[CivilSoc] Unconvincing Chechen Constitutional Referendum

[Moderator]

The following item comes from
RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL (Un)Civil Societies
Vol. 4, No. 6, 26 March 2003
CivilSoc editor's note: A good source on the recent Chechen constitutional
referendum and other Chechnya news is the Jamestown Foundation, which
publishes a "Chechnya Weekly."  Its March 27 edition quoted Moscow's chief
election official, Aleksandr Veshnyakov, to the effect that "the number who
voted in all of Chechnya was greater than the 540,000 who had officially
registered." Veshnyakov explained the discrepancy, according to Jamestown,
by saying that "many voters were refugees who did not register in advance
but ... nevertheless showed up on referendum day." See
http://chechnya.jamestown.org/pubs/view/chw_004_010_002.htm
UNCONVINCING CHECHEN REFERENDUM
The English statesman John, Viscount Morley, Britain's secretary to Ireland
and India, was famous for having said, "You have not converted a man because
you have silenced him." If he were alive today, he might find that a good
way to silence dissent is to hold a seemingly convincing public referendum.
With the vote on the new constitution in Chechnya this week, Chechen
citizens were given an opportunity to say what they think. Yet questions
linger about the manner in which the referendum was conducted, the
legitimacy of its results, and its real impact on ending the conflict,
despite a reported 96 percent vote in favor and more than 80 percent
turnout.
While Chechens who did turn out seemed to articulate their desire for peace
rather than war (not surprisingly), what had been silent for months before
the referendum is their television sets. Many families in the war-torn
republic do not have them, and what coverage they have received, from local
or national news, could not be said to constitute a serious, open debate of
the issues of Chechnya's future. Even at public voters' meetings, Russian
officials followed a long-established Soviet tradition of repressing public
opinion even as it is ostensibly sought by, for example, filming attendees.
Activists who went on a hunger strike or staged other nonviolent actions to
protest the referendum were detained to dampen their influence.
Public referenda have a long and discredited history in the post-Soviet
region. More often than not, they have been manipulated by authoritarian
governments eager to stay in power either to paper over civil strife or
feign massive support in the face of significant challenges. Experience has
shown that if a referendum is quickly organized, is made complicated, and
deals with multiple questions phrased in a certain way, almost any results
needed by a government in power can be obtained. In most democracies,
referenda are usually held on far narrower issues than a constitution or
social system itself, and other checks and balances such as a free media and
robust political party life exist to put them in context. Post-Soviet
leaders have made a specialty of packing as many complex legal and political
issues into plebiscites in their restricted societies, so that even if free
and fair conditions prevail--and they often do not--the results can be
misleading.
In March 1991, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev staged a referendum in which
75-80 percent of the population took part, of whom 75 percent voted
seemingly in favor of keeping the Soviet Union together. Rather than being
asked directly if they wished to preserve the USSR as such, the question was
worded as follows: "Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal, sovereign
states-republics in which the rights and freedoms of persons of all
nationalities will be fully guaranteed?" Feeling that this offer might be as
good as it gets, and concentrating on the words "renewed" and "rights and
freedoms" which they were hearing for the first time, many Soviet citizens
voted "yes." The three Baltic nations, plus Armenia, Moldova, and Georgia
did not participate. Gorbachev recalls in his memoirs how Russian leader
Boris Yeltsin, speaking on Radio Rossiya about the first draft of the new
union treaty, said: "The referendum is being held in order to win support
for the current policies of the leadership of the country. Its aim is to
preserve the imperial unitary essence of the union and the system." By
December 1991, Gorbachev had resigned and the union was dissolved.
In Belarus in 1996, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka engineered a referendum
to extend his term under a new version of the constitution, ultimately
disbanding the constitutional court and the parliament. The turnout was 64.7
percent of the population, 75 percent of whom voted "yes." Not to be
outdone, Azerbaijan's Heidar Aliev turned out 96 percent of the voters in
2002 for a bewildering array of constitutional amendments that somehow found
88 percent approval. In Kyrgyzstan in 2003, in the fourth constitutional
referendum since independence in 1991, President Askar Akaev was also able
to claim 75 percent in favor of changing the constitution and 79 percent
advocating that he stay in office until 2005. In each of these cases, the
perception that the government was acting in bad faith and eroding the
public trust by manipulating polls only served to enrage and enlarge the
opposition beyond those who had originally dared to vote "no."
