Russia’s newly elected President Vladimir Putin, who has imposed a savage and horrendous war on the tiny Muslim-majority Republic of Chechnya since September 1999, faced a hostile demonstration from hundreds of protesters on April 17 outside 10, Downing Street in London, where he came to meet the British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair. British Muslims, Chechen refugees and Human Rights supporters staged the demon-stration against Putin, holding aloft big banners deman-ding that the Russians stop the massacre of inno-cent people in war-devas-tated Chechnya. Amnesty Interna-tional, which has slated Russian atrocities in Chechnya, joined hands with Muslim groups in the UK in the demonstration outside 10, Downing Street. Scared by the anti-Putin feeling prevailing among Muslims and pro-Human Rights groups, Mr. Putin and his entourage came to Number 10, Downing Street in bullet-proof limousines.

According to London reports, Mr. Putin rushed to London to seek solace and help from Prime Minister Blair due to the suspension of Russia by the Council of Europe and the surge in media and parliamentary attacks all over Western and Central Europe over Russia’s savage war in Chechnya and the Russian army’s brutalities there since September last year. At first the Russian generals said that their objective in Chechnya was a limited one: creating a safety zone along its borders (like the Israeli safety zone inside Lebanon’s borders). But by October 1999, it was clear that ex-KGB Chief Putin, as the then Prime Minister of Russia, had deci-ded to slaug-hter the freedom-loving Chechens and flatten the tiny country with the latest Russian armaments. He got ailing and almost disabled Yeltsin’s blessing for the mass murder of the Chechens to avenge the defeat the Chechens had inflicted on the Russians in the 1994-96 war. On February 3, 2000, the Russian troops occupied totally- devastated Grozny after the Chechen freedom-fighters staged a tactical pullout from their rubble-like capital. For three days, Russian soldiers went berserk on Vodka to celebrate their phyrric victory. Despite the claims of the Russian President and his military chiefs that Chechnya has been bludgeoned into submission, the Russian public is now disillusioned as more coffins of dead Russian soldiers stream into their homes in Russia. The Chechens are conducting a successful guerrilla war against the Russian Army of occupation.

London’s weekly Observer, in an article written by its Moscow correspondent, Amelia Gentleman, (published in Pakistan’s daily DAWN of April 18) said that Putin had earned the nickname of Butcher of Grozny. The Observer article noted that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Government had been bitterly criticised by human rights groups and politicians in the UK for hosting Putin’s visit at a time when new details of the atrocities of the Russian military in Chechnya are emerging daily. Putin rushed to London to meet PM Tony Blair, after hosting him in St. Petersburg in March 2000, even before he is formally installed as Russia’s new President. Observers say that Putin won the Russian Presidential election on the crest of his savage war against the defiant Muslims of Chechnya, giving the Russian voters the lollipop that the Russian Army under his command had defeated the Chechens thoroughly and it was a great victory for the Russians. Human Rights supporters in the UK strongly opposed Putin’s visit to the UK and his meeting with Tony Blair. In a recent book published in Russia, Putin speaks of his KGB training and background and how he learnt to charm Western leaders such as Blair. Having hosted Tony Blair and his wife recently in St. Petersburg, Putin decided that his first port of call during his tour of Western Europe will be Great Britain. The Director of Moscow’s Centre for Strategic Studies, Andrei Piontovosky, according to the Observer article, recently noted that Blair is making himself into Putin’s pet poodle. British diplomats say that Britain is urging Russia to seek a political solution of the Chechen problem.

During the anti-Putin demonstration in London on April 17, there were many Chechens whose homes were wiped out by the Russian military and their relatives were murdered by Russian troops. Some military analysts say that since September 1999, the Russian military has rained more explosives in Chechnya than what the Nazis did in eight months to the USSR in the Second World War. Some 90% per cent of Chechnya’s total population of about 1.3 million (predominantly Muslim) has been made homeless by Russian bombardment and military action. More than half a million Chechens have been made refugees and a quarter million maimed and some 50,000 slaughtered. Yet the Chechen freedom fighters have refused to surrender and are waging an intense guerrilla war. In sheer anger, the Russian military is becoming more ruthless and every weapon in Russian’s conventional armoury is being tested on the Chechens to kill them and destroy their towns and villages. The Russian atrocities on the Chechens have sent shockwaves all over Europe and the Muslim world. Many countries, which suffered under Soviet occupation and are now free, have felt very angry over the Russian barbarity in Chechnya.

