Rights group disputes Chechnya voter turnout

MOSCOW -- A leading Russian human rights group condemned the presidential election in Chechnya, saying Wednesday the region's capital resembled a ghost town during weekend voting despite the official claim that turnout was nearly 90 percent.

The streets in the capital of the war-scarred region were deserted, with the market closed and no more than a trickle of voters casting ballots, the Moscow Helsinki Group said.

"I had the impression that other than us, there was no one else in the city," said the head of the group, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who was in Grozny for the election. "Not people. Not cars."

There were also widespread irregularities, including districts where everyone voted for the same candidate -- "something that doesn't even happen in totalitarian regimes," said Tatyana Lokshina, another official of the group.

The Kremlin-appointed regional administration chief, Akhmad Kadyrov, won Sunday's election with more than 80 percent of the vote, according to official results. Turnout was 87.7 percent, Chechnya's Central Election Commission said.

The Helsinki Group canceled plans to send official election observers after the two candidates who did better than Kadyrov in opinion polls didn't make it to the ballot -- one disqualified by Chechnya's high court and the other named an adviser to President Vladimir Putin.

But the group did send a handful of monitors. Alexeyeva, Lokshina and monitor Sergei Shimivolos said they rarely saw more than two or three voters at polling places. An exception, they said, were sites where foreign journalists were taken as part of a Kremlin-organized tour.

"We were always being told, 'Oh, but you simply didn't arrive at the right time. If you had only come an hour ago,"' Lokshina said. "Everywhere we went, the voters had only just left and the new ones had not yet arrived."

The group said that most Chechens they talked to said they had no plans to vote and that many were leaving because of fears that rebels might attack.

Russian officials have rejected claims that the election failed to meet international standards, touting it as a successful step on the road to peace.

"No excesses happened before the election day, on the voting day or after the election," said Chechen Prime Minister Anatoly Popov, who said Wednesday that he would be keeping his job in Kadyrov's new administration, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

With his main challengers out of the race, Kadyrov faced six virtual unknowns.

"It is horribly sad that our authorities ... didn't even try to make the election look respectable," Lokshina said.

Meanwhile, violence persisted. Four soldiers were killed and 14 wounded in rebel attacks in the last 24 hours, an official in the Moscow-backed Chechen administration said. Federal forces shelled suspected rebel bases and detained about 180 people, the official said on condition of anonymity.

After a 1994-96 war that ended with Chechnya's de facto independence, Russian troops returned in 1999 following attacks on a neighboring region and apartment-building bombings that Russian authorities blamed on rebels.