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In Chechnya, no doubt of victory for United Russia

By Umalt Chadayev

CHECHNYA - The vast majority of Chechens believe that the party of power will win an absolute victory in the elections to the Russian State Duma on December 2.

Many people have noted that, unlike the campaigns of previous years, the current election campaign in Chechnya has been marked by the almost total passivity of the other political parties.

"Today the flow of information in the republic is virtually dominated by the United Russia party," a local human rights worker told Prague Watchdog’s correspondent. "United Russia's supporters are given preferential treatment in the republic primarily because the party’s regional branch is headed by [President] Ramzan Kadyrov."

"For some reason not a single one of the parties that are taking part in this election – I’m referring to the regional branches of the Communist Party, the Union of Rightist Forces, Yabloko, [Zhirinovsky's] LDPR, and so on – has protested about the breaches of the law that have been committed by United Russia. Flags bearing the United Russia emblem and banners encouraging people to vote for the party were put up in Grozny almost a week before the official start of the parliamentary electoral campaign," he said. "Moreover, no other party has bothered to put up its election posters and banners in the streets of Chechnya’s other towns and villages. I think it’s because everyone knows that United Russia will gain a landslide victory."

"Contrary to the assertions of the Kadyrov government, Putin is not such a popular personality in Chechnya as is sometimes made out. Most of the population hate him, because they believe he is one of the perpetrators of what happened here during the second military campaign," the human rights worker said. "His inflammatory call to ‘rub out the terrorists in the outhouse’ (and by ‘terrorists ‘ we know that he meant almost all Chechens) has not been forgotten. So in any normal elections, United Russia with its ‘Putin Plan’ wouldn’t even get one percent of the vote here, but as Comrade Stalin said, ‘It’s not the votes that count, but how the votes are counted.’ I think that the party of power in Chechnya will fiddle the vote so that it gets not less than 90 percent."

"The fact that there aren’t any election posters and banners in the streets of our towns and villages is, of course, regrettable. But you can’t really say that we’ve just been sitting on our hands, as it were, because everyone knows that United Russia is going to win. We’re just a regional branch of the party, and we can only campaign within the resources we get from them. And for some reason we didn’t get any funding from the top in order to do that," Tamerlan Aliyev, deputy chairman of the regional branch of the Union of Rightist Forces, explained.

"The current election campaign looks very faded and colourless. During the last Duma elections the other parties had their posters in all the cities, but not this time. The only banners you see are those of United Russia. I think the Kremlin is so sure of itself that it didn’t even bother to create the semblance of democratic elections. Putin’s ‘vertical of power’ is now so strong that it isn’t afraid of anything or anyone," says Sultan Dadayev, 58, a former Grozny university lecturer.

"Everyone in Chechnya already knew beforehand that United Russia was going to get 80-90 percent of the vote at the elections. That doesn’t mean that our voters are going to rush to the ballot boxes on December 2 to give it their unanimous support. It’s all a lot more banal than that. The local election commissions will ‘fiddle’ all of the appropriate figures. The only thing it would be interesting to know is whether any other political party will gain seats in the Duma. Perhaps it’ll be the Fair Russia party (which is also an offspring of the Kremlin), the Communists and the LDPR. Though who knows what the Kremlin political strategists will dream up this time. I personally would have voted for Yabloko or the Union of Rightist Forces, but I won’t be voting, because I know that it’s all pointless," the former lecturer said.

According to him, the fact that Sunday’s forthcoming elections will not be fair (in Chechnya, at least), is demonstrated by at least one incident: a few days ago police carried out some “special measures” in the Grozny suburb where Sultan lives. The police officers went from house to house, checking and copying the details of the passports of all local residents. Dadayev is convinced that this was done with the sole purpose of using the information in the forthcoming elections.

"I mean, how has ‘voting’ been done in our city during recent years? They take the personal data of people who live in a particular district and enter it into logbooks. Then the folk at the electoral commission just have to process it. They mark the voting slips with a tick in the right box, enter the people’s details on them, and throw them into the ballot boxes. So no one should be in any doubt that United Russia will win the election, even though people have a negative view of Putin and Gryzlov (who was head of the Russian interior ministry at the time of the start of the "counter-terrorist operation" in Chechnya). And these elections, like all events of the kind in recent years, will not be fair and democratic," he believes.

(Translation by DM)

(T)

  RELATED ARTICLES:
 · An interview with the Chechen election committee chairman (in Russian, Regnum.ru, 30.11.2007)
 · In Chechnya, violations of electoral law (PW, 31.10.2007)
 · Parliamentary elections in Chechnya (PW, November 2005)
 · Referendum on a new Chechen constitution causes contradictory reactions (PW, February 2003)