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Moscow Holds Talks With Chechens As U.N. Says Too Soon For Chechen Mission
MOSCOW (AFP) - Moscow has been holding talks with opposition Chechen groups to try to end the conflict in Chechnya, the Russia army chief of staff, General Anatoly Kvashnin, told the news agency RIA-Novosti Friday.
"We are holding talks with those who have their heads screwed on properly and who understand there is no turning back," Kvashnin said, in reference to the peace accords that halted the conflict between Moscow and Chechnya from 1994 to 1996.
However, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev quickly denied the statement, qualifying it as "silly" and "absurd," according to RIA-Novosti.
Sergeyev and Kvashnin have often been at loggerheads over army reform.
President Vladimir Putin is categorically opposed to negotiating with the Chechen oppostion, including the breakaway province's president, Aslan Maskhadov.
Meanwhile, Security concerns are still preventing the United Nations from launching humanitarian operations in Chechnya, a senior U.N. official said here Friday.
U.N. Deputy Secretary General Carolyn McAskie had just returned from a two-day trip to the North Caucasus where she visited the Chechen capital of Grozny, as well as refugee camps in the neighboring Russian republics of Ingushetia and North Ossetia.
"It is not yet time for the United Nations to work freely in Chechnya," McAskie told a Moscow news conference, citing the lack of security guarantees and acceptable living conditions as the main obstacle to the refugees' return to the war-torn republic.
"Taking into account the current security situation, I would not recommend a U.N. presence in Chechnya," said the deputy secretary general, who is responsible for humanitarian issues.
McAskie added that Chechen refugees in Ingushetia were "not very enthusiastic" about returning to their shattered homes.
"The general feeling among the refugees in Ingushetia is that they cannot go home because of the lack of security and accommodation," she added.
Around 220,000 people have been displaced by the war in Russia's breakaway republic.
Also, a Russian soldier and two policemen were killed in separate incidents in the breakaway southern republic of Chechnya, the ITAR-TASS quoted officials as saying Friday.
The soldier was killed, and three others injured, Friday when a radio-controlled mine was detonated in Grozny as a convoy carrying special forces troops from the justice ministry drove by, the agency said, quoting the army.
In a separate incident on Thursday, two Russian policemen were shot dead at a city market, ITAR-TASS quoted the republic's top pro-Moscow prosecutor as saying Friday.
The interior ministry police officers were killed in broad daylight in a burst of automatic gunfire that erupted in the city's central market, Vsevolod Chernov.
Nearly 14 months after Russia launched its military “intervention” in Chechnya on October 1, 1999, separatist opposition members continue to inflict daily losses on pro-Moscow troops and police.
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