#9 - RW 264
Moscow Times
July 11, 2003
Editorial
Campaign Season Starts With a Bang
What is it about bombings and elections that go together in Moscow?

The sad tradition dates back at least to the summer of 1996 when President Boris Yeltsin was running for re-election, when five days before the June 16 vote a bomb exploded inside a metro car. It killed four people and put the whole city on edge.

Yeltsin and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who also was up for re-election, immediately described the bombing as an attempt to disrupt the vote. Luzhkov, with no evidence, blamed the Communists.

The Communists proposed their own politically charged version of events. They suggested the bomb was the work of "clans within the government" -- presumably the same clans that we later learned had been pushing Yeltsin to cancel the vote. This version also was bantered about by more independent observers, who said the involvement of the secret services was entirely plausible.

Some at the time linked the metro bombing to the war in Chechnya. And after two more bombs exploded in Moscow that summer, both on trolleybuses, and were officially blamed on Chechens, this version became the accepted one for these and all future bombings. Hard evidence was never an issue.

The authorities have not needed any evidence to convince many Russians that Chechnya is a source of evil, just as many Americans bought the U.S. government line linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.

Chechen rebels denied any role in the bombings of the summer of 1996, as they denied carrying out the bombings that brought down two Moscow apartment buildings in the fall of 1999, which perhaps not coincidentally was the next time the country's various political forces were maneuvering ahead of national elections.

No need to go too much into the theory, backed up by some evidence, that the apartment bombings were an FSB operation designed to promote Vladimir Putin's war in Chechnya and propel him into the Kremlin.

And now, just as this election campaign gears up, the bombings are back. Two suicide bombers, said to be Chechen women, struck at last weekend's rock festival in Tushino, killing 14 people, and another Chechen woman is accused of leaving a bomb outside a restaurant on Tverskaya that killed an FSB sapper trying to defuse it early Thursday.

Yes, suicide bombers, some women, have become all too common in Chechnya of late. But there is something about the two bombings in Moscow that does not quite fit the pattern. In Chechnya, the targets have been Russian troops or Chechens working with Moscow, and the rebel commanders have claimed responsibility. Here the pattern is different, or is it really oh so terribly familiar?

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