Alkhanov Wins Derided Chechen Poll

Forty-nine-year old Adam Muzayev, a former veterinary surgeon turned taxi driver, came out of a polling station located in Grozny’s School No. 15 in an angry mood. “In full view of all the election officials I put big crosses on my ballot paper – I voted against all the candidates,” he said.

Muzayev is a fairly typical Chechen citizen, fed up with endless elections in his republic and extremely cynical about this one, which was won, as expected by pro-Moscow Chechen interior minister Alu Alkhanov.

In 1997, when the pro-independence rebel regime was in power, Muzayev could not get a job because he had not fought the Russians. Since then he has not been able to find work, despite his good qualifications and the shift of power to a Moscow-backed administration.

“I voted because I didn’t want anyone else to use my ballot paper for me,” he said. “It’s obvious that the results of the election have been decided in advanced. Alkhanov will win. But I don’t want to be called an idiot.”

Shortly afterwards a busload of visiting journalists drew up and started interviewing the policemen guarding the polling station. At this point around 20 women and children arrived en masse at the school, which had seen just two voters in the previous half hour.

“Maybe they were brought by bus?” one of the journalists asked a policeman. “Yes, they hired a bus with their own money and came,” the policeman said. “They want to vote so much.”

Overhearing this exchange, Muzayev laughed and said, “These aren’t voters, they’re just film extras. They’re relatives of people from the electoral commission waiting for the election observers to arrive.”

The presidential election held in Chechnya on August 29 was the second within the space of a year. Akhmad Kadyrov, the pro-Moscow leader who won last October’s election, was assassinated on May 9 this year.

This time the victor Alu Alkhanov was declared to have received more than 73 per cent of the vote, with his closest rival, intelligence services colonel Movsar Khamidov, receiving just nine per cent. The turnout was said to be 85 per cent of registered voters - 505,000 people.

Abdul-Kerim Arsakhanov, the head of Chechnya’s central election commission, declared himself satisfied with the poll and said it had been free and fair.

Ruslan Yamadayev, who represents Chechnya in the upper house of Russia’s parliament, the Federation Council, told IWPR, “The elections are valid and – thank God – they passed without incident. Let us hope everything goes smoothly from now on.”

Russian parliamentarians and observers from the Islamic Conference also gave the poll a clean bill of health.

Others were less forgiving. Andres Gross, who is rapporteur on Chechnya for the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, declined to comment on the election because the CoE had not officially recognised it. But in a private conversation with human rights activists he was heard to use the word “farce” in reference to the ballot.

Foreign governments, including Britain and the United States, also refused to recognise the election.

Tatyana Lokshina, executive director of the Moscow Helsinki Federation human rights group which monitored the poll, said, “What we saw was in line with our expectations. It was very similar to the picture we saw in the presidential elections in October 2003 when Kadyrov won.

“Grozny is absolutely empty. There are no voters because it’s not interesting. The people who are voting are doing so because they have nothing better to do.”

Lokshina said that in a tour of polling stations, at each of which she and her colleagues spent 15 or 20 minutes, they saw only two or three voters at a time.

At 1pm there were just two voters at Polling Station No. 405, located at School No. 11 in Grozny. The polling station is surrounded by ruined apartment blocks, there were no signposts to it, and only one trampled grass path led to its door. Khanum Umarova, chairwoman of the local election commission, claimed that half of the registered voters had already cast their ballots – but that everyone had already been and gone.

One of the electoral officials in Grozny named Movsar revealed that at his polling station 540 voters out of a registered total of 1,120 had voted, and that this number also included Russian federal soldiers. “All the same, we gave a total figure of 980 people, which amounted to 87.5 per cent [of the electoral roll],” he said. Movsar said that his chairman had passed on only slightly inflated figures to the central commission.

“At the same time, when the observers got distracted – when they went off for lunch for example - the commission officials stuffed the ballot boxes. And at the end of the day there was mass stuffing.”

Movsar said almost all the real votes were actually for Alkhanov and that “a small percentage was redistributed among the other candidates”.

This confirmed anecdotal evidence from some of the people visiting polling stations – although even if Alkhanov got a majority share of the vote, the turnout figures appear to have been too low to give him a genuine victory.

“We don’t know anyone else,” said Saipudi Yushayev, a 62-year-old pensioner. “We saw Alkhanov a lot on television.”

Lokshina observed, “People I spoke to voted for Alkhanov because of Kadyrov, and because Alkhanov was his successor. They hoped he would continue Kadyrov’s policies and impose order. I didn’t hear anything else in Alkhanov’s favour.”

“People in Chechnya want peace and stabilisation,” she went on. “By the way, opinions of Kadyrov have got better since his death. In other words, they say there was some order or rules back then. With Kadyrov gone, the situation has become frightening.

“By voting for Alkhanov, they were voting for things to stay the same, or at least not to be worse than under Kadyrov.”

After his victory Alkhanov said that the strategy of the war against separatist rebels would not change, and clarified his position about the possibility of negotiating with pro-independence leader Aslan Maskhadov.

“I never said I think negotiations with Aslan Maskhadov are necessary,” said Alkhanov. “I said, and will continue to say, that Maskhadov has one chance: to apologise to his own people whom he plunged into war, and to be put on trial.”

Chechen political analyst Murad Nashkhoyev believes that Alkhanov will not serve out a long term as president.

“Using democratic slogans, Moscow is essentially imposing people on Chechen society who will strictly carry out the Kremlin’s will. As it was in Soviet times: they knew for sure who to vote for and how to vote,” he said.

“But our people are intelligent enough to understand what the Kremlin’s tactics are.”

Murad Magomadov is a correspondent with Chechenskoe Obshchestvo newspaper.