From: MSN Nicknamepsychoteddybear24 (Original Message) Sent: 11/22/2006 6:24 PM
Chechnya Weekly
November 22, 2006—Volume VII, Issue 45
IN THIS ISSUE:
* Movladi Maisarov Killed in Moscow
* Were Baisarov and Politkovskaya on the Same Hit List?
* Scandal Around Litvinenko’s Poisoning Mushrooms
* Kabardino-Balkaria Rebels Vow to Continue Attacks
By Andrei Smirnov
* The New Face and the New Policies of the Kadyrov Regime
By Mayrbek Vachagaev
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MOVLADI BAISAROV KILLED IN MOSCOW
At first glance, Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov’s position in the republic’s hierarchy was strengthened significantly on November 18, when one of his most vocal opponents, former Gorets special forces unit leader Movladi Baisarov, was shot and killed in Moscow. It is possible, however, that the audacious elimination of a political rival on the streets of the Russian capital will come back to haunt Kadyrov.
Baisarov fought on the side of the separatists in 1999 but in 2000, went over to the federal side along with Akhmad Kadyrov, who became head of Chechnya’s pro-Moscow administration and named Baisarov the head of his security service. After the elder Kadyrov was assassinated in 2004, Baisarov and his men left the presidential security service, which was reorganized by Ramzan Kadyrov, and formed the Gorets unit, which was subordinated to the operational-coordination department of the Federal Security Service (FSB) for the North Caucasus. In February of this year, the Gorets unit was dissolved, and while its members were promised new jobs, they refused to join structures subordinated to Ramzan Kadyrov. Meanwhile, Baisarov began openly criticizing the Chechen prime minister, and security forces loyal to Kadyrov blockaded the Gorets unit personnel at their base in the village of Pobedinskoe.
In September, the Chechen prosecutor’s office announced that it had put Baisarov on its wanted list for his alleged involvement in the January 2004 kidnapping of a family – a man along with his wife, mother and two sisters – in Grozny’s Staropromyslovsky district. The family is believed to have been murdered. In October, Baisarov, who fled to Moscow but remained out in the open and gave interviews to journalists, denounced Kadyrov in an interview with the weekly Moskovskie novosti as a “khan” who had “Asiatic habits” and declared that Chechen President Alu Alkhanov was the republic’s legitimate leader. In late October, the Chechen government officially ordered the Gorets unit broken up and assigned its members to various Chechen Interior Ministry units. On November 14, 33 members of the unit laid down their arms, reportedly after receiving personal security guarantees from Kadyrov and Alkhanov (Chechnya Weekly, November 2, September 28, September 15 and August 17).
On November 14, the same day as the Gorets fighters’ reported surrender, Vremya novostei published an interview with Baisarov, in which he said that that a group of “Kadyrov confidants armed with grenade launchers” had been dispatched to Moscow with “verbal orders” that if they detained him or if he were transferred to them by federal authorities, they were to arrange for his “liquidation.” This was to take place, he said, “Somewhere between Rostov and Chechnya…during an escape attempt or some other way.”
According to the initial press reports by Interfax and other Russian media on November 18, Baisarov was killed during a “special operation” on Moscow’s Leningradsky Prospekt conducted by Chechen policemen and members of the Moscow anti-organized crime department (UBOP). A Moscow law-enforcement source told Interfax that the Chechen prosecutor’s office had put Baisarov on its wanted list for the murder of ten people as well as kidnappings. The source said that Moscow UBOP officers had managed to track down Baisarov and set an “ambush” for him. When he arrived at the address on Leningradsky Prospekt and the police tried to detain him, the source said, Baisarov put up “desperate resistance,” shooting and even trying to throw a grenade at them. Baisarov, said Interfax’s source, was killed by “return fire.”
Within days, however, a different picture began to emerge, at least in some media reports. “Almost immediately an unofficial version of the incident on Leninsky Prospekt appeared, according to which the Moscow police only gave legal cover to the Chechen fighters’ operation (employees of the regional departments of the Interior Ministry do not have the right to act on ‘somebody else’s’ territory without the notification of local colleagues),” Vremya novostei reported on November 20. “Indeed, some even said that the metropolitan spetsnaz arrived at Leninsky Prospekt only a half hour after the killing of Baisarov.” According to the newspaper, other policemen claimed that the Moscow police watched the operation from the Khram Drakona (Temple of the Dragon) Restaurant, which is located on the opposite side of Leninsky Prospekt from where Baisarov was confronted. And while, according to the official version, Baisarov shot at those trying to arrest him, Kommersant on November 20 quoted witnesses as saying that after arriving at the 30 Leninsky Prospekt address, apparently for a prearranged meeting, Baisarov got out of his car and approached a group of Chechens standing nearby, who, when they recognized him, “shouted at him and then fired on him with Stechkin submachine guns.”
