MOSCOW - Elections that were supposed to confirm peace in the separatist region of Chechnya - after almost two years of war with Russia's army - are turning into a violent free-for-all of mysterious kidnappings, vicious political mudslinging, and threats of further armed conflict.
Ruslan Aushev, president of a tiny Muslim region neighboring Chechnya on Russia's southern border, warned yesterday that politicians hostile to a recent peace deal for Chechnya were trying to disrupt or discredit next Monday's elections, repeating the mistakes that led to combat two years ago.
"There are those who do not want these elections to take place," said Aushev, who plays an informal mediating role between Chechnya and Moscow.
For many Russians, the defeat of their army by a tiny Chechen guerrilla force last year was a painful humiliation. The former superpower was forced to agree to consider giving Chechnya's 1 million people the freedom they claim, after five years, and meanwhile to allow elections for a peacetime president and Parliament. All the leading presidential candidates are separatists.
Russian officials are already casting doubt on the validity of Monday's elections, saying they may not be fair because 300,000 Chechen refugees who have fled to distant parts of Russia will not be able to vote. Putting a question mark over the legitimacy of the voting now leaves Moscow freedom to maneuver if it later decides to reject the results.
Chechnya is still in ruins after a 20-month onslaught by Russian planes and tanks. A third of its people are homeless and many of them have fled Chechnya altogether in search of safety farther afield. Men carrying guns walk every street and violent crime is rampant _ including a spate of kidnappings.
The fate of two Russian television journalists and a Russian Orthodox priest, kidnapped in midcampaign by unidentified gunmen, remains unclear as foreign election observers and journalists make their way to Grozny, the ruined Chechen capital, to watch Monday's first round of voting.
Chechen politicians have accused Russia of sending secret agents to their homeland to carry out terrorist acts. They blame Russia for masterminding the murder of six Westerners working at a Red Cross hospital in Chechnya last December - an accusation Russia's security police denied Thursday.
In return, the Russian media have been airing the accusation that an aide to leading Chechen presidential candidate Aslan Maskhadov is behind the kidnappings. But Aushev said the kidnappings in Chechnya were being carried out mostly by criminals making money in "one of the easiest and dirtiest ways."
Boris Berezovsky, Russia's latest envoy to Chechnya and a controversial businessman, has stirred a different kind of trouble with a proposal to arm the Muslim Chechens' historical enemy - the area's ethnic Russian Cossack militias - and let them crack down on Chechen crime.
The suggestion fanned old hostility between ethnic Russians, who regard themselves as "white" and the "Big Brother" of their country's "black" minorities, and the Chechens, who never fully submitted to Russian rule in two centuries of almost constant conflict.
Southern Russians, who, attracted by the half-remembered glamour of a czarist past, have flocked to join neo-Cossack organizations since the Soviet collapse are now clamoring for weapons and a chance to beat Chechen heads together.
Meanwhile, politicians in Moscow, Chechnya and other southern regions are angrily berating Berezovsky - whose policy on Chechnya has until now been moderate and peaceable - for an inflammatory suggestion.
A statement yesterday from Russia's upper house of Parliament demanded Berezovsky be fired, although the senators' media office later back-tracked and said the demand had been withdrawn from the statement's final version.