19.04.2000 15:00 ON THE SITUATION IN THE NORTH CAUCASUS
SERGEI V. YASTRZHEMBSKY - assistant to the Russian Acting President for coordinating the information and analytical efforts of the federal executive agencies involved in the counter-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus
YASTRZHEMBSKY: There came reports yesterday of 3,000 paratroopers ostensibly airlifted to the Shatoi district of Chechnya. The Defence Ministry has corrected the information. There has been no major landing party. But some units have indeed been airlifted to the southern part of the republic.
Several detachments of the 42nd motorised division have indeed been airlifted southward. This is the division, which will be stationed in Chechnya on a permanent basis. A regular 'moping up' operation began today at 12:50 in the South of the Vedeno district in the hard-of-access mountainous parts. Adjacent to it, as you know, is the Itum-Kale district where the intelligence says there are fighters, too. It is too early to speak of the operation's results. The artillery shelled groups of bandits before the start of the 'moping up' in the vicinity of Itum-Kale, Zany, Grushevoye, Shalazhi, Perkhotoi and Tsa-Vedeno. The frontline aviation made flights to deliver air strikes at concentrations of bandits-close to 30 combat missions in all.
Information from the Interior Ministry. About 8,000 individuals and 4,000 plus vehicles were checked in the past 24 hours. As many as 180 administrative violations were identified, and 39 individuals were detained for various offences, including 12 on suspicion of participating in bandit formations. On April 17, the patrols and soldiers of the commandant's company of Grozny's Zavodskoi district found a large cache of arms in the territory of Heat Producing Plant № 2, in the bomb shelter: 6,000 various projectiles and communication means.
Let me share some curious information with you. The source is intercepted telephone communications between ringleaders of bandit formations. Some interesting conclusions can be made on the basis of their contents.
The first telephone communication, in Russian, between Basayev and Khattab. They exchange information about their whereabouts, without naming coordinates, of course. Khattab laments that the federal forces (I drop all four-letter epithets) are now travelling by helicopters only.
Basayev: The helicopters must be downed by 2-3 machine-gunners placed at different routes. What is needed is Strela air defence rockets. Basayev again: We'll see how land lies. I want Omar to take a look at the leg, I have another trouble with the leg. Then he addresses Khattab: Do you know they have found the ammunition and arms cache in the cemetery? Khattab: Yeah. I did not know. There are caches like that everywhere. We'll see. Do you have artillery? Basayev: No. Why? I have nothing. Maskhadov gives nothing, gives no money. He wanted to, but then did not give any.
Basayev again: There was a landing party, I wanted to hit them from a mine-launcher. I could have used a Fagot to shell the place. I need a Fagot mine-launcher. I have two projectiles to it, but no launcher. Khattab suggests where a Fagot can be obtained: I will put up the money, it will be delivered one of these days. But it turned out bad, Basayev says, that we have bought projectiles, but Omar took them all. He gave more money and took all the goods. He paid more for our projectiles, and we quarrelled with the people who sold our projectiles to him.
A very curious interception. It looks that groups of bandits in the mountainous part of Chechnya are short of ammunition and arms. Obviously, they are short of many types of weapons. They say so openly. For the first time ever we are witnessing a situation where warlords would quarrel about ammunition. Ammunition is becoming an apple of discord between warlords. In this particular case, between Maskhadov and Basayev.
The search parties have done a good job of searching for caches of ammunition. We are reporting finds effectively every day that cache in the cemetery included. A conspicuous fact: it demonstrates that the so-called fighters for the faith use Moslem graves and cemeteries to hide arms in.
Another telephone communication intercepted. This time, it is between Udugov and Basayev. The topic is the visit by the German intelligence chief escorted by officers of the Russian secret services to Gudermes and the discussion thereof in Germany's Bundestag.
I would draw the attention of foreign media to the following excerpt. Udugov: It will be easier to talk of hostages now. From now on, we will demand exhaustive proof that missing foreign citizens are not secret agents.
This excerpt is worthy of note. It means that those foreign citizens, which have been snatched by bandits and viciously murdered or are still in bandits' hands, e.g. the French photo correspondent Fleuteaux, can now be presented for agents of secret services infiltrated into Chechnya.
Udugov: We will try to fan this scandal... here's something interesting... I have informed Maskhadov. With his permission I will issue a note of protest.
Let me now cite from Maskhadov's interview to Die Deutsche Welle:
Maskhadov: I say again that Mr. Udugov, the Kavkaz-Centre, these are all alien persons and structures in opposition to the president and the government. Udugov has been given no powers by the president or the government and has no right to make statements, because today he is a nobody. Right before the war, he has been expelled from the Council of National Security. He is a private person.
This is an excerpt from Maskhadov's interview in which he talks of Udugov. And now Udugov, once again: I have informed Maskhadov and with his permission I will issue a note of protest.