Chechen sources in London say that the Chechens had no hand in the bombing of two apartment buildings in Moscow last September. The KGB planned it under Putin’s direction who wanted to become a hero for the Russians and a successor to ailing President Putin. Putin knew that many Russians did not like the agreement Russian General Lebed had reached with the Chechen leadership in 1996 to end the Chechen war. So he became a hawk and sold a strategy to Yeltsin under which Putin claimed he could slaughter the Chechen freedom fighters and keep Chechnya in the Russian pound. Yeltsin gave him a free hand and the stories of the victory of the Russian military against the ill-equipped but courageous Chechen fighters were bloated out of context and published in the Russian media to give a boost to Putin in the Russian Presidential polls and to whip up Russian nationalism versus the Chechen freedom movement.

The Russian people were given lollipops by the Putin brigade that the Russian military had smothered the Chechen Muslims for all time to come. More than half a million Chechen young men were hunted by the Russian military and transferred to military prisoner-of-war camps in inhospitable regions to languish and die. The city of Grozny, which the Chechen leadership had rebuilt after the 1994-96 War, was razed to the ground. Anything that crawled and looked like a Chechen was shot dead by the Russian troops. The Russian air force flew more than 100 sorties daily for months on end to demolish Grozny so that Russian troops could seize it after clearing the Chechens. Not even Stalingrad was subjected to such inhumanity by the Germans in World War two as Grozny was by Putin’s Government in Russia. He gave the Russian troops a free licence to kill the Chechens. Hundreds of Chechens, after being massacred by the Russian military, were flung into hastily dug pits or burnt en masse with petrol sprinkled on their dead bodies.

Every Chechen home was looted by the Russian soldiers; countless Chechen girls were raped by drunken Russian soldiers. Refugees fleeing from the War, who were given guarantees of safe evacuation from Grozny, were murdered in cold blood by Russian tank fire, bombs and mortars. Some of these harrowing details were smuggled out of Chechnya by American newsmen and published in the US newspapers and in Germany where many middle-aged Germans even now remember the Soviet atrocities in the eastern half of Germany at the end of the Second world war. (When it was Communist-ruled East Germany). People in the Baltic countries were sympathetic to the Chechens because they had been brutalised under Soviet occupation for decades and knew what the Russians could do to slaves as their masters.

Even in Poland, there was horror over what the Russian troops were doing in Chechnya to slaughter its people; many countries in Central Europe were shocked by the Russian brutality in Chechnya. The Russian military leadership went to the extent of threatening the rulers of the Muslim republics bordering on Chechnya that they would be occupied by the Russian army and bludgeoned if they supported the Chechen freedom fighters. Russian troops virtually occupied parts of Ingushetia and Dagestan by inventing the excuse that they were preventing the Chechen fighters from taking over these republics. The Muslims in these republics were hateful of the Russians because of their drunken orgies and their molestation of Muslim women.

The Daily Dawn of Karachi and Lahore in Pakistan, in its issue of April 18, ran an article by Daniel Williams of Washington Post-LAT-WP News services, from Russia under the caption: Russians no longer cheerful over Chechen War. In the article, Denial Williams wrote from Novokuznetsk in Russia that scenes of Russian flag-raising over battered Chechen towns and blustery Russian commanders posing against haggard Chechen civilians are no longer appearing on the Russian television network, and the feeling has grown in Russia that the Russian forces in Chechnya, after 8 months of war, are caught in a quagmire. Hardly a day goes by without reports of Chechen guerrilla attacks on Russian convoys and outposts, even from areas which the Russians claimed had been liberated by the Russian troops. Reports of the killing of Russian soldiers by the Chechens in daring ambushes have come from Grozny, too, which the Russians captured after destroying every building in it. Officially, more than 2000 Russians have died in the war in Chechnya since September, a much higher rate than in the 1994-96 Chechnya war. A young Russian soldier, Dmitry Lyapin, said to Daniel Williams in Siberia after returning from the Chechnya war: Quick victory is out of question. There is no victory. We have been lured into a Guerrilla war.

The Russian military commanders are now changing their tune. At one time they said the Russian police will run Chechnya; now they say that because of thousands of rebel fighters there the Russian military will continue its operations. After capturing Grozny, Russian military leaders were saying that instead of 90,000 troops, only 15,000 troops would be kept in Chechnya and for the rest the Russian police would do. Newspapers in Moscow which at one time cheered the Russian military for its victories in Chechnya, now say that the military is confused. Nezamisimaya gazeta is alarmed by the daily casualties on the Russian side and the mounting losses. Another newspaper, Obschaya Gazet recently wrote that the mood in the army is changing for the worse. Russian propaganda has fed the Russian people lies about the Chechens telling them that the 250 million Russians are in danger from the 1.3 million Chechen Muslims.

