FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT CONVERSATION

	May 25, 2000
	Our occasional conversations with American reporters posted overseas.

RAY SUAREZ: And tonight, that correspondent is Daniel Williams. He's the Moscow correspondent for the "Washington Post." Welcome back to the program. DAVID WILLIAMS, Washington Post: Thank you. RAY SUAREZ: Well, we saw devastating pictures from Chechnya here in the United States. We heard that the Russians had declared victory. Is the war in Chechnya over? DAVID WILLIAMS: Uh, no, the war in Chechnya is not over, and it's going to be hard even to know when it's over. It's easy for a Chechen to kill a Russian now. Russians are occupying most of the country, and therefore there's lots of them around, and the leaves are out, so that the Chechens can hide behind them, and they can carry out ambushes. It doesn't take that much to do that. The rebels are not in great shape, but again, it doesn't take that much to stand behind a few trees, wait for these noisy convoys to come by, and shoot, and that's what happens. So no, the war is not over by a long shot. RAY SUAREZ: Who, or do we even know who, is making it possible for armed units to remain in the field? How do they get fed? Supplied? DAVID WILLIAMS: Again, it doesn't take that much, and the numbers, nobody knows-- several hundred, a couple thousand? So again, it's not... it's not a huge army they're having to support. Rebels out there, the guerrillas, they survive on barley, snickers bars, water. They can get that. They can get that stuff. But again, there's not a huge supply line. There's no Ho Chi Minh trail that's really too necessary for this kind... for this level of warfare to continue for a long time. RAY SUAREZ: If you're not one of the Russian occupiers and not one of the armed guerrillas, just a rank-and-file Chechen, what's life like for you now? DAVID WILLIAMS: Well, of course it may depend on whether you have a house or not, for instance. If you're from Grozny, you haven't gone home, probably, because there is no home. If you're from several other towns, also there is no home, so this... Those people may be picking up their lives a little bit. If you have a house and if you have a town, you may have gone back, but you are caught between two forces, both of whom may suspect you. If you support the Russians in some way, openly, you could be a target of the rebels. If...and the Russians, especially young men, find themselves vulnerable to being picked up by the Russians as potential or past supporters of the rebels. So it's this rather tense situation, actually, all over Chechnya, not just the parts where the main fighting has been going on, which is in the Southeast. RAY SUAREZ: Well, we saw people on the roads. We saw people coming out of the ruins of buildings, out of hovels dug into the ground. Once the actual hot fighting stops, how do those people live? Is there an economy? DAVID WILLIAMS: Well, those people you're talking about are large... you're talking about Grozny, I think. Of course, there is no Grozny. It's just kind of a landfill at this point. Those people are still living in the basements pretty much where they did live before. They survive on handouts from the Russians, largely. There is also a curious commerce. Chechens do go into neighboring republics and come back with food, and buy and sell. You say, "well, where do they get the money for this?" Well, there are relatives in Moscow in other towns, and it's a kind of subsistence economy that is working now in Chechnya. RAY SUAREZ: Well, the man who ran the Chechnya operation, Vladimir Putin, is now the President of Russia-- he was acting President, now he's the elected President. Any changes in Moscow? DAVID WILLIAMS: Well, yes. There's certainly change in tone. A lot of the substance has yet to become evident. Putin is a man who's very clearly declared that he is going to restore Russia as a cohesive and great state, and of course, exhibit "a" is Chechnya. He's very passionate about this. "Well, we've got to cure Chechnya. Otherwise, if we don't reincorporate Chechnya into Russia, Russia's going to fall apart." That may not be... may or may not be true, but that's what he says. His next step has actually been to appoint kind of consuls to cover regions of Russia, seven of them. Now, what they're going to do and how they're going to relate to the governors, most of whom were elected, and so on, I don't know. But it's clear that there's all this maneuvering to do what in his view is necessary to bring Russia together. Again, what does that mean? Except in Chechnya, we know what it means, he did it by force. What it means for the rest of the country, we don't know. RAY SUAREZ: Are there any indications that he's given of wanting to get rid of old placeholders, crack down on corruption, go after people who might have been previously thought to be untouchable? DAVID WILLIAMS: Well, that's been one of the curious things about Putin. He... in some ways, invading Chechnya was one of the easiest things he could do. Everyone in Russia felt that Chechnya was out of control. But taking on some of the cronies, the people who have really been able to loot the resources of the state, people who engage in corruption... I can give you an example. If you go to any cemetery in Moscow or St. Petersburg and you want to get buried, right, and there's a price list. You go there, and quite openly they'll tell you to forget about the price list, you have to pay this much. Now, this would be the easiest thing to resolve, you would think, because it's quite open, as is police corruption, as is corruption in the Customs Service. None of this has been touched yet. So again, he's added bureaucracies, he's fought in Chechnya, but what he is going to do about these things that are quite visible is not clear. RAY SUAREZ: Well, didn't he have a reputation as a straight arrow, coming out of the internal security system, trying to reorganize St. Petersburg as part of the administration there? DAVID WILLIAMS: Well, straight arrow and straight arrow... Saying you were coming out of a security service or something that maybe is a contradiction in terms. His whole life was one, in some sense, of deception. That said, he has a reputation out of St. Petersburg, where he worked for the mayor there, of being honest and not corrupt, so that is a twist, and that has to be taken into account. Again, we don't know what the effect of some of the things he's doing is going to be. RAY SUAREZ: How is it, then, to cover all of this? We hear a lot of stories here in the United States about journalists being beaten, arrested on silly, propped-up charges, and then released a couple of days later, but really shaken up. Have you found it difficult to move around the country, to see what you want to see? DAVID WILLIAMS: Well, no. In Russia, there's not been that problem-- Russia proper. In Chechnya is where the problem is, because in Russia, the government was quite clear that they'd not want what happened in the first Chechen war, when Chechnya separated itself from Russia, which is that reporters would go there and tell everybody what's going on. So it was very difficult in moving in and out of Chechnya during the war, and you would get detained, supposedly for not having a credential, which they wouldn't give you anyway, and removed. And that has made it difficult and has made it impossible, in fact, to know a lot of what's going on. RAY SUAREZ: But if you don't work for the "Washington Post," if you work in Russian media, haven't there been threats, intimidation, that kind of thing - in Russia proper? DAVID WILLIAMS: Well, there's... RAY SUAREZ: In Russia proper? DAVID WILLIAMS: Yes. That, of course, predates the Putin era, and -- that has in fact come from some of these governors. There was this incident in Moscow recently where police raided a large... an independent media company in Moscow, supposedly on the grounds that they were bugging people, that they were eavesdropping on important people, and this was bad. It just so happened that this media company was also the most critical of Chechnya, and one that had seemed to be out of the circle of favored Kremlin companies. Now, what is the truth of the matter? I don't know, but of course, I suppose in my view, there are many, many places you could raid in Russia that would be more interesting, where you'd find more interesting dirty things going on than this television company. RAY SUAREZ: Daniel Williams, thanks for coming by. DAVID WILLIAMS: Thank you very much.