In addition, Kommersant on November 21 quoted Andrei Potapov, a prosecutor for Grozny’s Staropromyslovsky district, as saying that Baisarov was wanted for questioning as a witness, not as a suspect, in connection with the Chechen family’s abduction and killing, and that the Chechen Interior Ministry had not put him on the federal wanted list until three days before his death. According to Kommersant, the officer who shot Baisarov was from the Interior Ministry’s extra-department guard service, “who, according to his job description, should not have been part of the operational group that came to Moscow from Chechnya.”
Kommersant reported on November 20 that documents were found on Baisarov identifying him as an FSB lieutenant colonel. The newspaper also wrote that “the liquidation of the commander” became possible after the FSB removed bodyguards who had been accompanying Baisarov around Moscow. Kommersant quoted people from his inner circle as saying that the week before his murder, Baisarov telephoned his former sponsors in the FSB, and, upon learning they could no longer protect him, tried to get a meeting with the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office so that he could give evidence “to prove his innocence and at the same time to tell about the murders and kidnappings organized by his political opponents.” One source told the newspaper: “The last contact he had with the special services was last Friday [November 17, the day before his murder], but they told him: ‘The program is closed. Don’t call anymore.’”
The FSB’s apparent behavior toward Baisarov is interesting, given that it reportedly opposes Ramzan Kadyrov’s ambitions and has been trying to clip his wings. In a piece posted November 20 on Ej.ru, the website of Yezhednevny zhurnal, Yulia Latynina gave one possible explanation for the special services’ treatment of Baisarov. “Movladi Baisarov probably sincerely hoped for the support of the siloviki, who were unhappy with Kadyrov,” she wrote. “And hoped in vain: he wasn’t a player; he was only a card on the green table. The situation was very simple. If Kadyrov could not get the better of Baisarov, everyone in Chechnya would regard this as weakness. [If Kadyrov could] get the better of him, they [the siloviki] could go to the Kremlin, to Putin, and say: Look what it has come to with the Chechens! They are bumping off people in Moscow! In Moscow, on Leninsky Prospekt!”
Indeed, many Russian politicians and other observers have reacted very negatively to the fact that forces loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov killed one of his opponents in the streets of Moscow. These are similar to the negative responses that followed Kadyrov’s hint that he was considering armed intervention to prevent anti-Chechen violence in the Russian region of Karelia and the negative reactions to the activities of Chechen security forces in the neighboring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia (Chechnya Weekly, September 8 and June 1; January 19, 2005). Kommersant quoted some of these reactions in its November 21 issue. “It doesn’t matter to these people whether they are permitted or forbidden [from doing something],” Frants Klintsevich, deputy head of the pro-Kremlin United Russia’s faction in the State Duma, said in response to the reports that it was armed Chechens who had killed Baisarov. “For them there is no law. There is the resentment of a top official, who is showing who is boss. But not all Chechens behave this way; on the everyday level, they themselves suffer as a result of such [lawlessness].”
State Duma deputy Sergei Mitrokhin, who is a member of the liberal Yabloko party, told Kommersant: “I don’t understand how the Chechen OMON could act on the territory of Moscow – couldn’t the Moscow GUVD [or] FSB deal with it themselves? The suspicion arises that Kadyrov put out a contract on Baisarov and that the federal authorities gave permission for it to be carried out. The country’s leadership must be responsible for who in the country carries out operational activities, who is allowed to carry out the death penalty in Russia and who Ramzan will dispose of next.”
State Duma deputy Arkady Baskaev, a United Russia member who commanded the Moscow military district of the Interior Ministry from 1993-2000 and was a deputy commander of the federal forces in Chechnya, said the killing of Baisarov in Moscow smacked of a criminal razborka - or settling of scores. “And the prosecutor’s office needs to explain why this killing took place,” he told Kommersant. “It is too bad that in Moscow they don’t understand how dangerous it is to allow Kadyrov to carry out such actions.”
In an article posted on the Politcom.ru website on November 20, Ivan Yartsev wrote that the “main result of the murder of a personal enemy of Ramzan Kadyrov on one of Moscow’s busiest streets is that the city’s inhabitants once again felt as unprotected as they did during the bandit shoot-outs of the early ‘90s.”
WERE BAISAROV AND POLITKOVSKAYA ON THE SAME HIT LIST?
