Morning Star, Wednesday July 26 1995. Page 5.

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Draft dodging into a protest movement in the US during the Vietnam war - now Russian conscientious objectors are publicly refusing to serve in Chechnya. FRED WEIR witnessed their action in Moscow

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On a muggy afternoon in mid-July, a group of 19 frightened and angry young men gathered in a downtown Moscow office.

Together they signed a document which they hope thousands of others will embrace - Russia`s first-ever collective refusal to perform military service.

It charges that Soviet-era conscription laws violate fundamental human rights and the unabated efforts to enforce them are a betrayal of promises made by president Boris Yeltsin when he authored Russia`s new constitutions in 1993.

"I am wiling to server in any alternative capacity, but it is against my principles to kill," - says Maxim Kostyurin, a 19-year old sound engineer. He has been evading the draft - and the military police - since April 1994.

We are supposed to be living in a civilised, democratic country that gives people a choice," he says. "I want my rights."

Mr Kostyurin says that his friends called him a starry-eyed idealist and older people snap: "Try to remember what country you're living in."

But he insists that he is not mistaken.

He reads aloud Article 59, Part 3: "Citizens of the Russian Federation, in cases where their personal convictions or beliefs contradict military service and in other cases established under federal law, have the right to exchange such obligations for alternative forms of civic service. "

"Is this not the constitution of the country I'm living in?" Mr Kostyurin asks.

But for the estimated 100,000 young men who have gone underground rather than face Russia's obligatory two years military service since the USSR, that right has proved as elusive as it is tantalising.

Mr Kostyurin's mother, Natalya. a 47-year old engineer, says that she has represented her son at three court hearings over the past year and has been told that he must either join the army or face a prison sentence.

"We are deeply religious people. We do hot believe that any cause is worth killing another human being for," she says.

"My son is a good citizen and he is willing to serve his country in any peaceful and constructive way the government prescribes."

"If necessary, he will go to jail, but he will not go into the army," she says.

A draft law on alternative service has been wending its way though the parliamentary process for almost three years.

It died when Mr Yeltsin disbanded the old opposition-dominated legislature in 1993, was resurrected more than a year later by a group of pro-reform parliamentarians and has been stalled in committee ever since.

Even if it is passed, there is no guarantee that Mr Yeltsin, who is under intense pressure from the military lobby, will sign it.

Meanwhile, courts refuse to grant conscientious-objector status to young conscripts, citing the lack of legislation.

"They announced a revolution and declared that everything will be different," says Yuri Kurochkin, another signatory of the appeal, who has been resisting military service since 1992.

"But if you're a young guy who just doesn't want to climb into the military meat-grinder, nothing has changed for you," he says.

The Russian armed forces, with two million personnel, is currently 30 per cent under strength. The eight-month old war in Chechnya has exposed the military's operational weakbnesses, but ironically boosted its political clout.

President Yeltsin's debt to the generals has grown as his popular support has ebbed and he is locked into a botched war policy.

Last April, Mr Yeltsin paid the first instalment on that debt by cancelling draft exemptions that he had earlier granted to students and family men.

In an accompanying statement, he argued that national priorities require a strong army.

During this year's spring draft, 20,000 men - about 10 per cent of new recruits - failed to show up at military induction centres, admits Col Sergei Volgin, spokesmen for Russia's defence ministry.

"They are breaking the law and they will be punished," he says.

He adds that military courts typically mete out between one and five years at hard labour to draft evaders.

But critics argue that the annual conscription drive and the long, hard burden of military service for young Russian men is illegal, unnecessary and cruel.

"Our armed forces are a completely unreformed monster that abuses and brutalises our children," says Valentina Melnikova, a spokeswomen for the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, an anti-war group.

"Even in peacetime, thousands of conscripts were dying every year due to terrible conditions in the army," she says.

"Now there is war in Chechnya and boys are being sent to kill fellow citizens and die for nothing down there. Of course, many of them are refusing to serve."

The young men who signed the collective rejection of military service insist that they are not draft dodgers but democrats and patriots.

"The goal is not merely to save a few lads from the hell of the Russian army," says Nikolai Khramov, the secretary of the Anti-Militarist Radical Association, which sponsored the declaration.

"We are fighting for the democratic soul of Russia, for our leaders to deliver on the promises they made and for this country to finally recognise its obligations to the individual citizen."

"These young men are taking an enormous risk by declaring themselves publicly. But if they don't don't do it, who will?"