Peace plan unravels as fighting continues

PRESIDENT Yeltsin's recently announced peace plan for Chechnya lay in tatters yesterday as he continued his first pre election sweep through southern Russia.

Russian jets and artillery bombarded a number of villages in southern and western Chechnya yesterday, but federal forces were taking heavy casualties as well.

In the southern village of Goiskoye over 30 Russian soldiers were killed and 67 wounded by Chechen rebels. Fifteen Russian soldiers were unaccounted for.

The Chechens also managed to shoot down a state of the art Sukhoi 25 jet fighter in the area on Thursday.

As the election campaign continues Mr Yeltsin's opponents are divided over methods of ending the war. On the liberal side Mr Grigory Yavlinsky has been holding anti war rallies in the manner of the anti Vietnam war in the US while the right wing Gen Alexander Lebed yesterday called on Russian forces to crush the vipers in Chechnya".

Mr Yeltsin's policy is somewhere in the middle. He has announced a cessation of hostilities talks with the Chechen rebels through intermediaries and a forum of the Chechen people to discuss the future of the region, but despite his decrees the war continues and has reached a new intensity.

All this must be seen in the context of the election campaign.

The declaration of the Russian ceasefire included a clause which allowed Russian forces to retaliate for Chechen attacks. It also allows Mr Yeltsin and his supporters to claim that the war continues because of Chechen belligerence and that Russian forces are merely responding to Chechen provocation.

The customary propaganda which war situations engender is also very much in evidence. Yesterday, the official news agency ITAR TASS carried a report in which Mr Anton Surikov of the Russian Defence Research Institute, claimed that the Chechen rebel leader, Gen Dzhokhar Dudayev, had his own air force with bases in Azerbaijan and Turkey and that these planes were bombing Chechen villages in order to place the blame on the Russians. The aircraft were described as Antonov 24 and Antonov 26 models.

The Antonov 24 is a civilian passengier aircraft and the Antonov 26 is a civilian freighter. Both are turbo prop aircraft and neither could be mistaken for the jet fighters and bombers seen in action in Chechnya in recent days.

Mr Yeltsin continued to gain ground in the opinion polls on his main rival, the communist leader, Mr Gennady Zyuganov.

In a poll issued yesterday and taken on the eve of Mr Yeltsin's peace announcement, there were only two percentage points between the two men. The poll taken by the Public Opinion Foundation put Mr Zyuganov on 21 per cent with Mr Yeltsin on 19 per cent. Gen Lebed and Mr Yavlinsky polled at 8 per cent each with ultra right winger, Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky, on 7 per cent.

AFP adds: Mr Zhirinovsky registered yesterday as a candidate in the presidential elections, the Interfax news agency reported.