Vyacheslav Izmailov, military columnist for Novaya gazeta, wrote in the bi-weekly’s November 20 edition that back on October 21, two weeks after the murder of the newspaper’s Chechnya correspondent, Anna Politkovskaya (Chechnya Weekly, October 12), another leading opponent of Ramzan Kadyrov, former Chechen vice premier and Grozny mayor Bislan Gantamirov, had come to the newspaper’s offices. According to Izmailov, Gantamirov told the newspaper’s editors, along with a member of the law-enforcement team investigating Politkovskaya’s murder who was on hand, that several groups of Kadyrov’s siloviki were in Moscow to liquidate him – Gantamirov – and Movladi Baisarov, and that members of these groups had already murdered Politkovskaya. Gantamirov told the newspaper that he had known about the arrival of these hit teams a month before Politkovskaya’s murder and had asked his brother to warn her.
Izmailov reported that on October 17, Moscow police detained two residents of Chechnya who had police IDs, special passes allowing them to move around without being stopped by police and pistols with silencers along with a “Val” rifle capable of penetrating an armor-plated automobile. According to Izmailov, after the two Chechens were detained, several people from the Interior Ministry and the FSB who were apparently acting not on orders but out of “some kind of personal considerations” tried to intervene on their behalf. They included an FSB lieutenant colonel who tried to get the Chechens freed but was subsequently fired from the agency and questioned by the Prosecutor General’s Office. However, the “two Kadyrovite policemen with the hit-men’s arsenal” were subsequently released, Izmailov wrote, adding that this was “totally unexpected even for some high-ranking members of the law-enforcement bodies.”
In a separate article published in the November 20 edition of Novaya gazeta, Vyacheslav Izmailov wrote about the November 15 arrest in Grozny of Sultan Isakov, head of the secretariat of the Chechen government’s commission for compensation payments. According to Izmailov, the arrest was the result of a joint operation by the Chechen branch of the FSB and the republican prosecutor’s office, and capped an investigation into the large-scale theft of payments owed to residents of Chechnya as compensation for the destruction of their homes during the war. Isakov, a protégé of Ramzan Kadyrov, was allegedly directly involved in these machinations. Kadyrov himself chairs the republican commission for compensation payments. Izmailov reported that the leadership of the Chechen Interior Ministry, which is completely controlled by Kadyrov, was not told about the investigation of Isakov. His arrest, Izmailov wrote, represents “the first real confrontation between federally-subordinated republican power bodies and Kadyrov, and is aimed, we believe, at curbing the overreaching premier.”
SCANDAL AROUND LITVINENKO’S POISONING MUSHROOMS
The apparent poisoning in London of former FSB lieutenant colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko (Chechnya Weekly, November 16) has grown into a major international scandal. Doctors and other specialists remain uncertain what substance poisoned Litvinenko, who accused the FSB of involvement in the 1999 apartment building bombings that killed around 300 people. Those bombings served as the pretext for the second Russian military intervention in Chechnya. Litvinenko was granted political asylum in Britain in 2001. (The British toxicologist John Henry initially pointed to the highly toxic heavy metal thallium, but doctors treating Litvinenko said this was unlikely. Henry later said the poisoning agent might have been radioactive thallium.) There is little doubt, however, that Litvinenko, who remains in serious condition in intensive care in London’s University College Hospital, was poisoned. As the BBC reported on November 21, Scotland Yard said it was treating Litvinenko’s illness as a suspected “deliberate poisoning.”
Meanwhile, the Italian professor who met with Litvinenko in a London restaurant on November 1, just before Litvinenko fell ill, said in a press conference in Rome on November 21 that he had asked to meet with the ex-FSB officer in London after receiving “very disturbing” information about “plots against Russians both in Italy and Great Britain.” Britain’s Sky News quoted Mario Scaramella as telling reporters that he had received from a contact a “hit list” that included him and Paolo Guzzanti, head of the Italian commission investigating KGB activities in Italy, as well as “people in Britain.” Scaramella said he asked Litvinenko to “make a call to his people in Russia to evaluate it” but that Litvinenko had told him “not to worry about it” and to call him later in the day or the following day. When Scaramella called Litvinenko the next day, the latter’s wife indicated he was ill with the flu. Litvinenko’s symptoms apparently then drastically worsened.
During his Rome press conference, Scaramella said Litvinenko had told him in London on November 1 that he had met with other people in the city earlier that morning. Kommersant on November 22 reported that Litvinenko met with two Russians on November 1 before meeting with Litvinenko, and identified one of them as Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer and former head of security for ORT television, as Russia’s state-controlled First Channel was known when it was under the de facto control of Boris Berezovsky, the erstwhile Kremlin insider who is now also living in exile in London and is a close associate of Litvinenko. Kommersant reported that it contacted Lugovoi in Moscow but that he refused to comment on the Litvinenko poisoning.
