'Thank You, Ramzan'

According to the exiled government - Ilyas Musayev, told TIME in an interview last month that Kadyrov has the support more than hundreds CLANS in Chechnya ; - "His power there is absolute."


In Chechnya, A Blood Feud Ends—and a Despot Digs In

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2014319,00.html

The men of gun-loving Chechnya, long Russia's most rebellious province, are not known for turning the other cheek. When a member of a Chechen clan is killed, even in a street brawl the vendetta can pass through the generations, obliging the men on both sides to take revenge until their elders have reconciled, or one of the clans is wiped out. So many observers were baffled last week when the region's most notorious feud ended without a fight.

The story began banally enough, with a traffic incident on April 14, 2008. The motorcade of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov was driving through the city of Gudermes when it ran into a convoy carrying a member of the powerful Yamadayev clan. The convoy did not yield, and a gunfight broke out. Soon after, Yamadayevs started getting killed. (See "Russia's Troubled Caucasus: Five Years After Beslan.")

But by August 22, something had changed. Yamadayev traveled that day with his mother to meet Kadyrov in Chechnya, and afterward told reporters that the two men had found "no reasonable causes preventing us from reaching normal relations." Confirming the peace between them, Kadyrov attended a memorial ceremony for one of the Yamadayev brothers. "I forgave Isa Yamadayev for his incorrect statements," Kadyrov told reporters afterward. "He lost two brothers. I feel bad for him."

This is the culmination of a long drive to force all of the Chechen clans — there are more than a hundred — into line behind Kadyrov, who appears to have the unflinching support of the Kremlin. Over the years, the violent separatist insurgency has been pushed out of Chechnya into neighboring Russian republics, a development that human rights groups say involved widespread torture and summary executions committed by Kadyrov's men. Last year, Kadyrov also managed to turn the head of the separatist Chechen government in exile, Akhmed Zakayev, who announced last February that he was ready to return to Chechnya from London to "contribute to a long-term peace."

This announcement splintered the exiled government, leaving only a few dedicated separatists fighting for Chechen independence from abroad. One of them, Ilyas Musayev, told TIME in an interview last month that they would never surrender to Kadyrov. "But there is little we can do," he conceded. "His power there is absolute."

This means that for the foreseeable future, Kadyrov is likely to rule unchallenged, and Chechnya will remain a black hole of human rights abuses inside of Russia's borders. Even the international community has largely given up its criticism of Kadyrov's police state, seeing it as a lost cause, says Helen Krag, a European rights activist and sociologist who has studied Chechnya since the early 1990s.

"Politicians are constantly telling me to forget it.

To stop bothering with this place," she says. "And now the Yamadayevs have given up. I understand them. They don't want to get annihilated."