Chechens Defy Moscow Laws, Sensitivities With Public Executions

MOSCOW — Chechnya’s stifled battle for independence from Russia resumed expression Thursday when a firing squad publicly executed two convicted murderers in defiance of Russian law and sensitivities.

The executions before as many as 5,000 spectators--the second in as many weeks in the rebellious southern republic--served as another brutal reminder to Moscow that the 21-month-old war may have been halted, but Chechnya’s quest for separation has not.

Russian television carried gruesome footage of the executions in which six soldiers manacled the bearded men to a brick wall and then sprayed them with submachine-gun fire, sending bullets ricocheting across the crowded square and clouds of dust and pulverized brick billowing around the mangled corpses.

Although capital punishment remains a legal option in Russia, President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered a moratorium on executions earlier this year in a measure intended to show compliance with requirements imposed by the Council of Europe for membership in that Western alliance.

None of the hundreds of pending capital sentences have been carried out in other parts of Russia this year, but Thursday’s executions in central Grozny’s Square of the People’s Friendship brought to five the number of Chechen residents killed under Islamic law in recent months.

In the years since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Chechens--most of whom are Muslim--have resumed practice of Islamic law and last spring began invoking the death penalty in an effort to combat rampant crime.

A man and woman were gunned to death in the same square Sept. 3, prompting Yeltsin to condemn the public executions as “an act from the Dark Ages.”

“The world community doesn’t understand us because they don’t live here,” Magomed Magomadov, deputy prosecutor for Chechnya, told the NTV television crew that filmed the latest executions.

Other Chechen leaders vowed to continue carrying out death sentences in public despite the uproar it has caused elsewhere in Russia. “Only rigorous measures like this can stop crime in Chechnya,” First Deputy Prime Minister Movladi Udugov told the Itar-Tass news agency.

The latest executions took on a political cast because they coincided with negotiations in the southern Russian resort town of Sochi aimed at defining Chechnya’s status.

Open warfare between the Russian federal forces and Chechen insurgents ended with a peace agreement Aug. 31, 1996, that put off resolution of Chechnya’s political relationship with Moscow for five years. But Grozny’s political course since the agreement has repeatedly demonstrated the rebel republic’s intention to live by its own rules.

Russia’s chief delegate at the Sochi talks, Nationalities Minister Vyacheslav A. Mikhailov, complained after this week’s session that the sides were at an impasse. Chechnya wants total independence from Russia; the Kremlin insists that it remain an integral part of the federation.