After truce , Lebed faces tougher Chechen problem .
Alastair Macdonald
MOSCOW 1996-08-26
Alexander Lebed may finally get to discuss his Chechen peace proposals with Boris Yeltsin on Tuesday after a lost weekend in the region when he was forced to abandon plans to sign a new political treaty with the separatist rebels .
It could be a sobering experience for the Kremlin security chief who , just two months after being appointed by the president and two heady weeks after taking charge of the Chechen crisis , had promised to wrap up the 20-month war by the weekend .
Despite a mood of compromise in the region after some of the worst fighting of the war , Lebed may be just finding out that concluding a long-term settlement , somewhere between rebel demands for independence and Moscow 's insistence that Chechnya remain part of Russia , will be no easy matter .
A chain-smoking former paratroop general with a sharp line in deadpan putdowns and a soldier 's knack for making life sound simple , Lebed managed to arrange an ambitious ceasefire in the region last week , days after the Russian army threatened to bomb its way back into the rebel-held Chechen capital Grozny .
He returned at the weekend , pledging to conclude a political settlement that would make this truce work where all others have failed .
But then he apparently thought better of it .
Saying he needed to tidy up legal loose ends on the deal -- and also cover his back against unnamed pro-war schemers in Moscow -- he flew back to the capital empty-handed on Sunday .
He met Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin on Monday and , according to the press service of Lebed 's Security Council , could meet Yeltsin on Tuesday .
It was not clear if the start of Yeltsin 's holiday , announced later , would affect plans to talk .
Moscow 's as yet undisclosed proposals on Chechnya 's political future have , meanwhile , been sent back to do the rounds of various government departments .
It is not known what caused the delay in the peace plan .
Speculation mounted last week that Lebed was operating out on a limb in Chechnya as Yeltsin , hardly seen since his reelection last month , kept out of sight and then gave an interview criticising his envoy just as he clinched a truce .
But Chernomyrdin took pains at the weekend to insist Lebed was playing for a united team and that the proposals he took to rebel chief-of-staff Aslan Maskhadov had been agreed by Yeltsin .
If that were the case , it was unclear why Lebed suddenly found it necessary to have the deal verified in Moscow .
Lebed himself said he was concerned that powerful interests in Moscow , who have profited from the war and want it to go on , would seize on any inadequacy in the deal to remove him .
Maskhadov warned that Lebed risked the same fate as a former Russian army commander in the region who sought a compromise and was blown up last year by -- so the Chechens say -- Russian forces .
Maskhadov may also have made new demands on Lebed , forcing him to check back with the Kremlin on what he could offer .
A rebel spokesman said the two military men had come close to agreement on a face-saving formula acceptable to both sides and involving a referendum on independence at some future date .
Chernomyrdin said voters should decide Chechnya 's future but stressed there was no question of the government letting the region quit the Russian Federation -- something Moscow fears could encourage separatist tendencies in other ethnic regions , particularly in the strategic North Caucasus .
Lebed may be be finding that closing that political gap between the two sides is more difficult than just ending a war .