DATE=9/6/1999
TYPE=CORRESPONDENT REPORT
TITLE=RUSSIA / DAGESTAN (L)
NUMBER=2-253514
BYLINE=PETER HEINLEIN
DATELINE=MOSCOW
CONTENT=
VOICED AT:
INTRO: Russia's Security Council is to hold an urgent
session on the rapidly spreading conflict in the
northern Caucasus, as the death toll from Saturday's
bomb blast in Dagestan reaches 50. Moscow
Correspondent Peter Heinlein reports Russian jets are
again bombing villages controlled by Muslim rebels.
TEXT: President Boris Yeltsin ordered his powerful
security council to meet after reports that additional
Muslim insurgents are streaming into Dagestan from
neighboring Chechnya.
A Kremlin aide said the council's session (Tuesday)
will consider ways of restoring order in the
predominantly Muslim northern Caucasus region.
In the meantime, Russian jets and artillery are
keeping up a steady barrage of strikes against several
villages held for nearly one-year by Islamic
extremists in the Dagestani mountains.
A senior Chechen official said the air strikes had
also targeted villages inside that breakaway region.
Deputy Prime Minister Kazbek Makhashev said 25-people
were killed in the attacks, most of them civilians.
However, a Russian official said he had no information
on those attacks.
In Moscow, Dagestan's representative to the central
government, Gadgi Gamzaev, issued an appeal to
President Yeltsin to take tougher measures to end the
nearly month-long conflict.
/// GAMZAEV ACT - IN RUSSIAN - FADE UNDER
///
He says measures taken by federal authorities are
insufficient. Mr. Gamzaev urged President Yeltsin to
take personal control over the anti-insurgency
campaign, calling the Muslim uprising -- a plague that
can spread throughout Russia.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who was appointed
almost the same day the fighting broke out last month,
said in an interview broadcast Sunday that the anti-
insurgency campaign in Dagestan is going according to
plan. But that interview was recorded Saturday, hours
before a bomb destroyed a military housing complex in
Dagestan's second city, Buinaksk. The blast killed
scores of people, most of them family members of
soldiers involved in the conflict.
The leader of a pro-government faction in parliament
Monday disagreed sharply with Prime Minister Putin's
assessment. Alexander Shokhin of the "Our Home is
Russia" faction described the Dagestan conflict as a -
- full-scale undeclared war. He said it is important
the fighting does not lead to new hotbeds of
separatism. (SIGNED)
NEB/PFH/JWH/RAE
06-Sep-1999 11:24 AM LOC (06-Sep-1999 1524 UTC)
NNNN
Source: Voice of America
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