NEWS

Kadyrov Set for Easy Run in Chechnya Poll

By Anna Dolgov

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

MOSCOW - The last two serious challengers in Chechnya's presidential election w!ere taken out of the race Thursday, clearing the way for the Kremlin's favored candidate, Akhmad Kadyrov, to win handily on Oct. 5.

Aslambek Aslakhanov, who represents Chechnya in the State Duma, said Thursday that he withdrew from the race and will serve as an adviser to President Vladimir Putin.

Malik Saidullayev, a prominent Moscow-based businessmen, was removed from the race Thursday by Chechnya's Supreme Court, which said some of the signatures he had submitted in support of his candidacy were fake.

"There is a big chance that the election will become a theater with one actor," Aslakhanov said at a seminar at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Kadyrov, who heads the Moscow-backed administration in Chechnya, no longer faces any serious competition in the election.

Election officials also had been going after Aslakhanov for irregularities in his registration documents. He acknowledged there were some problems: He had forgotten to fill out the "citizenship" box in the form that he submitted to the elections commission, got one figure wrong in his street address, and was late in submitting his income declaration.

A court was to decide Thursday whether Aslakhanov had violated registration rules and should be removed from the race, and few believed the court would decide in his favor.

But before any final decision was made, Aslakhanov said he got a telephone call Wednesday night from Putin, who offered him a job as an adviser on southern Russia issues.

"I said I will probably be removed tomorrow [from the race], I have no doubt about it," he said. "And the president said: 'You had long wanted to work on the problems of southern Russia and I can offer you a job as an adviser.'"

Saidullayev, however, denies there were any violations in his registration documents and plans to appeal to Russia's Supreme Court, one of his campaign staffers said.

The staff member, who would only give her first name, Rimma, said Saidullayev had been contacted with offers of government posts and business deals in exchange for dropping his bid, but he had refused. She made clear that Saidullayev's staff believes that the Kremlin influenced Thursday's ruling.

Some observers see the Kremlin's hand behind the sidelining of both Aslakhanov and Saidullayev.

Aslakhanov, though, denied suggestions that his departure from the race had been orchestrated. "I have nobody to blame," he said. "The blame for my withdrawal lies entirely on me.

"To say that there is some mechanism, some conspiracy, some story behind it - I don't possess such information."

But Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said things were not that simple. "Of course not," he said. "There are just things that a person cannot talk about."

Kadyrov, meanwhile, met with Putin on Thursday in Sochi. Interfax said they discussed compensation to Chechens who lost their homes in the war.

The Kremlin had publicly backed the relatively predictable and controllable Kadyrov throughout most of his three years as head of Chechnya's administration.

Even though Putin says his government will work with whatever president the Chechen people elect, the Kremlin has "placed its bet on Kadyrov," Malashenko said.

"If a new person appeared, who knows what he would be up to. What if he starts digging around to find where the money [allocated to Chechnya] had gone?"

Aslakhanov denied reports that Chechens are being pressured to vote for Kadyrov. A former police official, Aslakhanov said his friends in the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service - the same agencies whose troops are stationed in Chechnya - told him they had received no orders to coerce a Kadyrov vote.

"There has been no pressure in Kadyrov's favor," Aslakhanov said. "Maybe it will appear in the final stages, I don't know."

But the Kremlin would hardly need to resort to such crude methods to ensure Kadyrov's victory. The seven other candidates now remaining in the race present little challenge to Kadyrov.

Aslakhanov, Saidullayev and another top contender in the race - Khusein Dhzabrailov, first deputy director of the Rossiya hotel and a member of a prominent Chechen family - had earlier agreed to form an alliance to defeat Kadyrov in the election, Aslakhanov said.

They decided to try to prevent Kadyrov from winning in the first round and agreed that whichever of them made it into a second round would have the others' support, he said.

But Dzhabrailov unexpectedly withdrew from the race earlier this month. He did so after meeting with the Kremlin chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, and his deputy Vladislav Surkov, a source close to Dzhabrailov said at the time.

Dzhabrailov later said he withdrew because he feared his victory would fuel a conflict between armed rebels who support him and their opponents, according to Aslakhanov.

Artur Matirosyan, senior researcher of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Conflict Management Group, said there is little doubt that Kadyrov took pains to have all the serious candidates removed from the ballot.

With his strongest rivals gone, Kadyrov can now negotiate with their clans to ensure their support in the upcoming election in exchange for future spoils. And the presence of several rather weak candidates on the list will allow Kadyrov to maintain a smokescreen of pluralism in the election, said Martirosyan, whose center helped mediate in negotiations between Chechen separatists and the Kremlin in 1995-97.

Kadyrov's office could not be reached for comment Thursday night. Chechen election officials refused to comment, with a representative of the election commission, Magomed Mezhidov, saying only that the commission had not yet received Aslakhanov's official statement about his withdrawal from the race.

More stories by this section:

VTsIOM Gets a New, Younger Director | City Remembers Attacks of Sept. 11 | Official: Iran Plant Deal Could Be Off | IN BRIEF

Or take part in the discussion below.