MOSCOW, Oct 14 (AFP) - Russia will tighten its political grip over the restless Caucasus and may introduce a moratorium on elections there as it tries to stamp out violence linked to Chechnya, a top Kremlin official said Thursday.
President Vladimir Putin's personal envoy in the Caucasus region defended the Kremlin's proposal to have Moscow appointees run the region instead of having governors elected in popular votes as a required security precaution.
The move is meant to bring the regions under strict Moscow control, and comes in response to a wave of August and September terror attacks that killed hundreds, leaving the authorities scrambling for an adequate security response.
"The north Caucasus region urgently needs to undergo thorough political reforms," Putin's aide Dmitry Kozak told reporters. "Elections do not guarantee democracy in the Caucasus," he said.
Putin's proposal has been criticized by Western human rights campaigners and the more liberal Russian factions, which no longer hold a meaningful representation in parliament.
"Personally, I favor decentralized power," Kozak said. "But the measure is forced on us by what is going on in the north Caucasus."
Seen as one of Putin's most powerful aides, Kozak also told reporters that last month's Beslan school hostage taking that killed more than 330 people proved yet again that guerrillas could only be destroyed, not talked to.
"We cannot hold talks with people who stage inhumane acts like those in Beslan. There is no basis for talking to such people. Otherwise, the terrorists will get what they are after.
"There is no one left to speak to after Beslan," an attack that came five years into the Chechen war, Kozak said.
Despite the Beslan attack, Washington has still urged Moscow to find less radical Chechens for peace talks, instead of relying exclusively on pro-Russian officials whom it has installed to head the republic's new government.
That government appears to exercise only limited authority over large swaths of Chechnya, controlled either by various field commanders, Russian troops or other paramilitary or security organizations.