Tweet
The Boston Globe
September 26, 2004, Sunday THIRD EDITION
AS RUSSIA SEETHES, 2 CHECHEN REBELS ARE MARKED MEN
ALLEGED LEADER OF BESLAN ATTACK FACES $10M BOUNTY
By Anna Dolgov, Globe correspondent
MOSCOW Russia trained Shamil Basayev to fight fires, but he has made
a career igniting them.
As a firefighter, he served an unremarkable two-year term in the
Soviet military after he was drafted. As a rebel warlord in Chechnya
after the Soviet collapse, he hijacked planes, seized hostages, and
led guerrilla raids. He has spent a decade terrorizing the country,
and now Russia has put a $10 million bounty on his head.
The target of that hunt is a balding 39-year-old man with a disheveled
beard, an admiration for Che Guevara, and a penchant for camouflage
uniforms, black hats, and berets. He has claimed responsibility for
nearly every major terrorist attack that has shaken Russia, most
recently the hostage-taking raid on a school in the town of Beslan
this month that killed more than 330 people.
Along with Basayev, Moscow has offered an equal award for the
capture or death of a man it says is Basayev's boss, Aslan Maskhadov,
Chechnya's fugitive separatist president.
Russian officials say Maskhadov has little control over rebel groups,
such as Basayev's. But in President Vladimir Putin's view, all Chechen
rebels are terrorists, and government officials insist that Basayev
and Maskhadov are two sides of the same coin.
They "are in the same boat and are playing good cop and bad cop,"
Major General Ilya Shabalkin, spokesman for Russian forces in Chechnya,
Russian news agencies quoted him as saying. "The good one is Maskhadov,
and the bad one is Basayev. Maskhadov is supposedly kind and is
distancing himself from terrorist attacks, while Basayev is claiming
responsibility for them."
Maskhadov's main offense of late, in Russia's view, was his comment
published this summer in newspapers in the former Soviet republic
of Georgia. He said that "as long as Russian policies in the north
Caucasus region continue in the form they have now, terrorist attacks
cannot be avoided."
Maskhadov's remark "is a straightforward instigation to terrorism,
if not a statement that he directed it," Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov said recently.
One view that Russia's two most-wanted men share is placing the
ultimate blame for terrorist attacks on Moscow. Where Maskhadov's
rhetoric is calm, Basayev's is ferocious.
He called Putin a "bloodsucker from the Kremlin." He accused the
Russian president of ordering troops to storm the school in Beslan and
killing hundreds of children, parents, and teachers "to satisfy his
imperial ambitions." He promised more of the same if Russian troops
don't pull out from Chechnya.
They have pulled out once before. Russia signed a peace deal with
Maskhadov in 1996, ending the first war in Chechnya and giving the
republic de facto independence.
For the three years that followed, gangsters roamed Chechnya, children
picked up Kalashnikov submachine guns and played guerrilla fighters,
and kidnappings for ransom became a popular business enterprise.
Russian troops returned after Basayev led a raid on the neighboring
region of Dagestan, and after a series of apartment-building bombings
in 1999, blamed on rebels, killed about 300 people in Moscow and
other cities.
By then, Basayev had resigned from all posts in Maskhadov's government
and led his followers in a guerrilla war against Russia. This was a
trade Basayev says he has studied for years, with more success than
he earned in civilian professions.
After his stint as a firefighter in the Soviet Army, Basayev was
admitted to a Moscow college in 1987 to train in land development. He
either quit or was thrown out for poor grades a year later. He tried
working for a small trading business.
He preferred razing property to developing it and said he turned to
Russian military manuals.
"I began studying because I had a goal," he told a Russian newspaper
at the close of the first Chechen war. "We were a group of about 30
guys, and we knew that Russia won't let Chechnya go just like that,
that freedom had to be paid for in blood."
At first, it included Basayev's own blood. He was wounded about a
dozen times and lost a foot after stepping on a land mine during a
rebel pullout from the Chechen capital, Grozny, in 2000.
The first horror stories about Basayev began to spread when he led a
raid on a Georgian province in 1992, and his fighters were rumored to
have been seen playing soccer with the severed heads of their enemies.
Basayev led rebels to storm a KGB building in southern Russia in 1991,
hijacked a plane to Turkey later that year, and, according to various
accounts, fought against ethnic Armenians in a separatist enclave of
Azerbaijan or trained in guerrilla camps in Afghanistan.
Last year, the UN Security Council put Basayev on its official
terrorist list, and Washington named him a threat to the United
States. After Basayev claimed responsibility for the raid in Beslan,
US Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage called him "inhuman"
and "not worthy of existence."
Commanders of pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya say they believe Maskhadov
and Basayev are hiding in the rebellious republic. They don't explain
how a man with a face familiar to every Russian has managed to elude
capture in a small region that Russian forces claim to have fully
under control.
Maskhadov and Basayev "bring more harm to the people than hundreds of
other militants together, and that's why their days are numbered,"
Sultan Satuyev, deputy interior minister in Chechnya's pro-Moscow
administration, told reporters.
But then, Moscow had claimed to be even closer to defeating Basayev
in the past. It had reported him dead several times.
