MOSCOW. Nov 10 (Interfax-AVN) - Russia will not sign a new agreement with Chechnya such as that signed in Khasavyurt in 1996, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a group of Chechen public and religious figures in Moscow on Sunday.
With the withdrawal of Russian units and "Chechnya becoming de leader Aslan Maskhadov] use his powers in the republic? What has he destruction of the spiritual and social sphere. He brought Chechnya to war," Putin said.
"Those who choose Maskhadov choose war," Putin said. "Maskhadov could call on us to kill odious terrorists and then appoint those people as his deputies. He could organize gangster raids and then denounce their perpetrators following their failure," he said.
Last September "we suggested to him that the peace process could resume. He sent his representative to Moscow as a diversion, but evaded further contacts. Instead of talks he chose terror and was behind the scum who took hundreds of people hostage in Moscow on October 23," Putin said. wherever they are, inside or outside Russia, as accomplices of terrorists," he said.
"To those who conscientiously or otherwise, fearing the gangsters or following the undying tradition of pacification, will call on us to sit at a negotiating table with the murderers, I would suggest that they hold talks with bin Laden or Mullah Omar," Putin said.
Those who kill people by their hundreds and thousands "also make political demands to the United States, Europeans and Arab countries concerning the Middle East, Kashmir and, in our case, Chechnya. They have claims in other parts of the world, too," he said.
Political issues must be resolved by political tools, but "we regard terrorists and their accomplices separate from a political process," Putin said.
The address made by Chechen public and religious figures echoes his and the entire Russian leadership's views, he said.
A group of Chechen political figures and businessmen made public on Friday their address to the Chechen people calling for speeding up the constitutional process in the republic, which must result in a constitutional referendum and the election of authorities reporting to the people.
The recent terrorist attack in Moscow was aimed, above all, at having the situation deteriorate in Chechnya where peace processes have become irreversible and hospitals, schools and other educational institutions operate, Putin said.
Those who obstruct the rebuilding of a peaceful and civilized life in the republic use the slogans of independence and so-called free self-determination as a cover, Putin said. He recalled the history of separatism degenerating into terrorism. "It was not today that Chechnya became the source and, simultaneously, the victim of international terrorism," he said.
Separatists set the process off, Putin said. "I can even presume that those who put forward separatist ideas were originally guided by quite good intentions. They, like many others, looked for a solution in the early 1990s to a bunch of conflicts and crises and could do so quite sincerely," he said.
"But others used the problems and hardships of the most difficult transitional period in Russia's history for other than noble purposes. The worst kind of Wahhabis and, in the final analysis, international terrorists took over the ideas of separatism and the so-called independent Ichkeria," Putin said. International terrorists used these ideas as a cover for their own ideological goals and aggressive intentions, for turning Chechnya into a den of international terrorism trying to implement "ambitious plans to create a medieval caliphate from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea," he said.
If the Chechen problem is not resolved today, tomorrow, like in 1996, "new attempts will be mounted to set up the caliphate," Putin said. That caliphate would include part of the Krasnodar and Stavropol territories, as well as the North Caucasus, which would be followed by the destabilization of the multi-ethnic Volga region," Putin said. "The idea was to have the situation develop according to 'the Yugoslav scenario' for the country's disintegration. This is not to be. There will be no second Khasavyurt," he said.