Russia: War-weary Chechens went to the polls to elect a president yesterday in what the Kremlin called a key step to securing peace, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow.
Separatist rebels denounced the vote as a Soviet-style sham that would only prolong guerrilla fighting in the southern Russian republic.
Moscow's chosen candidate and the only realistic winner in the vote, Mr Akhmad Kadyrov, said victory would allow him to bring order and justice to a region shattered by two wars in a decade between federal forces and independence fighters.
Russian claims of high voter turnout in free and fair voting conditions were immediately questioned by rights groups and reporters in Chechnya, where all Mr Kadyrov's serious opponents were excluded or withdrew from the election race.
"There will be no second round," a bullish Mr Kadyrov told journalists in his native village of Tsentoroi, south of the Chechen capital Grozny.
He needed more than 50 per cent of votes to win the election outright. Some 562,000 people were eligible to vote in Chechnya, including about 30,000 Russian servicemen stationed there.
"My first act will be a decree to set up a commission to investigate all the criminal acts which have taken place," he said of his plans for Chechnya, where he was a guerrilla leader before being wooed to the Kremlin side.
He and his thousands-strong personal army are loathed in Chechnya, and rebels denounce him as Moscow's stooge.
He said victory garnered in Chechnya's 426 polling stations - heavily guarded by 13,500 soldiers and police - would change all that.
"People will no longer be able to say, as they sometimes do, that I am [President Vladimir\] Putin's puppet. I will be a real leader."
With the withdrawal or exclusion of half a dozen potential challengers, it was only Mr Kadyrov who gained any real publicity ahead of the election.
Chechen Prime Minister Mr Anatoly Popov said the election was in line with international norms, and dismissed criticism from democracy watchdogs that a fair poll was impossible while Russians troops still die daily in rebel attacks, and locals accuse Moscow's forces of kidnap, rape and murder.
Mr Popov said: "The republic is awash with observers: international ones, some from social organisations and religious organisations. And the general impression they will be left with, I think, is that a holiday has finally come to Chechnya because the people are glad that elections are at last taking place."
The only international observers present were from the Arab League, the organisations of the Islamic Conference and the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose grouping of ex-Soviet states.
Similar groups approved a referendum in March that the Kremlin said proved Chechnya's desire to remain part of the Russian Federation.
Rebels called the referendum a farce, and intensified their attacks in and around Chechnya in the ensuing months.
"That was a referendum in a ghetto, and this will be an election in a ghetto," former speaker of the Russian parliament Mr Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Chechen and one-time potential rival to Mr Kadyrov, said on the eve of the vote. "The rapists, murderers and bandits - among the army, Kadyrov's people and the rebels - have divided Chechnya up among themselves, and won't let people have a normal life," he told The Irish Times.