By empty (1/23/2004 issue of the CACI Analyst)
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin contradicted the official Kremlin line that the Chechen war was over and won but reaffirmed France\'s desire to work with Moscow to create a \"new international order.\" \"Chechnya is in a state of open war, with its daily quota of dramas and its risks of destabilisation for neighbouring countries, from Turkey to Iran,\" de Villepin said, addressing a group of students in Moscow where he also met his Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov. Moscow has consistently referred to the fighting in Chechnya, where it poured in troops to put down a separatist insurgency in October 1999, as an \"anti-terrorist operation\" and not a war, and has for several months insisted that the situation in the southern republic has been \"normalized.The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst is a biweekly publication of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, a Joint Transatlantic Research and Policy Center affiliated with the American Foreign Policy Council, Washington DC., and the Institute for Security and Development Policy, Stockholm. For 15 years, the Analyst has brought cutting edge analysis of the region geared toward a practitioner audience.
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