SURPRISE VOTE AGAINST RUSSIA'S CHECHNYA POLICY An overconfident and overbearing Russian delegation lost the first major international test of Moscow's Chechnya policy to occur since the March 23 constitutional referendum. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) voted unexpectedly on April 2 to... MORE

Chechnya's upcoming presidential election, like its recent referendum, will be an exercise in court politics disguised as a popular vote. From their early maneuvers it would seem that both Akhmad Kadyrov, widely seen as the early front runner, and his rivals are assuming that the... MORE

"DEVYATKI": THE REAL LEGAL SYSTEM IN CHECHNYA What sort of amnesty is President Putin actually going to put into practice in Chechnya--and for whom? In the April 7 issue of Novaya gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya, one of the newspaper's correspondents, suggested some criteria for judging the... MORE

Russia's secret police won a court battle on April 2, one that allows them to continue covering up their role in the mysterious 1999 terrorist bombings that laid the groundwork for the current war in Chechnya. A Moscow court refused to order the FSB to... MORE

The constitutional referendum has not brought peace to Chechnya. Eight civilians were killed on April 3 when a passenger bus was destroyed by a remote controlled mine. The mine was apparently intended for another bus carrying Chechen policemen. On the next day another explosion wounded... MORE

The news agency Interfax reported on April 8 that three pits containing the bodies of murdered and dismembered men were found in Chechnya within just twenty-four hours of each other. The heads and arms were missing from the bodies in two of these pits. As... MORE

At the end of March, the pro-Moscow administration of Akhmad Kadyrov sent the Kremlin a confidential report about murders, kidnappings and other atrocities committed against civilians in Chechnya. The essential details of this report, which must have been known to the administration before the March... MORE

The U.S. government has decided not to co-sponsor a resolution about Chechnya at this week's meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told journalists at the department's daily press briefing on April 11 that Washington had not even... MORE

In an April 12 article by one of its war correspondents in Iraq, the Times of London reports that the regime of Saddam Hussein "imported hundreds of well trained Islamic guerrillas before the war to spearhead his fight against American and British forces." The article... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin's staff has already drafted legislation for an amnesty in Chechnya, the website Gazeta.ru reported on April 15. The presidential proposal will be formally introduced in the Duma this week, Putin's representative to the Duma confirmed to Boris Sapozhnikov and Artem Vernidub,... MORE