Issue #935 (3), Friday, January 16, 2004

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Handling of Dubrovka Queried

By Caroline McGregor

Staff Writer

Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times

Irina Khakamada

MOSCOW - Presidential hopeful Irina Khakamada distinctly sharpened her rhetoric against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, arguing in a full-page open letter in Kommersant and at a briefing with reporters that Putin has built "a society based on lies" - first and foremost hiding the truth about what happened at Dubrovka in October 2002.

Khakamada wrote that after she negotiated with five of the Chechen rebels who took some 800 people hostage at the theater, she came to the conclusion that they "did not plan on blowing up the theater, and the authorities were not interested in saving all the hostages."

The rebels were hoping for negotiations, she said, and her calls for talks to end the standoff were ignored.

The day after she met with the rebels she was summoned by Alexander Voloshin, then Putin's chief of staff, who "in a threatening tone ordered me not to interfere," she said in the letter.

Pressed for more details at the news conference, Khakamada said after a moment's pause, "He was terribly displeased."

None of the male rebels wore explosive belts, she added, and she said she found it suspicious that all the hostage-takers were killed, leaving nobody to question about who was behind the attack.

Though friends voiced concern for her personal safety, she said she decided to speak out after receiving an appeal Tuesday from relatives who lost loved ones, asking the 10 presidential candidates to help them find answers.

"If the president is building democracy and not a dictatorship ... he must answer for everything that happens in the country, particularly in such events," she told reporters.

No public inquiries have been opened, and the government has remained tight-lipped on the gas that special forces used to end the siege - although it is blamed for the deaths of many of the 129 people, most of them hostages, who ultimately perished.

"President Putin made his choice to hide the truth," Khakamada wrote, saying that if she becomes president, she will expose the truth about Dubrovka and "about many other crimes by the authorities."

"We have a society based on lies, a society in which democracy is used only as a formal procedure, a society based on a completely closed nature and, most importantly, a society based on fear," she said.

Khakamada has spoken out against the president before, but never so bluntly. Her remarks were perceived as an attempt to establish her credentials as an independent candidate in face of critics who contend that she is running at the Kremlin's behest, since without its approval, her candidacy would be dead in the water.

Skeptics argue that her participation is advantageous for the Kremlin because in the eyes of the West, the presence of a serious democratic politician casts a veneer of legitimacy on a one-man race in a way that the presence of others, like bodyguard-cum-candidate Oleg Malyshkin, of the Liberal Democratic Party, does not.

Khakamada defiantly denied any cooperation with the Kremlin, arguing that it is in the Kremlin's interest to circulate those rumors. "The most convenient way to discredit an opponent is to say they have been bought off by the Kremlin."

She said in an interview with this week's Yezhenedelny Zhurnal that she had been forced to take a softer line against the Kremlin than she would have liked during the State Duma campaign to maintain a united front with other leaders of her Union of Right Forces, or SPS, party, like longtime Kremlin insider Anatoly Chubais.

After campaign strategies largely attributed to Chubais resulted in the party's dismal performance in the Dec. 7 poll, the party was paralyzed by fingerpointing. Leaders of the broader liberal constituency were riven by personal and ideological divisions.

Khakamada's announcement that she would run took many of her fellow liberal politicians by surprise. After Yabloko and SPS failed to agree to throw their support behind a single candidate, various factions began to discuss either boycotting the election entirely or encouraging pro-democratic voters to cast their votes "against all" on March 14, as ways of refusing complicity in elections they believe to be a farce.

Khakamada dismissed this Wednesday, saying a vote "against all" was merely a way to "be afraid with honor." A boycott, she said, was "dangerous for the democracy we have, because - it means citizens are in fact rejecting a democratic procedure."

She said she decided to run after other liberal candidates whom she was prepared to support, including Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov, Chuvash Governor Nikolai Fyodorov and Yabloko co-founder Vladimir Lukin, said they would not. Establishing oneself as an opponent to the Kremlin "takes courage," she said.

Staying in the race will take more than courage. Collecting the 2 million signatures needed to get her name on the ballot by Jan. 28 remains a "very difficult" task, she said. As of Monday, her campaign staff said they had gathered 150,000, less than 10 percent of the total.

Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said that although there is no way for Khakamada to prove she is not masterminded by the Kremlin, "I rather tend to trust her."

Khakamada stands to gain little by toning down her criticism, she said, and "why would she agree to be timid? She'll lose the respect of people like liberal journalists whose support she needs."

Even if she entered the race on her own, the Kremlin has full control to help or prevent her from collecting the needed signatures, Lipman said.

Dmitry Orlov at the Center for Political Technologies linked Khakamada's emboldened criticism of Putin to the announcement by top Yukos shareholder Leonid Nevzlin that Open Russia, the embattled oil firm's civil society organization, will financially support her campaign.

The letter, which Orlov called "unexpected," is "evidence of her cooperation not with the president but with opponents of the president."

Khakamada confirmed at the news conference that Yukos was helping fund her campaign.

Nevzlin, who has not returned from Israel since the October arrest of his partner, former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said in a statement Wednesday that he was stepping down as deputy chairman of Open Russia to help with her campaign.

With Yukos and the Kremlin locked in a vicious feud, Lipman doubted that Yukos would give money to Khakamada if she were indeed a Kremlin puppet. "Ironically, Yukos is paying for the Kremlin to look more democratic."

See comment, page 8.