The Russian military forces in Chechnya, according to some observers, lack morale, training and weapons. Last month, 41 OMON Russian troops (under the Interior Ministry), were killed in a Chechen ambush because they did not know the air frequency to call for Russian air strikes on the Chechen guerrillas. A Russian unit tried to reach the ambushed and trapped Russians but failed; the Chechen fighters wiped them out. The Chechens are experts in guerrilla warfare as the mountains are their homeground while Russian military knows little about the actual geography of the area. An OMON officer blamed the Russian Defence Ministry; the Russian Defence Ministry blamed the OMON troops. Some Russian military personnel are amazed how daringly the Chechen guerrillas manage to escape from Russian encirclement.

A problem Putin faces is how to raise the money needed for rebuilding Chechnya which he and his troops under his orders destroyed to conquer. Some Russians say unless Chechnya is rebuilt, the present destruction of it will breed new recruits for the Chechen guerrillas, some analysts warn that even if the West gives money for rebuilding Chechnya by the Russian Government, the money will disappear. A Chechen source said in London that prior to September 1999, all the money which the West gave for Chechnya’s rebuilding to Russia disappeared in Russian hands, so widespread is the corruption.

The Putin Government had been thinking of the aerial bombing of Afghanistan, saying that its Taliban Government is helping the Chechens with money, weapons and volunteers. Moscow has also levelled false allegations against Pakistan in regard to the Chechnya war out Pakistan has denied the Russian allegations. Russia has been sounding pro-Russian Tajiks to organise guerrilla attacks on the Taliban and help the anti-Taliban forces of Ahmed Shah Masood.

Moscow attacks the Muslim Governments if they say a word of sympathy for the Chechen Muslims but Moscow goes silent when newspapers in Germany, Austria, Lithuania, Hungary and Poland feature stories of Russian brutality on the Chechens in the newspapers. Not a word is said by Moscow to France or Germany or Italy or Holland when they attack Russia’s Chechen policy and suspend its membership of the Council of Europe. Compared with the strong stand of the Council of Europe vis a vis Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has done almost nothing to help the Chechens militarily or materially or diplomatically. It is hoped that the OIC Foreign Ministers in their meeting in Kuala Lumpur in coming June will show some guts in debating the Chechnya issue and at least organise some relief for the victims of the Russian atrocities in Chechnya. This is the least that the OIC can do for the Muslims of Chechnya.

The jubilation of the Russian military over the capture of Grozny on February 2-3, was shown for hours on Russian TV networks under Putin’s orders to boost his image as future President of Russia. For two nights, the Russian soldiers in Grozny swigged Vodka and got drunk on Grozny’s streets. The ghost city, with every building destroyed by months of Russian gunfire, had no young woman left for the drunken Russian soldiers to rape. Only the aged, the disabled and sick Chechens were left in their battered capital. Some were of Russian origin who were too old or ill to move out of the besieged city. Gloating over the Russian capture of Grozny on February 3, the Russian Defence Minister, Igor Sergeyev, blusteringly said on the Russian ORT network that more than 1500 Chechen fighters, trapped in the city, were slaughtered by Russian machine guns and artillery fire. The Chechens denied it, saying they had staged a tactical orderly withdrawal from Grozny. Russian TV networks showed the Russian soldiers drinking in the streets of Grozny to celebrate their victory. But in the past few weeks, Chechen fighters have staged daring attacks on Grozny and killed scores of Russian soldiers and destroyed their armoured vehicles. Refuting the Russian claim of slaughtering more than 1500 Chechen fighters, a Chechen spokesman, Movladi Udugov said that some 43 Chechen fighters were killed while crossing a minefield in the city’s southwest. The Russian bloated the figure to 1500. A Chechen commander, Khizir, Khachukayev, had then said: We will get organised in our mountains. It was easy for the Russians to pound us when we were concentrated in Grozny. Now that we are going to be in the mountains, the Russians will face more trouble.

