insecure by a series of bomb attacks against apartment buildings in a number of cities, in which several hundred people lost their lives. At the time, Chechen extremists were thought to be behind those criminal acts, just as they had challenged Russia by hostile incursions into the neighboring republic of Dagestan. But to this day Russian criminal authorities have failed to offer convincing proof of Chechen involvement in those devastating bombings. And a very dubious incident in the city of Ryasan raised serious suspicions - which have never been allayed - that elements of the Russian secret service may have had a hand in those murderous crimes.

Be that as it may: When Putin, then the newly appointed prime minister, organized a new campaign to conquer the separatist republic of Chechnya, he immediately became Russia's most popular politician. A few months later, he faced no serious competition in the country's presidential election.

Since last September 11, the Russian leadership has found a much more willing audience abroad for its claims that the war in Chechnya is a "battle against terrorism." Pressure to find a political solution to the bloody Caucasus conflict, especially from Western governments, fell off sharply once Putin had smoothly and unhesitatingly joined the American-led anti-terrorism coalition.

But Moscow's assertion that its war in Chechnya is a legitimate battle against Islamic terrorists, one which is in the security interests of other countries as well, is only a half-truth at best. Fears about the devilish energy of religiously cloaked fanatics, as manifested in the mass murders in Manhattan which shook the world, are understandable. But a healthy dose of skepticism is also called for when the political leaders involved tend to present the solution to problems which have deteriorated into violence exclusively under the banner of the "uncompromising war against terrorism" and devote little energy to attempts at politically defusing the situation. Such skepticism seems appropriate both in the case of Chechnya and in the even more complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is certainly true that there are unscrupulous terrorists agitating among the Chechen separatists. Clearly in that category are the two troublemakers Jamil Basayev and Khattab, the latter apparently a Saudi Arabian who previously fought in Afghanistan as well. Chechnya's President Maskhadov, who was elected after the first Chechen war, tried in vain to bring those extremist forces under control. Because he failed in that attempt, and because the small Caucasian republic had increasingly succumbed to anarchy and banditry before the start of the second Russian campaign, the Chechens squandered their political and moral claim to an independent state, at least for the present generation. But that failure on the part of its politicians and clan leaders does not justify a Russian "anti-terrorism war" in which hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are displaced and tens of thousands are robbed, tortured and murdered by undisciplined, poorly led troops.

Western heads of government, who now cultivate such close and friendly relations with Vladimir Putin, should energetically push the Kremlin ruler to continue the direct contacts with Maskhadov and the approachable separatists around him which were begun in November. If he is truly interested in a political solution, Putin must offer those Chechens concrete prospects of a compromise solution. A working group from the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, which includes deputies from the Russian Duma, has been circumspectly pushing for the start of a more comprehensive Russian- Chechen dialogue.

In a talk with representatives of the Council of Europe, Putin gave assurances that he is fully aware of the painful history of the Russian-Chechen conflict, which goes back far into the czarist era. If that is indeed the case, the Kremlin chief has probably also read Tolstoy's tale "Hadji Murad," a work which the author based on his own wartime experiences as a czarist officer in the Caucasus. In it, a blossoming but unnecessarily uprooted branch of thistle reminds him of the campaign against the Chechens, which he regrets in retrospect as senseless. Putin still has a chance to use Tolstoy's experience for the benefit of his own decisions.

by Reinhard Meier
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