Yeltsin, who launched the 1994-96 war in Chechnya, would never apply his
reasoning about the Soviet Union's republics to the Russian Federation's
constituent parts. The extent of resistance in Chechnya nonetheless
compelled his successor, President Vladimir Putin, to make an unusual
televised speech on the eve of the referendum on 16 March, hinting at
further autonomy for Chechnya down the road, and even seeming to concede
that Chechens had lived too long in fear of the knock at the door in the
middle of the night from Russian troops. Later, in a meeting with religious
readers, he even conceded that "mistakes had been made" even at the federal
level.
Before the vote, Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen officials flip-flopped on
whether displaced Chechens in Ingushetia would be allowed to vote at all in
their camps, or be bussed to border towns to cast their vote, and finally
some were delivered to polls. Migration officials said rebels were
intimidating refugees from voting, Interfax reported on 27 February.
Refugees themselves told reporters that officials were threatening to close
their tent camps in Ingushetia and cut off their services if they did not
participate in the vote, AP reported on 12 March. In the end, at least
65,000 displaced persons were said to have voted.
Local human rights groups and some European officials marveled at the
Kremlin's decision to allow 38,000 Russian troops--far from their home towns
in the heartland of Russia--to vote in the referendum, out of 80,000 troops
overall who remain in the region, some of whom guarded polling stations. Yet
there was the even more curious matter of the Russian census in Chechnya in
October 2002, which seemed to turn up far more Chechens than anyone believed
to have existed, prompting some observers to wonder if the numbers were
cooked. As part of the federal effort, census takers working for just two
days in Chechnya (they cited security concerns) collected more than a
million questionnaires. The phenomenon was explained away by the pro-Moscow
government as resulting from fewer war casualties than human rights groups
claimed, and new births even in wartime. After subtracting Russian soldiers,
it was unclear where the "extra" Chechens had come from, although some in
the Chechen diaspora in other parts of Russia returned to vote. The last
census held in Chechnya in 1989, had 1.27 million residents, but in Chechnya
and Ingushetia combined.
Expectations that large numbers of Chechens would boycott the referendum
appeared to be misplaced, although some mothers whose children had
disappeared in Russian military sweeps demonstrated in a main square of
Grozny, telling RFE/RL's North Caucasus Service that they would only go to
the referendum if the authorities returned the young people. Russian
officials persuaded reluctant international organizations to come to the
region, despite their security concerns, to witness the event. Conditions
for voting were "less than perfect," conceded these observers, but they were
inclined to celebrate any show of reconciliation from the Kremlin in an
effort to stop the war. A reporter from the "Chicago Tribune" saw only
handfuls of people voting in districts where much greater participation was
claimed, and a "Le Figaro" journalist was able to vote himself when he
showed his French passport. Citing "Prague Watchdog" and journalist Anna
Politkovskaya, the Jamestown Foundation's "Chechnya Weekly" reported this
week that local officials were either doling out benefits on the eve of the
referendum, especially for children and the elderly, or intimidating people
at voters' meetings by filming them. A form of silent protest leading up to
the day of voting was the persistent tearing down of many posters promoting
the referendum.
Memorial Society Human Rights Center polled 665 people in 17 regions, many
of them teachers at the time of the referendum. Seventy-eight percent said
they didn't believe proper conditions for a referendum existed; 43 percent
said that without monitoring, it was hard to trust the results. Perhaps most
tellingly, 76 percent of those polled by Memorial said in any event that
Russian authorities would not obey the new constitution for which they had
so carefully obtained a consensus, 7 percent said it would only be
"selectively" enforced, 3 percent said it would be, and 15 percent were
undecided, providing a microcosm of the difficulties in building convincing
consensus in the future.
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"RFE/RL (Un)Civil Societies" is prepared by Catherine Fitzpatrick on the
basis of reports by RFE/RL broadcast services and other sources. It is
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