September 26, 2004, Sunday THIRD EDITION
AS RUSSIA SEETHES, 2 CHECHEN REBELS ARE MARKED MEN
ALLEGED LEADER OF BESLAN ATTACK FACES $10M BOUNTY
By Anna Dolgov, Globe correspondent
MOSCOW Russia trained Shamil Basayev to fight fires, but he has made
a career igniting them.
As a firefighter, he served an unremarkable two-year term in the
Soviet military after he was drafted. As a rebel warlord in Chechnya
after the Soviet collapse, he hijacked planes, seized hostages, and
led guerrilla raids. He has spent a decade terrorizing the country,
and now Russia has put a $10 million bounty on his head.
The target of that hunt is a balding 39-year-old man with a disheveled
beard, an admiration for Che Guevara, and a penchant for camouflage
uniforms, black hats, and berets. He has claimed responsibility for
nearly every major terrorist attack that has shaken Russia, most
recently the hostage-taking raid on a school in the town of Beslan
this month that killed more than 330 people.
Along with Basayev, Moscow has offered an equal award for the
capture or death of a man it says is Basayev's boss, Aslan Maskhadov,
Chechnya's fugitive separatist president.
Russian officials say Maskhadov has little control over rebel groups,
such as Basayev's. But in President Vladimir Putin's view, all Chechen
rebels are terrorists, and government officials insist that Basayev
and Maskhadov are two sides of the same coin.
They "are in the same boat and are playing good cop and bad cop,"
Major General Ilya Shabalkin, spokesman for Russian forces in Chechnya,
Russian news agencies quoted him as saying. "The good one is Maskhadov,
and the bad one is Basayev. Maskhadov is supposedly kind and is
distancing himself from terrorist attacks, while Basayev is claiming
responsibility for them."
Maskhadov's main offense of late, in Russia's view, was his comment
published this summer in newspapers in the former Soviet republic
of Georgia. He said that "as long as Russian policies in the north
Caucasus region continue in the form they have now, terrorist attacks
cannot be avoided."
Maskhadov's remark "is a straightforward instigation to terrorism,
if not a statement that he directed it," Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov said recently.
One view that Russia's two most-wanted men share is placing the
ultimate blame for terrorist attacks on Moscow. Where Maskhadov's
rhetoric is calm, Basayev's is ferocious.
He called Putin a "bloodsucker from the Kremlin." He accused the
Russian president of ordering troops to storm the school in Beslan and
killing hundreds of children, parents, and teachers "to satisfy his
imperial ambitions." He promised more of the same if Russian troops
don't pull out from Chechnya.
They have pulled out once before. Russia signed a peace deal with
Maskhadov in 1996, ending the first war in Chechnya and giving the
republic de facto independence.
For the three years that followed, gangsters roamed Chechnya, children
picked up Kalashnikov submachine guns and played guerrilla fighters,
and kidnappings for ransom became a popular business enterprise.
Russian troops returned after Basayev led a raid on the neighboring
region of Dagestan, and after a series of apartment-building bombings
in 1999, blamed on rebels, killed about 300 people in Moscow and
other cities.
By then, Basayev had resigned from all posts in Maskhadov's government
and led his followers in a guerrilla war against Russia. This was a
trade Basayev says he has studied for years, with more success than
he earned in civilian professions.
After his stint as a firefighter in the Soviet Army, Basayev was
admitted to a Moscow college in 1987 to train in land development. He
either quit or was thrown out for poor grades a year later. He tried
working for a small trading business.
He preferred razing property to developing it and said he turned to
Russian military manuals.
"I began studying because I had a goal," he told a Russian newspaper
at the close of the first Chechen war. "We were a group of about 30
guys, and we knew that Russia won't let Chechnya go just like that,
that freedom had to be paid for in blood."
At first, it included Basayev's own blood. He was wounded about a
dozen times and lost a foot after stepping on a land mine during a
rebel pullout from the Chechen capital, Grozny, in 2000.
The first horror stories about Basayev began to spread when he led a
raid on a Georgian province in 1992, and his fighters were rumored to
have been seen playing soccer with the severed heads of their enemies.
Basayev led rebels to storm a KGB building in southern Russia in 1991,
hijacked a plane to Turkey later that year, and, according to various
accounts, fought against ethnic Armenians in a separatist enclave of
Azerbaijan or trained in guerrilla camps in Afghanistan.
Last year, the UN Security Council put Basayev on its official
terrorist list, and Washington named him a threat to the United
States. After Basayev claimed responsibility for the raid in Beslan,
US Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage called him "inhuman"
and "not worthy of existence."
Commanders of pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya say they believe Maskhadov
and Basayev are hiding in the rebellious republic. They don't explain
how a man with a face familiar to every Russian has managed to elude
capture in a small region that Russian forces claim to have fully
under control.
Maskhadov and Basayev "bring more harm to the people than hundreds of
other militants together, and that's why their days are numbered,"
Sultan Satuyev, deputy interior minister in Chechnya's pro-Moscow
administration, told reporters.
But then, Moscow had claimed to be even closer to defeating Basayev
in the past. It had reported him dead several times.