From: MSN Nicknamepsychoteddybear24  (Original Message)    Sent: 7/14/2006 9:04 AM
BASAYEV'S DEATH CREATES FATEFUL CHOICE FOR RUSSIAN LEADERSHIP.
The death late on July 9 of Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev
creates a window of opportunity for those few Russian officials who
advocate peace talks as the only logical way to end the ongoing
fighting across the North Caucasus. At the same time, if the Russian
leadership chooses to spurn that opportunity, the North Caucasus
resistance is already planning -- apparently in line with an eight
year plan of action drafted and endorsed four years ago -- to take
the fighting across the Volga and into the heartland of Russia.
The circumstances of Basayev's death remain sketchy: he
is said to have been killed when a lorry packed with explosives
detonated near the village of Ekazhevo, south-east of the Ingushetian
town of Nazran. Whether the explosion was freakishly fortuitous -- as
the deaths of Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005 and of
Maskhadov's successor Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev last month appear to
have been -- or whether it was the result of a sophisticated Federal
Security Service (FSB) operation remains unclear.
Basayev's death, coming as it does less than a month
after the death of Sadulayev, is undoubtedly a major blow to the
Chechen resistance, especially in light of his fighting experience
and role as strategist and as coordinator between the various North
Caucasus fronts. But as both Sadulayev and his successor Doku Umarov
have made clear, the strength of the resistance to Russian domination
both in Chechnya and in other North Caucasus republics long ago
reached the point where the death of one man -- even of a legendary
figure such as Basayev -- cannot derail it, given that a younger
generation of fighters is waiting in the wings to take over. Neither
the death of Maskhadov nor that of Sadulayev appears to have deterred
young men across the North Caucasus from flocking to join the ranks
of the resistance. Umarov said in an interview with RFE/RL's
North Caucasus Service in April, and again in a recent interview with
the Turkish daily "Vakit," that the resistance has far more potential
recruits to choose from than it can provide weapons for. In other
words, the weak point of the resistance is not a lack of man-power
but a lack of funds.
Moreover, the resistance drafted and endorsed four years ago
-- while Maskhadov was still alive -- a plan of action for the period
until 2010. The decision by Sadulayev in May 2005 to establish six
"fronts," four within Chechnya, one in Daghestan, and one for the
rest of the North Caucasus, the latter subdivided into separate
sectors for Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Stavropol,
Karachayevo-Cherkessia, and Krasnodar Krai, is presumably part of
that plan, as is the decision taken on July 8 by the State War
Council to establish new fronts in the Urals and the Volga region.
Under Sadulayev, the resistance finally abandoned the tactic
of large-scale terrorist attacks against the Russian civilian
population that became synonymous with the name of Basayev. Such
attacks -- launched first by Basayev in Budyonnovsk in June 1995 and
again with devastating effect in the hostage takings in Moscow in
October 2002 and Beslan in September 2004 -- more than anything else
undercut international support and sympathy for the Chechen cause.
Even more crucially, such tactics played into the hands of a Russian
leadership that sought to persuade the West that the fighting in
Chechnya was part of the international war on terrorism. In 2003, the
UN and the U.S. government designated Basayev's Riyadus-Salikhin
battalion a terrorist organization; the Russian leadership placed a
reward of $10 million on his head.
The death of the man whom Moscow branded Terrorist No. 1 at
least theoretically removes the major obstacle to a negotiated
settlement of the conflict, given that the U.S. too regarded Basayev
as a terrorist. By contrast, the international community would be
less likely to discourage Moscow from embarking on peace talks with
Umarov, who is not known to have participated in any terrorist
attack, or with London-based Chechen Foreign Minister Akhmed Zakaev,
described by former Russian Security Council Secretary Ivan Rybkin in
a recent interview with RFE/RL's North Caucasus Service as
representing the moderate wing of the armed resistance. Many senior
Russian officials, however, claim that both Umarov and Zakayev are,
like Basayev, tainted by terrorism or war crimes. One of Russian
Prosecutor General Yury Chaika's first actions following his
appointment last month was to launch a new bid to have Zakayev
extradited from the U.K. And Umarov recently announced the creation
of what is tantamount to a death squad tasked with the assassination
of "international terrorists and war criminals" outside Chechnya who
have been sentenced to death by a Sharia court for the "genocide of
the Chechen people." Whether Umarov would be prepared at this
juncture to impose a moratorium on the activities of that death squad
to signal his readiness for peace talks is unclear, however.
Moreover, the resistance still intends, as Umarov stressed in
his first public statement as president in late June, to continue to
target Russian military and police facilities both in the North
Caucasus and elsewhere. (The location at which Basayev was reportedly
killed suggests that the intended target of the lorryload of
explosives may have been the Russian military base at Mozdok in North
Ossetia.) And the example of the October 2002 Moscow theater
hostage-taking suggests that the logistical problems involved in
launching such attacks thousands of kilometers from Chechnya are not
insurmountable.
The Russian leadership thus faces a choice between, on the
one hand, abandoning President Putin's policy of Chechenization
-- in other words offloading on to Moscow's quislings most of the
responsibility for hunting down the remaining Chechen resistance
forces and trying to revive Chechnya's war-shattered economy and
infrastructure -- and embarking on peace talks, or, alternatively,
ignoring the opportunity and risking an indefinite series of attacks
on military, police and security facilities across Russia. Some of
those attacks will in all likelihood fail, as did the October 2005
raids in Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, and the planned
assault that appears to have killed Basayev. But the planned opening
of the Volga and Urals fronts could herald an entire new dimension to
what is no longer just the second Chechen war.
As for the continuing resistance in the North Caucasus, it
will face its most serious challenge when Umarov is killed -- which
he himself accepts with equanimity is simply a matter of time. His
death will remove the last military leader of influence still in
Chechnya whose combat experience expands an entire decade, and
possibly one of the last to have been close to Maskhadov. True,
Basayev and Umarov will have shared their experience with a younger
generation of commanders who have fought under them for the past
seven years, even though the names of those men may be unknown
outside the North Caucasus. But that younger generation of men in
their 20s and early 30s, possibly with only a rudimentary formal
education and only hazy childhood memories of an era when Chechnya
was not at war or in turmoil, are less likely either to consider
peace talks an option, or to be taken seriously as negotiating
partners either by Moscow or by the international community. From
that point of view, President Putin and other members of the Russian
leadership now have a window of opportunity that could slam shut in a
matter of weeks if Umarov too is killed. (Liz Fuller)