Chechen president prepared to talk

CHECHEN President Aslan Maskhadov is prepared to hold unconditional talks with the Russian leadership to find a political solution to the bloody conflict in Chechnya, his envoy said yesterday.

“We can only solve it politically,” Akhmed Zakayev, deputy prime minister of Chechnya, told the World Chechen Congress, which opened in Copenhagen despite Russian protests. “President Maskhadov, as before, is ready without any preconditions to sit at the negotiation table. It is up to the Russian leadership.”

EU president Denmark said it had decided to move the venue of a November EU-Russia summit from Copenhagen to Brussels after Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to pull out to protest against Denmark’s hosting of the Chechen meeting.

“These are old Soviet methods. It is a kind of political hostage-taking of a totally peaceful meeting,” said Flemming Larsen, chairman of a Danish support committee for Chechnya which is hosting the two-day congress. “Maybe this meeting will show that Mr Putin’s claims that all Chechens are terrorists are false. Maybe that is what Mr Putin is afraid of.”

Putin vowed yesterday that Russia would make no deals with terrorists: “Russia will make no deals with terrorists and will not give in to any blackmail,” news agencies quoted Putin as telling government ministers.

Deni Teps, chairman of the Chechen congress, said the Chechen government had no links with terrorists: “The position of the Chechen government is that, of course, no talks with terrorists should be possible. We don’t accept the point of view that the Chechen government is linked in any way with any terrorists. I believe that, sooner or later, common sense will prevail in Russia and they will start negotiations with the Chechen government led by President Maskhadov.”

Ruslan Khasbulatov, first chairman of the Russian parliament and a keynote speaker at the congress, said he had been in contact with Maskhadov and agreed on the outlines of a plan to solve the conflict. The essence of the plan is to give Chechnya special autonomous status with some kind of international guarantees against Russian violence and deportations of Chechens, he said: “The population of the Chechen republic do not trust the Russian authorities. Nobody is going to surrender there. People will continue to fight very seriously.”