[list_indonesia] [ppiindia] Russians kill leader of Chechen rebels New Feature
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- Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 03:30:29 +0100
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Russians kill leader of Chechen rebels New Feature
By Steven Lee Myers The New York Times
Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Effect of Maskhadov's death uncertain
MOSCOW Russian special forces killed the leader of Chechnya's separatists,
Aslan Maskhadov, in a raid on Tuesday that gave the Kremlin a rare victory in a
war that has killed tens of thousands and spawned a wave of terrorist attacks
across Russia in recent years.
.
Maskhadov, who from hiding led thousands of fighters following Russia's second
invasion of the republic in 1999, died in a bunker beneath a house in an
outwardly peaceful village, Tolstoy-Yurt, only 19 kilometers, or 12 miles, from
the region's capital, Grozny, according to officials and news accounts.
.
His death is akin to the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, depriving
insurgents of their political and symbolic leader, though with still uncertain
effects on those determined to resist Russian forces in Chechnya, including
with acts of terror.
.
While Maskhadov, who was 53, nominally commanded Chechnya's fighters, he
appeared to have lost influence over Russia's most-wanted man, Shamil Basayev,
the rebel commander who has claimed responsibility for the worst terrorist
attacks, including the siege of a theater in Moscow in 2002 that killed 129 and
a school in Beslan last September that killed at least 339, half of them
children.
.
President Vladimir Putin appeared on television with the director of the
Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev, who told him that his forces had
killed Maskhadov and arrested four associates.
.
In brief, unemotional remarks, Putin asked Patrushev to confirm the
identification of Maskhadov's body and to submit a list of those involved in
the raid for medals.
.
"There is still a lot of work to do there," he said, referring to Chechnya. "We
have to build up our forces to protect the people of the republic and citizens
of all Russia from the bandits."
.
Maskhadov's imminent capture or death has been reported before, but officials
showed little doubt that it was Maskhadov who died in the raid. The network NTV
showed graphic images of a corpse that resembled him. The body lay in a pool of
blood, bare-chested, his arms outstretched and entangled in his shirt sleeves.
There was what appeared a bullet-hole beneath his left eye.
.
One of his most prominent aides, Akhmed Zakayev, said that he also had
confirmation of Maskhadov's death from sources inside Chechnya.
.
"It is just one more political assassination," he said in a telephone interview
from London, where he has received political asylum.
.
He cited the deaths of Chechnya's first post-Soviet president, Dzhokhar
Dudayev, who was killed by Russian forces during the first war in 1996, and his
predecessor, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who died in a car bombing in February 2004
while in exile in Qatar.
.
A court there convicted two Russian secret agents and sentenced them to life in
prison, though they later released them to the Russian authorities.
.
"The ordinary people of Chechnya are being killed every day because they
disagree with the federal authorities," Zakayev said, "as are the people they
have elected."
.
Zakayev said the separatist movement's leaders - now in exile or in hiding -
would under the republic's former constitution elect an interim leader, as they
did following Dudayev's death.
.
Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center who co-authored
"Russia's Restless Frontier," a book published last year that examined the
conflict's reverberations, said that Maskhadov's death might not change events
on the ground significantly, given that his leadership had become increasingly
symbolic and that Basayev remained at large.
.
Still, he called it a "political victory and a moral victory" for the Kremlin.
.
"I think it's significant for Mr. Putin," he said. "He can produce evidence
that the antiterrorist operation in Chechnya is yielding results. He needed
that, especially after Beslan."
.
The Russians considered Maskhadov a terrorist, not a rebel leader, and accused
him of masterminding many of the attacks that have struck from the Caucasus in
southern Russia to the heart of Moscow itself in recent years, killing hundreds
of civilians in a theater, at a rock concert, on the subway, or aboard trains
and passenger airliners.
.
After the siege of Middle School No. 1 in Beslan, a small city in North
Ossetia, the authorities offered a reward of $10 million for information
leading to his arrest or Basayev's. It was not immediately clear whether the
reward would be paid now that he had been found and killed.
.
Maskhadov, for his part, denied involvement in the worst of the attacks in
messages he communicated through his envoys in Europe and the United States or
through the Internet.
.
He denounced the siege in Beslan and vowed in statements to prosecute Basayev.
Earlier this year, he was reported to have offered a monthlong cease-fire,
which ended on Feb. 23. Attacks in Chechnya did seem to slow, but Russian
officials denounced the gesture as a stunt, refusing, as before, to hold any
negotiations with him or any other separatist leaders.
.
Officials provided few details on the raid, which was not surprising since it
involved officers of the FSB, the predecessor of the KGB, who even afterwards
were shown on television still wearing black masks.
.
Major General Ilya Shabalkin, who first announced his death, said in a
telephone interview that Maskhadov had been hiding in a bunker beneath a house
in Tolstoy-Yurt, while his four associates were outside.
.
He suggested that the agents intended to arrest Maskhadov, but that he had
resisted. "He was hiding in the bunker," he said. "So the bunker had to be
blown up. Apparently he was shell-shocked, but tried to shoot back."
.
He said no Russian forces had been hurt.
.
Maskhadov was born on Sept. 21, 1951, in Kazakhstan, where Stalin had ordered
the deportation of most of the Chechen population during World War II, an act
of paranoia that carries heavy symbolism among all Chechens to this day. He
served most of his life in the Soviet Army, rising to the rank of colonel and
serving in Soviet-occupied Hungary and later in Lithuania as the Soviet Union
began to fall apart.
.
After Chechnya, a small, mountainous Muslim republic on Russia's southern
border, declared its independence in 1991, he resigned his commission and
became commander of the armed forces of a country unrecognized.
.
He remained military leader during the first Chechen war, from 1994 to 1996,
when he commanded the daring assault to retake Grozny from Russian troops.
.
President Boris Yeltsin then negotiated an end to the war, leaving Chechnya
with de facto independence.
.
In January 1997, he was elected president, defeating the man whose name is
still almost always linked to his - Basayev. By 1999, with the republic roiled
by lawlessness, Basayev launched an attack on neighboring Dagestan, and Russian
forces poured in again, driving the rebellious leaders from Grozny and
eventually most of the republic.
.
It is a measure of how deeply troubled and chaotic the republic is that despite
the presence of tens of thousands of Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen forces,
Maskhadov was able to hide - for how long is not clear - in a village in the
center of Chechnya itself.
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