ChechnyaObituaryShamil Basayev
Chechen politician seeking independence through terrorismShamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord reported to have died in an explosion yesterday aged 41, was a one-time guerrilla commander who turned into a mastermind of spectacular and brutal terrorist actions. His passage from national liberation hero to pitiless extremist with fundamentalist Islamic overtones reflected the collapse of values on both sides of Russia's struggle to contain Chechen demands for independence in the post-Soviet period.
As respect for civilian life and human rights disappeared - among Russian forces as well as among the Chechen guerillas - Basayev emerged as the most feared and desperate of the warlords. He spent the last eight years on the run, emerging on videos or in telephone calls to take responsibility for dramatic atrocities.
The Russian authorities saw him as a Chechen version of Osama bin Laden, a tag which had some validity, though it exaggerated Basayev's ideological reach. He never commanded Bin Laden's international appeal, and the Chechen struggle against Russian domination only attracted a few foreign fighters, partly because jihadis view Russia as a much less powerful threat to the Islamic world than the US. None the less, he was an adherent of the strict Wahhabi sect that also inspired Bin Laden.
Basayev's father was one of the thousands of poverty-stricken Chechens who returned to their homeland in the 1950s after Stalin's deportations. Brought up on tales of the two-century-old Chechen struggle to preserve their culture from Russian rule, Shamil was also deeply imbued with Soviet history. He once described himself as an "all-Soviet kid" who admired the role Chechens played in fighting with Russia against the Nazi invasion. A conscript in the Red Army, he went on to study land management in Moscow. He described his heroes as Abraham Lincoln, Garibaldi and Che Guevara.
During the failed military coup against Boris Yeltsin in August 1991, Basayev was one of scores of Chechens who joined the barricades to protect the Russian president. But when Dzhokar Dudayev used the ensuing chaos to declare Chechen independence, Basayev rushed to the capital, Grozny, to join the fledgling state. He quickly became a commander, leading several hundred volunteers fighting to help Abkhazia break away from Georgia. When Yeltsin sent troops to quash Chechnya's independence in 1994, Basayev was one of the city's fiercest defenders and became a national hero.
He was already toying with the idea of "taking the war to the Russians". In June 1995, he masterminded a raid into the southern town of Budyonnovsk, where his men took control of a hospital after capturing several Russian officers and men. Basayev ordered 12 of them to be executed in a bid to get the Russians to give him and his men safe passage back to Chechnya. Russian forces made one attempt to storm the building, prompting the death of several hostages. After two more botched efforts, the Russians agreed to let Basayev go in return for freeing the remaining hostages.
Basayev's reputation as a ruthless adventurer was sealed. He still commanded widespread support in Chechnya, a following which he enhanced the following year by organising the successful recapture of Grozny from the Russians. Yeltsin then made peace.
Basayev ran for the Chechen presidency in 1997, coming second with 27% of the vote. He served for several months as prime minister without much success. As Chechen society degenerated, in the unreconstructed ruins of postwar Grozny, the collapse of the economy after the USSR had fallen apart, and the militarisation of a generation of jobless young men, he became a warlord. He and his friends became kidnappers, as well as traffickers in oil stolen from the republic's wells.
War was always on Basayev's mind, even as he studied the basics of Islamic thought and became affected by extreme notions. In the summer of 1999 he organised a raid into the Dagestan mountains with the apparent aim of setting up an Islamic state. The move was denounced by Chechnya's president Aslan Maskhadov, but it was used by Vladimir Putin, Russia's new prime minister, to justify a fresh invasion of Chechnya. Russian troops took Grozny in January 2000, forcing Basayev to escape to the mountains of the south, losing a leg in a minefield in the process. From here he is believed to have organised several terrorist spectaculars, the worst of which was the seizure of a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in September 2004. On the pattern of Budyonnovsk nine years earlier, 331 people, about half of them children, died after a botched Russian rescue. Basayev was not on the scene, but claimed to have directed it, and last October he boasted of organising an attack on police facilities in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria that left 139 people dead.
Basayev's brutality helped to undermine the Chechen cause, allowing Putin to portray the struggle as part of a worldwide Islamic terror movement. It embarrassed the moderates, who wavered between denouncing Basayev and trying to coopt him, a hopeless task. But even after his death, violence and lawlessness will remain the dominant features of Chechnya's life for many years to come.
̭ Shamil Basayev, politician and warlord, born January 14 1965; died July 10 2006
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