Former Soviet spy Oleg Gordievsky, who also lives in exile in the United Kingdom and is a friend of Litvinenko, was quoted by Britain’s Times newspaper on November 20 as saying, in an apparent reference to Lugovoi: “He used to be in Mr. Berezovsky’s entourage and was imprisoned in Moscow. Then suddenly he was released, and soon after that he became a businessman and a millionaire. It is all very suspicious. But the KGB has recruited agents in prisons and camps since the 1930s. That is how they work.” Litvinenko apparently drank tea during his meeting with Lugovoi and the other unidentified Russian in London on November 1, and Scaramella said in his Rome press conference that he understood that the British authorities are investigating the possibility that Litvinenko was poisoned during that meeting.
Scaramella said during his press conference that the information he had received was in two e-mails and that he passed the information on to the British authorities through diplomatic channels. “The information was disturbingly serious and these people are very dangerous. I was warned to be very careful as these people are well organized,” he said. “The information regarded plots to do something both in Italy and Great Britain. There were several Russian people in Britain on that list as well as Litvinenko, Mr. Guzzanti and myself.” According to Sky News, Scaramella refused to elaborate on where the list had come from other than to say it came “from someone who lives out of Russia.” However, the Los Angeles Times on November 22 quoted him as saying that he had alerted Litvinenko to an e-mail he had received, warning that both of their names had surfaced on a hit list connected to organized criminals in St. Petersburg.
According to Sky News, Scaramella appeared at his Rome news conference with bodyguards and, when asked if he was scared and what steps he had taken to increase his own personal security, replied: “I don’t want to answer that question. These people are very dangerous. We are talking about people involved in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya.” He also described how there was a “strong connection” between the Russian mafia and the former KGB and their successor organizations, the FSB and SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), and said that Litvinenko had provided information that led to the arrest of six Ukrainians who were smuggling arms between Russia and Italy for an attempted hit. Scaramella added: “About a year ago Litvinenko contacted me to say he had details about arms being smuggled to Italy. With that information I contacted the Italian intelligence services and he also spoke to them. It led to the arrest of six Ukrainians near Teramo who were found with arms. They had hidden powerful grenades - strong enough to take out a tank or an armored car - inside two hollowed out Bibles. The information was that these grenades were intended for a hit man from the former Eastern bloc who was living in the Naples area.” When asked directly what he thought of the attempt on Litvinenko’s life, Scaramella said: “It was a political assassination.”
As various media have pointed out in the wake of Litvinenko’s apparent poisoning, Yuri Shchekochikhin, the State Duma deputy from the Yabloko party and Novaya gazeta deputy editor who died in July 2003 after a mysterious illness, is believed to have been poisoned. Shchekochikhin had been investigating the Tri Kita case, involving alleged corruption by FSB officials, as well as the 1999 apartment building bombings. In addition, Anna Politkovskaya was apparently poisoned as she was traveling to Beslan, North Ossetia, to try to mediate the hostage crisis there in September 2004.
Perhaps the most interesting take on the Litvinenko poisoning case came from Boris Berezovsky. The website of Ekho Moskvy on November 20 quoted the exiled tycoon as saying in an interview with the radio station that the organizers of the attempt on Litvinenko’s life should be sought out in the Kremlin and that he did not rule out that it was carried out on President Vladimir Putin’s orders. However, the website quoted Berezovsky as then saying that while the Kremlin “unquestionably” stood behind the poisoning, Putin’s participation in it “raises many questions” and the incident “undoubtedly hurts Putin’s reputation.”
Berezovsky added: “I have the impression that it is being done by people who are insisting that he [Putin] goes for a third term; people who are showing that he is not the only one who makes decisions of this kind in Russia.” The attempt on Litvinenko’s life and the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, said Berezovsky, were “links in the same chain.”
The SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, denied involvement in Litvinenko’s poisoning, the Associated Press reported on November 22. “Litvinenko is not the kind of person for whose sake we would spoil bilateral relations,” Interfax quoted Sergei Ivanov, a Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman, as saying. “It is absolutely not in our interests to be engaged in such activity.” On November 21, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed suggestions that Russian intelligence services were involved as “sheer nonsense.”
Kabardino-Balkaria Rebels Vow to Renew Attacks
By Andrei Smirnov
On November 15 and 16, a video statement made by Anzor Astemirov, aka Emir Seyfullah, the leader of the rebels of Kabardino-Balkaria, a region in the North Caucasus, was posted on the rebel-based Camagat website as well as the Kavkaz Center website.