You can make conclusions for yourself. In real fact, there is close interaction between Maskhadov and Udugov, they coordinate their efforts. And the deliberate information leaks by Maskhadov is nothing but a show. A show, which, unfortunately, is easy to sell to foreign media. Udugov and Maskhadov play analogous roles, and talk about it cynically, but not in interviews to foreign media, of course.
Udugov then goes on to characterise Benita Ferrero-Waldner in very unflattering expressions which I will not cite.
Let's get back to the situation in Chechnya. There are 124 inmates in the Chernokozovo detention ward now. The units of the Justice Ministry have detained four men suspected of participation in bandit groups.
Information from the Emergencies Ministry: It has become a stable trend that more Chechen residents are returning from the refugee camps in Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Daghestan and the Stavropol Territory to places of their permanent residence. As of today, 160,509 people have returned home. We are monitoring the situation in Grozny now that the city has been opened and more civilians are returning there. Nearly 43,000 people received hot free meals there yesterday. The work to find and bury dead bodies is going on. Five 6-man teams are working in Grozny. A total of 903 dead bodies have been buried.
The bulk of work to clean Komsomolskoye has been completed. Over 800 bodies of fighters were found and buried in the settlement, but there are another 370 dead bodies lying on the minefield outside the settlement. The mine pickers are de-mining it now.
Information from the office of the Russian government: It has been decided to build a Gilyany - Nozhai-Yurt - Vedeno gas mainline, and 170 tractors with mounted equipment have been delivered to Chechnya. As of today, 73,500 hectares of farmland have been ploughed in the liberated regions of the republic, which amounts to over 60% of the overall farmland. Such work is not underway in three regions - Itum-Kale, Vedeno and Shatoi, owing to a complicated operational situation there.
Yesterday I was asked about the format of the commission that has started working in Grozny today. It is a special government commission, set up on the decision of the Russian government. It shall evaluate the amount of requisite restoration work in Grozny. It is headed by Albert Marshev, first deputy chairman of the State Construction Committee, and includes 17 representatives of the Emergencies and Education ministries, the Special Construction Committee, the ministries of railways and communications, the Press Ministry and other organisations. The group's task is to determine the volume of work, requisite outlays and the sequence of restoring the communal services of the city. I mean electricity, gas and water supply. These will be evaluation conclusions, and these preliminary estimates will be taken into consideration during the drafting of a federal program of the restoration of Chechnya. The federal program is to be discussed at the government session on April 27.
Here is another, comical, information. It shows how difficult life has become for our opponents, who represent the bandit groups in the information space. Take the web, where a new site, The Nakhchi information centre, has appeared. To our knowledge, information for this site is provided from Georgia. We noticed the very first entries on this site and determined that there are many Soviet football fans among its authors. When compiling their list of Russian men and officers who had perished in Chechnya, they used the simplest way possible, using the names of famous Soviet and Russian football players and politicians. I will give you these names now, and those who remember the glorious past of the Soviet football will recognise them. Dzodzuashvili - remember that brilliant fullback from the Tbilisi Dynamo? Oganesyan, Lobanovsky, Lovchev, Netto, Kapiani. Also Kolotov, a halfback from the Kiev Dynamo, Gershkovich, Khidiatullin, and Dasayev. Here you are. Add to this the names of well-known and still living Russian politicians - may they live long - Chernogorov, Titov and Chub. Luzhkov and Rutskoi. The singer Gazmanov. Stroyev. And once again Rutskoi.
I just want to warn you that there is a new site working for the bandits, and its authors are clearly sports fans.
TV CENTRE: My first question: What are the reasons for Gantamirov's resignation and his latest statements to the effect that the operation would last for at least another four or five months? Why did he resign? And the second question: Look at the map and you will see that the fighters hold a small territory of some 66 by 25 kilometres. It seems that not a single missile strike has been made at the sites where Basayev and Khattab are presumably located. It seems that the task of liquidating them has not been set. Compare this situation to the Serb campaign, when Milosevic slept in a different place every night, or Hussein, who escaped from the American missiles into Jordan. It seems that the task of liquidating the bandit leaders has not been set.
YASTRZHEMBSKY: You will be disappointed, but the task has been set; it is one of the main tasks of the counter-terrorist operation. In the past month, special groups have been working well on this task. They add to the list of field commanders and persons responsible for kidnapping people virtually every week. We can provide this list, because so far we have been giving you only individual names. We should sum up the intermediate result now, and show how far the groups whose task is to find, neutralise or capture field commanders have progressed.
You were right to say that prominent persons in international conflicts escaped possible strikes. Both Khattab and Basayev are using this technique now, too, moving around not only the mountain part of Chechnya, but also in the foothills. According to our information, they not only move about every day. In some cases, they stop a conference an hour and a half, or two hours, after it has begun to move to another site. I did not specifically ask if missile strikes were delivered at them or not. Put this question to Manilov tomorrow. Such strikes are delivered, but they should be specially monitored. This is the kind of work that is not advertised.
