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Last Russian troops leave Chechnya

January 6, 1997
Web posted at: 8:45 p.m. EST (2045 GMT)

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From Correspondent Betsy Aaron

MOSCOW (CNN) -- The last Russian soldiers are out of Chechnya, the formal end to a humiliating military defeat for the country and its leaders that has left Chechen separatists in charge.

But wars don't really end for those most affected by them. In Moscow, widows and their children filed into a room Monday in the Interior Ministry to commemorate the end of that war which took the lives of their husbands and fathers.

For the children there were gifts. For the women, much needed financial aid. But there was not much solace on either side.

"Someone told me the pain would disappear after a year," said one woman, Valentina Zaslavskaya. "The year has passed and the pain is still the same."

More than 30,000 Russians fought for almost two years to stop the Chechens from pulling out of the Russian republic. But the pullout went almost unnoticed in Russia on a week of holidays that included New Year's Day and the Russian Orthodox Christmas.

'We shook hands...like warriors'

Tens of thousands of civilians died in the war, and much of Chechnya's housing and industrial capacity was destroyed.

"We accompanied the last Russian soldier out and shook hands with him like warriors," an unidentified Chechen rebel fighter said on Russian television Monday. "Now it's peace, peace."

But some soldiers remain in Chechnya. Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov said Monday that 19 Russian servicemen are still in Chechnya, and another 37 are missing. He said the two sides plan to sign an agreement soon to cooperate in the search for missing soldiers and crime prevention.

Under a truce hammered out after rebels re-captured the Chechen capital Grozny in August, the question of secession from Russia was set aside in the interest of securing a cease-fire.

But the two sides are as far apart as ever and the issue will not go away, particularly in view of elections for a new Chechen president and assembly on January 27.

The winner of this month's presidential election, organized with Moscow's blessing, is certain to be committed, at least publicly, to winning outright independence.

Candidates pledge to seek independence

More than a dozen candidates are seeking the presidency, and all have pledged to lead the region to independence. A failure to deliver on that promise is likely to spark violent reprisals from heavily armed hard-liners, many of them partisans of consolidating Islamic law in the republic.

Meanwhile some analysts believe that Russian President Boris Yeltsin has freed his hand by removing Russian troops. They are no longer targets for attacks or hostage-taking, and Yeltsin could withhold aid and investment for Chechnya's ravaged economy. He could even threaten new military strikes to force a face-saving settlement, some analysts suggest.

It is also thought that Moscow must not recognize Chechen sovereignty to avoid deepening disillusion in the army, which feels frustrated by its inability to eliminate Chechen resistance, and to discourage other ethnic groups from pressing for more autonomy.

'You could only say Russia lost the war'

One thing is certain: what was expected in Moscow to be a quick campaign turned out to be long, bloody and disastrous.

"After Afghanistan we could expect that we learned some lessons," says Alexander Konovalov, a political analyst. "But we repeated all the stupidity possible in Chechnya. It would be impossible to say Russia stopped the war, but you could say that only Russia lost the war."


Reuters contributed to this report.

 
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