Astemirov said that the militants were planning to conduct a large-scale operation in Kabardino-Balkaria soon, but that prior to this they were getting ready to target local residents who had cooperated with the Russian authorities, including policemen, officials, clerics, and businessmen. “For some time, we have been indulgent toward anyone who considered himself a Muslim, but this will now change,” the rebel leader warned on the video. “Now we will consider who is a Muslim in deed and not just in word.”
At the same time, Astemirov claimed that more and more people in the region are joining the ranks of the insurgency, including students, workers, businessmen and even policemen.
Even before Astemirov’s statement appeared, it was evident that the rebels were preparing large attacks in the North Caucasus. In September, Dagestani Interior Minister Adilgerei Magomedtagirov announced that “the leaders of these bandit formations plan to carry out several terrorist acts in several republics of the North Caucasus.” Furthermore, on October 17, General Arkady Yedelev, commander of the Russian Anti-Terrorist Forces in the North Caucasus, said at a press conference in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, that, “until Astemirov and [Musa] Mukozhev [another leader of Kabardino-Balkarian militants] are caught, there is a possibility of terrorist attacks and extremist raids in Kabardino-Balkaria” (Vesti, October 20).
The tactics that Astemirov discussed have been already implemented throughout the Caucasus. Clerics, local policemen, and officials are being killed everywhere, from Karachaevo-Cherkessia in the western North Caucasus to Dagestan in the east. As for Kabardino-Balkaria itself, a colonel from the Organized Crime Department of the republican police was wounded in September by a car bomb, while a district police chief in Cherkesy (a Kabardinian city about 10 kilometers west of Nalchik) was recently fatally shot by rebels when he was driving to work.
The aim of these tactics is to weaken the pro-Russian authorities by eliminating or intimidating those who support the Russian cause and who oppose the insurgency. The rebels believe that this strategy, which appears similar to the tactics of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, will help to isolate the Russian forces in the North Caucasus. Afterwards, it will be much easier for the insurgency to prepare and to conduct a large-scale offensive against the newly-isolated Russian troops.
The question is, what is the true strength of the insurgency in Kabardino-Balkaria, and how popular is it with the locals?
There has been no official reaction in Kabardino-Balkaria to Astemirov’s statement. Unofficially, republican security officers told the newspaper Kommersant that the rebels did not currently possess the capability to organize another large-scale raid on Nalchik like the one they had conducted on October 13, 2005, but that they could target senior police officers, which is similar to what the insurgents in Dagestan do. (Kommersant, November 18).
It should be noted that the authorities cancelled access to the Internet in Kabardino-Balkaria as soon as Astemirov’s video was posted on the Camagat website on November 15. It was impossible to access the Internet in the republic for several days after this. The shutdown of the Internet was an obvious and immediate reaction to the statement. Yet, at the same time, security officials have not visibly tightened security measures. At the very least, there have been no noticeable additional patrols or mobile posts in Nalchick. A possible explanation for this, though, is the fact that there are already so many troops in the region that it is virtually impossible to send in even more or to keep them in a state of full alert all the time. The authorities are now focusing on combating the propaganda campaign initiated by the rebels in Kabardino-Balkaria when Astemirov’s statement was posted on the Internet. Larisa Dorogova, a famous regional lawyer, told Jamestown that three young men, who had been distributing video cassettes and DVDs of Astemirov’s statement, were recently arrested in Nalchick. However, the statement is also circulating on cell phones, which is much harder to block.
Despite the big losses suffered by the insurgents during the raid on Nalchik last year, the insurgency in Kabardino-Balkaria still has quite a bit of indigenous support. Last summer, Kabardino-Balkaria’s Interior Minister Yuri Tomchak admitted that local officials had not yet discovered the identities of more than 100 of the gunmen who took part in the raid. Likewise, the authorities have been unable to locate 40 rebels wanted in connection with the raid (Kavkazky Uzel, July 13).
Nevertheless, sources in the regional Interior Ministry told Jamestown that the police are looking for more than 300 men who are involved in rebel activities. Irina Babich of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who studies the role of Islam in Kabardino-Balkaria, estimates that the number of potential supporters of the Islamic insurgency in the region could number up to 10,000. It should be noted that Anzor Astemirov, the top rebel commander, as well as Musa Mukozhev, the spiritual leader of the rebels, are both highly respected by the young Balkars and Kabardinians. Both studied in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1990s and speak excellent Arabic. Moreover, Astemirov’s local popularity is based upon the fact that he is a descendant of one of the most influential aristocratic families of Kabarda; and Mukozhev had already attracted thousands of disciples by the end of the 1990’s as a result of his public sermons in local non-government run mosques.