It is a specific feature of that region that it is not flat. It is a difficult-of-access mountain region with numerous caves, and the relief is not favourable to us. Now that the trees are getting new leaves, it will become more difficult to detect and neutralise these characters.
Your first question concerned Gantamirov. I have checked some phrases from his statement and cannot reaffirm his complaint that the Chechen militia was left in the lurch. This is an emotional bias. The Chechen militia received requisite rations, including uniforms and all types of weaponry, and were widely used in special operations. Some of them were awarded decorations, and the ill and wounded were hospitalised for medical treatment. They could not complain about the lack of attention to them.
As for political reasons, I cannot comment on this, as nobody in Moscow can explain the situation. We are monitoring this problem, and the public wants answers. I hope that we will provide a comprehensive report on this issue by the end of the week.
TV CENTRE: It is said on the Turkish Chechen sites, of which there are 16, that the Chechens fear that Russia might use defoliants in the mountains, just as the Americans did in Vietnam. Can this be done to defoliate mountain forests?
YASTRZHEMBSKY: Categorically not. Because the Americans did not defoliate their home territory. They defoliated Vietnam and fought on foreign territory. We are fighting on home territory. And the use of defoliants is completely inadmissible in this situation, because the ecological consequences will be most serious, and this will create major problems for the population and servicemen. We are not pondering such measures.
FRANCE PRESSE: A few words about the movement of the airborne troops. It was reported today that 1,500 servicemen had been dispatched to the Shatoi district. Can you reaffirm this figure and that they had been dispatched to the Shatoi district? If so, what is the purpose of this operation?
YASTRZHEMBSKY: Fieldwork is not on in the Shatoi, Vedensky and Itum-kalinsky districts. That is why this information is correct from the point of view of geography. I do not think it is necessary to specify the number of servicemen dispatched there. These servicemen are engaged in special operations to discover bandit groups precisely in these regions. Operations began today. So, yesterday's report on paratroopers fits into one and the same information framework. Yes, additional units have been sent precisely to these regions, but not 3,000 paratroopers. Special units have been sent to reinforce the federal forces operating in those regions so as this special operation in the mountains could produce the necessary result.
INTERNATIONAL UNION OF SLAV JOURNALISTS: Negotiations with Chechen leaders will begin, sooner or later. Are there plans to hold ecology days, subbotniks and months (unpaid work performed collectively) in the Caucasus, in particular Chechnya? Have such measures been taken over the past ten years? Have ecological passports been kept in one form or another, despite the complicated military situation?
YASTRZHEMBSKY: I do not understand how all this is connected with your postulate on the inevitability of starting negotiations. I am not as sure of the latter as you are. As for the ecological situation, it is very grave, indeed, but there is no ecological catastrophe in the territory of the Chechen Republic. There are some problems, which need to be settled promptly. They are connected, first and foremost, with oil reserves, which lie very close to the surface. Some unauthorised small oil factories continue to turn crude oil into oil products. The military exercise ecological monitoring. They watch the radiation situation, among other things. Ecological passports are kept for the more acute issues and facilities requiring heightened attention. I suppose that if it is necessary to issue quickly the general ecological passport of the Chechen Republic, it is much easier to do it now. Both civilian and military specialists have made considerable progress in this work.
INTERFAX: Do you have any comments on Kasymova's appeal to the European Human Rights Court?
YASTRZHEMBSKY: There is a definite procedure for the appeal to the European Court by citizens of European countries. It is first necessary to go through all the court instances in one's own country. Only after having been rejected or having received an unsatisfactory answer in one's own country, a person can appeal to the European Court. Kasymova - or, is her name Kasyeva? - has not appealed to Russian courts. This makes in principle impossible the consideration of her appeal in the European Court. This would be a violation of the established procedure. This is the first thing I wanted to say. Second, a lot of questions arise how a medical nurse can pay the services of such a famous British lawyer as Hariett Pearce. And third, it is a very funny coincidence - and there are no such coincidences in politics - that her appeal got to the European Court at the same time when Vladimir Putin visited London. This gives the ground to presume that those forces, which strive to use the situation around Chechnya to blast Russia's international reputation, begin to play the nurse Kasyeva card.
TAIROV, independent expert: The same mass media and the same persons keep lying without bothering to provide any proof that suburban Moscow OMON men have been killed by our own servicemen. Are any measures taken to stop these illegal and false allegations?
YASTRZHEMBSKY: The Interior Ministry has more than once given a detailed answer to such allegations. There has been a special Ministry investigation. It is over now. Journalists have been informed about it. I do not remember this subject to be brought up again lately. Some time ago this version roamed about some mass media.
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