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Chechnya looks beyond
Maskhadov
By Liz Fuller
Chechen leader and resistance commander
Aslan Maskhadov was killed on March 8 in a special
operation in Tolstoi-Yurt, north of Grozny,
Russian agencies reported, quoting Colonel Ilya
Shabalkin, spokesman for the Russian federal
forces in the North Caucasus.
Maskhadov's death effectively
demolishes the hope that the ongoing conflict in
Chechnya can be resolved peacefully, at the
negotiating table. Command of the semi-autonomous
resistance 
forces, the various
detachments of which are capable of operating
independently for months at a time, now devolves
to radical field commander Shamil Basaev, the next
in seniority and experience after Maskhadov.
While Maskhadov sought repeatedly to
obtain Russia's consent to negotiate a peace
settlement that would guarantee the security of
the Chechen people within the Russian Federation,
Basaev has made it clear that he has no interest
in peaceful coexistence with Russia. But it is
likely that others, as yet unknown or little
known, will emerge in the months to come to
challenge Basaev for that role, or to operate
independently of him.
Talks with those new
potential resistance leaders, according to former
Ingushetian president Ruslan Aushev - who
negotiated with one of them in the North Ossetian
town of Beslan during last September's hostage
taking - would be "incomparably more difficult"
than with Maskhadov and his associates, even
assuming that the Russian leadership would agree
to any such talks.
Aushev went on to warn,
in an interview published in Novaya Gazeta last
month, that it would be wrong to dismiss the new
generation of fighters as savages; he described
them as "politicians with a young and aggressive
ideology behind them ... they are well-informed
and armed with sophisticated technologies." More
to the point, radical Islam is a far more
compelling motivating force to the new generation
of militants than it was for Maskhadov.
Maskhadov's death also removes the last
constraints and inhibitions about attacks on
Russian civilians and extending the war beyond the
confines of Chechnya. Until very recently,
Maskhadov had insisted that his men abide strictly
by the Geneva Conventions of warfare, that they
refrain from killing civilians, and that they
desist from terrorist attacks elsewhere in the
Russian Federation.
It was only in his
most recent communication, just last week with
RFE/RL's North Caucasus Service, that Maskhadov
hinted he might relax the prohibition on extending
fighting into other North Caucasus republics as
the sole means of upping the pressure on Russia to
end the war.
He pointed to the emergence
of autonomous militant formations in Daghestan,
Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria. Those
formations all maintained links to, and some were
trained by, Basaev, who has claimed responsibility
for numerous acts of terrorism, including the
Beslan hostage taking, the Moscow theater hostage
taking in October 2002, and the killing of
pro-Moscow Chechen president Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov
in May 2004.
Insofar as Maskhadov's death
will almost certainly lead to an upsurge of
resistance activity across the North Caucasus as
soon as the spring foliage provides enough cover,
it may enhance Moscow's reliance on the
pro-Russian Chechen military formations, including
the so-called special presidential guard
subordinate to First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan
Kadyrov, Akhmed-hadji's son and perhaps the most
feared and most hated man in Chechnya.
Russian President Vladimir Putin already
apparently regards Kadyrov as the most credible
and reliable source of "objective" information
about the "true" situation in Chechnya. Moreover,
the fact that the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti
(Russia's Federal Security Service or FSB) managed
to kill Maskhadov is likely to act as an
additional incentive to Kadyrov to make good on
his sworn pledge to kill Basaev, the one figure
who could coordinate and control future resistance
activities in the North Caucasus.
The key
question that is likely to remain unanswered is
whether the FSB has known Maskhadov's whereabouts
for some time, but decided only now, for unknown
reasons, to close in on him, or whether he was
betrayed. On March 7, lenta.ru reported that
Maskhadov was among some 15 Chechen fighters
pinned down in southeastern Chechnya, about 70
kilometers from where Maskhadov was reportedly
killed.
Born in exile in Kazakhstan in
1951, Maskhadov returned to Chechnya with his
family in the late 1950s and proceeded to make a
career in the Soviet armed forces. He was without
doubt the linchpin of developments in Chechnya for
most of the past decade - certainly since the
killing of president Djokhar Dudaev in April 1996.
It was Maskhadov, in his capacity as
Chechen army chief of staff, who negotiated with
Russian Security Council secretary Aleksander
Lebed the two agreements that put an end to the
1994-1996 war and paved the way for the withdrawal
of Russian troops and Maskhadov's election in
January 1997 as Chechen president.
But
almost from the outset Maskhadov was challenged
and deliberately undercut by more ruthless and
less-principled rivals, including Basaev, whose
ill-advised incursion into neighboring Daghestan
in the summer of 1999 furnished the Kremlin with
the rationale for launching a new war.
Copyright (c) 2005, RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW,
Washington DC 20036 |
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