From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 2/7/2008 2:40 AM Chechnya’s Theatre of War Akhmed Zakayev – actor, politician and former resistance fighter – talks to Vanora Bennett
IT might seem counter-intuitive for a military resistance movement with a reputation for bloodthirstiness to choose a classical actor as its representative in the West. But Akhmed Zakayev, whose current incarnation is as foreign minister of Chechnya’s separatist government-in-exile, sees no incongruity.
What many would call an unusual career arc has taken the urbane, trimly bearded and faultlessly ambassadorial Zakayev from successes as Hamlet and Coriolanus in the Grozny theatre of the 1980s, to victories as a separatist field commander during the Russian-Chechen conflict of the 1990s, to failures as a peace negotiator with Moscow after the war resumed in 1999, and to exile in London after Russia accused him of terrorism (a British court rejected those allegations and granted Zakayev asylum). Today, he counts as friends and colleagues individuals as disparate as Doku Umarov, the heavily bearded Muslim fighter in military fatigues who last month became president of an anti-Russian resistance movement calling itself the separatist government of Ichkeria; Boris Berezovsky, the most prominent Russian billionaire to have fallen out with Vladimir Putin since 2000, and a fellow-exile in London; the British actress and activist Vanessa Redgrave; and the late Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian ex-secret service officer infamously poisoned with polonium last autumn.
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