An example of the massive use of force by the Russians against the Chechens was furnished when the Russian military on February 13-14, dropped countless 1500kg bombs on villages in the Argun gorge in Chechnya’s mountainous south. The Russian military claimed that they were using these huge bombs to kill between 7000 to 8000 Chechen fighters operating from villages in the Argun gorge. The Russian pincer move was a flop. The Russians used 50,000 troops, three dozen SU 24 planes and score of MI-24 helicopter gunships in the Argun and Vendeno gorges to encircle the Chechen fighters but this operation failed. Nevertheless, many hundreds of Chechen villages and innocent Muslims civilians were the victims of Russian gunfire. The Russian Interfax news agency fed lies to the Russian public by claiming that the Russian forces had destroyed 18 Chechen bases yet the Chechen fighters continued blasting the Russians and killing their troops. The Russian public has got confused and has doubted the Russian military claims.

The mountainous Chatoy region is still held by the Chechen fighters despite the Russians’ ruthless bombing and laying of minefields. What surprises the Russian public is the ease with which the Chechen fighters mount daring raids on the Russian military targets inside Grozny and its outskirts. The Russians sent an elite battalion of paratroopers in March to wipe out the Chechens in the mountains in the Chatoy region and the Argun and Vendeno gorges. Half of them were wiped out by the Chechen fighters. On February 14, and in mid-March, bands of Chechen fighters sneaked into the Russian military headquarters in Grozny and exchanged gunfire with the Russian troops.

The continuing war in Chechnya is imposing a huge burden on the Russian economy and many Russians recall how the 8-year-war in Afghanistan bankrupted the USSR, leading to its collapse in 1991. The West, which has been bankrolling the anaemic Russian treasury, is fed up with having to finance Putin’s endless war against the Chechens. The anger of the West is reflected in the suspension of Russia’s membership; of the Council of Europe and the lambasting of Russian by a large number of key West European organisations. Neither the World Bank nor the IMF seems to be in a mood to finance Putin’s Chechnya war. Both organisations have been reluctant to release more funds. The West feels angrier when Putin says defiantly he will not negotiate with the Chechen freedom fighters. In the style of the old Czars, he wants their heads on a platter. Not one of the top leaders of the Chechen freedom movement has so far defected to Moscow despite the offering of huge bribes and amnesty. The delegations from the UN and the Western World, including Ms. Mary Ribinson, head of the UN Human Rights Commission , who were allowed to visit Chechnya after much haggling with the Russians, have spoken in angry words about the Russian brutalities there. Some members of the UN HR Commission want a full-scale investigation of the Russian military brutalities in Chechnya and the trial of many Russian officers on war crimes, like those indicated in Bosnia and Kosovo. Apprehensions are being expressed in Western and Central Europe that Putin, in order to make Russia strong and powerful may follow the policy of Communist dictators, like Stalin and Brezhnev, to stifle whatever democracy the Russians had under Yeltsin and turn Russia into a militarised dictatorship, a terror to its neighbours and to Western Europe and the USA. Even some Americans in Washington entertain such apprehensions due to what he and his generals have done to the tiny republic of Chechnya and its 1.3 million population.

That Mr. Putin has no regrets over the genocide against the Chechens, which his Government has waged for the past eight months, was obvious when he said in a joint press conference with Premier Tony Blair in London on April 18, that he would not allow investigation of Russian Human Rights abuses in Chechnya by any international agency or body. Putin defiantly said this would be done by Russia’s own agencies. In the same Press Conference in London, British Premier Tony Blair urged Mr. Putin to opt for a political solution of the Chechen problems.

The hard-line attitude of Mr. Putin shows that he has little or not regard for world public opinion viz-a-vis Russia’s genocide in Chechnya. This is reminiscent of the hard-line attitude of the Soviet leaders when they grabbed countries like Hungary and imposed their hirelings on them (as Kadar in 1956). The Soviets had refused to show any regrets for their strong-arm actions in decimating those who opposed them.

A Chechen source in London hinted that the Russians may invent the fib that Osama ben Laden agents are among the Chechen freedom fighters to mislead the US Government and American people. This would be in line with old KGB practices against its opponents.

Arab sources indicated that Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, during a visit to Cairo on March 4, had promised to invite an Arab League delegation to observe Russian actions in Chechnya. So far no such invitation has been received by the Arab League. Egyptian students held big rallies in Cairo and Alexandria during Ivanov’s visit to protest against the Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya. The Russian Ambassador in Saudi Arabia, Ramzan Abdulalatipov, met Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abudllah bin Abdul Aziz in Riyadh in March to explain the Russian stand on the war in Chechnya. Crown Prince Abudllah said that the war in Chechnya must stop and the two sides should negotiate, instead of Muslim blood being spilled. The Arab League Secretary General, Esmet Abdel Aziz Majid, during his meeting with Russia’s Ivanov, expressed similar views in favour of Moscow’s negotiations with the Chechen leaders for a peaceful settlement.