Fighter Turned Peacemaker Claims Victory in Chechnya

Aslan Maskhadov, the military commander who helped bring peace to separatist Chechnya, proclaimed himself the new president of the southern republic Tuesday on the basis of leaked, partial election results.

Surrounded by armed guards and solemn advisors in fur hats, Maskhadov--the Chechen candidate whom Moscow preferred--swept into a postelection meeting with journalists and listened impassively as his spokesman announced his victory.

“Today we start the first press conference with Mr. Aslan Maskhadov in his capacity as president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,” Mayerbek Vachagayev said, using the name the separatists give to their republic, which Russia calls Chechnya.

Although his opponent gave no signs of conceding, Maskhadov claimed that figures from all but five of Chechnya’s 63 voting districts gave him about 65% of popular support--such a strong showing that there would be no need for a runoff.

This, of course, was not an official result, with votes continuing to be tallied--slowly--Tuesday.

But Russia breathed a sigh of relief at the news that Maskhadov, a former Soviet colonel whom Moscow sees as a moderate, appeared to be the victor.

After losing a two-year war with separatists in Chechnya, Russia had been worried that it would lose the peace too if Shamil Basayev, the deeply anti-Russian commander who is one of Chechnya’s most loved and respected warriors, got the job instead.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin is “fully satisfied” with the way the elections were run, spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky said Tuesday, quickly dropping the long list of quibbles about electoral procedures Moscow had raised during the campaign.

Yastrzhembsky said there were now serious grounds to hope the “productive negotiating process” with Chechnya will go on.

Equally quickly, however, Maskhadov made plain he is not the political pushover Moscow hopes to do business with, but the inheritor of separatists who declared Chechen independence in 1991, before the Soviet collapse.

Under a peace treaty signed in August, after bands of Chechen fighters chased the huge Russian army from Grozny, their capital, Russia and Chechnya now have five years in which to “define their relations.”

Russia interprets this as a cooling-off period in which to rebuild economic ties with Chechnya and route oil from former Soviet countries profitably back into Russia through pipelines crossing Chechnya. Many Russian politicians hope the issue of Chechen independence will quietly be forgotten.

But Chechens have no intention of returning to Russian control. As far as they are concerned, independence is a done deal and all that remains is to make Russia and the rest of the world see things their way.

Maskhadov’s past might have been in the Russian-dominated Soviet army, but he went on to become the separatist chief of staff. He made it clear Tuesday that his view of the future is purely Chechen.

“The first and second steps were taken in 1991: that Chechnya became an independent state and that sovereignty was declared,” he said. “Now there is just one task left--to get our independence recognized by everyone, including Russia--which we will achieve by political means.

“There are five years in which to consider this in a sober way,” he added. “But we want to define our relations with Russia as soon as possible. Everything now depends on Moscow. If Russian leaders at last understand that they have tried everything and that the only thing left is to sit down at the negotiating table and at last sort out who we are, then we are ready any time, even tomorrow or the next day.”

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, which has sent 72 observers to Chechnya to monitor voting, pronounced the elections for president and a new 63-member parliament free and fair, so far.

With Chechnya’s telephone network taken out by the war, vote-counting is a painstaking, time-consuming business. Walkie-talkie radios supplied by the OSCE have helped Grozny compile election results from remote hill districts.

But spokesmen said the electoral commission could probably offer only preliminary results today.

Maskhadov was the clear front-runner of the candidates for the presidency, all leading separatists.

But, apparently nervous at jumping the gun in an election that Chechen officials have been at tremendous pains to conduct as legally as possible in a land devastated by Russian shells and bombs, Chechnya’s Central Electoral Commission would not immediately confirm or deny the result Maskhadov’s supporters had announced.

The panel’s chairman, Mumadi Saidayev, said it would be unfair to give any breakdowns of support until all the votes were counted--but fluttered a handwritten list of candidates’ names as he spoke, topped by the name “Maskhadov” and the figure “62.”

Zelimkhan A. Yanderbiyev, Chechnya’s caretaker president, would not comment on results until definite figures are released by the electoral commission. But he implicitly acknowledged his own defeat, saying philosophically that the most important election result was that the separatist cause had won.

Basayev--demonized in Russia as the very spirit of Chechen defiance, which has kept the Muslim mountain people fighting for freedom throughout two centuries of Russian rule--was less complacent about Maskhadov’s hasty assumption of the presidency.

He did not appear at his headquarters for a promised evening news conference. His spokesman, Aslanbek Ismailov, said there could be no discussion of his boss taking any ministerial jobs in a Maskhadov government until after the real result of Basayev’s bid for the presidency is announced.

Ismailov said that if Maskhadov had won the presidency and formed a government that dropped its commitment to full independence from Russia, Basayev’s supporters would go into opposition.

But, he added, Basayev does not intend to play into the hands of Russian politicians who have predicted that the once-united Chechen war leaders will turn on each other in peacetime and begin an Afghan-style civil conflict. Whatever the final election result, he added, Basayev will not dispute it.