Russian intellectuals Tuesday urged the nation's political classes to come forward with their own suggestions to solve the Chechen crisis, saying last month's school hostage tragedy showed the government had no answers.
A Chechnya round table organised by the liberal SPS party linking human rights activists, analysts, journalists and sociologists stressed the need for new thinking to bring peace to the rebel southern republic, where government forces are trying quell armed separatists.
At least 342 people, half of them children, were killed after gunmen demanding independence for Chechnya seized hostages in a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan.
Ludmilla Alexeyeva, chairperson of the Helsinki Watch human rights group, told the meeting here the Kremlin had wasted the opportunity to start negotiations with Chechnya's separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, now in exile in London. Maskhadov, president of Chechnya in 1997 during its short-lived de facto independence after the first 1994-96 Chechen war, has been seen as a moderate force in the splintered separatist movement.
He denied any role in the Beslan school hostage-taking after a suspected hostage-taker said he had ordered the raid.
"Chechen society has disintegrated and there is no one personality able to unite the Chechens," Alexeyeva told the round table, urging efforts towards consensus with the Chechen people.
"Even if we build schools and hospitals in Chechnya there will be no peace as long arbitrary executions and kidnappings of innocent people continue", she warned.
Leonid Gozman, a member of the SPS political council, said: "All possible proposals must be discussed publicly to choose the least painful." Valentin Gefter of the Russian Human Rights Institute said the government was no longer able to solve the Chechnya problem alone. What was needed was a Chechnya "roadmap."
"It's up to civil society to prepare it," he said.
Meanwhile in its capital Grozny, Chechnya swore in its latest pro-Moscow president, Alu Alkhanov, who ruled out talks with guerrillas five years into the republic's latest separatist war.