A misguided strike at the rebels’ heartMar 10th 2005

Mar 10th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Aslan Maskhadov, the leader of Chechnya’s independence movement, has died in a raid by Russian special forces. But removing the relatively moderate Mr Maskhadov will only make the republic’s long-running conflict harder to solve

THE conflict in Russia’s rebellious southern republic of Chechnya took a dramatic turn on Tuesday March 8th, when Russian special forces tracked down Aslan Maskhadov, the leader of Chechnya’s separatist fighters, who was killed during the raid. According to Russian media reports, one of Mr Maskhadov’s captured followers had led the Russian troops to his hideout, a concrete bunker under a building in the village of Tolstoy-Yurt, north of the Chechen capital, Grozny. Accounts differ as to what killed Mr Maskhadov: the Russians say it was one of their grenades, while a Chechen politician has claimed he was shot accidentally by one of his bodyguards.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, hailed the assassination as a blow against terrorism. Others said the Kremlin had shot itself in the foot by removing a man who, unlike many of his rebel colleagues, was prepared to talk peace. Others still speculated that this was precisely what Mr Putin had wanted to achieve: by doing away with the relatively moderate Mr Maskhadov, their thinking goes, the Russian leader can prolong a conflict that allows him to portray himself as a leading player in the international “war on terror”.

Whatever Mr Putin’s intentions, Chechnya’s rebels, who want independence for their mainly Muslim territory in the North Caucasus, hailed Mr Maskhadov as a martyr and made it clear that they will fight on against Russia's forces. A statement posted on a rebel website told field commanders and fighting units to continue with planned missions in the coming weeks.

Though Russia had branded him a terrorist, Mr Maskhadov was one of the more conciliatory voices in Chechnya’s rebel camp. A former colonel in the Soviet army, he added his weight to the Chechen independence movement in the early 1990s. He was at the forefront of peace talks with Moscow in 1996, in the wake of an invasion of Chechnya by Russian troops, and his pragmatism was said to have impressed Russian negotiators. He was democratically elected as Chechen president in 1997, partly on his war record but also because he was less radical than his opponents and thus offered a better chance of ending the conflict. But Chechnya splintered on his watch, with warlords taking control of much of the republic, and he became increasingly powerless. After Russian troops went in again in 1999, Mr Maskhadov took control of the rebel forces. However, he often invited Mr Putin to hold talks with him, saying a peaceful solution to the conflict could be worked out in a matter of minutes. The Russian leader refused, saying he did not talk to terrorists.

The next leader of the Chechen resistance is unlikely to be as willing as Mr Maskhadov to hold out olive branches. On Thursday, Mr Maskhadov's London-based envoy said that Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, a little-known cleric who heads the rebels' Islamic court, will become their acting leader. But few doubt that real power lies with Shamil Basayev, a ruthless guerrilla warlord. Unlike Mr Maskhadov, the 40-year-old Mr Basayev believes Russian civilians, including children, are legitimate targets: “Russians are accomplices in this war. It is just that they don’t all have weapons in their hands,” he told Britain’s Channel 4 television in an interview last month.

Mr Basayev was probably behind the bombing of a Moscow metro station in February last year, which killed around 40. And he has masterminded numerous raids and sieges, including the hostage-taking at a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan last September, in which more than 320 died, half of them children, after Russian special forces stormed the building. The Russian authorities also linked Mr Maskhadov to the Beslan siege, though he publicly denied involvement and said that Mr Basayev should go on trial for the massacre after the conflict was over.

A devout Muslim, Mr Basayev is said to be more interested in spreading militant Islam than in winning independence for Chechnya. Were he to take over as Chechnya’s rebel leader, it could play into the hands of Mr Putin, who has sought to define the conflict as his very own war on international Islamist terrorism—despite Russia’s terror problem in fact being overwhelmingly home-grown.

A long and bloody history

Mr Putin was prime minister when, in September 1999, Moscow and two other Russian cities were hit by a mysterious wave of bombings. Though there was no proof of Chechen involvement, the bombings (and an incursion into neighbouring Dagestan by Mr Basayev) gave Mr Putin the backing he needed to launch a second invasion of the republic since its declaration of independence in 1991. He seemed undeterred by the abject failure of the first invasion, in 1994-96. The deceptive initial successes of Mr Putin’s military campaign helped him win the presidency in March 2000.

Mr Putin has been claiming since 2002 that the military operation in Chechnya is over and that normality is returning. But the rebels still control large chunks of the region and thousands of Russian troops remain there. In March 2003, in a referendum marred by irregularities, Chechens supposedly voted overwhelmingly to accept Mr Putin’s offer of limited autonomy within Russia. In October of that year, a blatantly rigged election installed Akhmad Kadyrov, a former ally of the rebels who had come over to Moscow’s side, as president of Chechnya. However, Kadyrov was assassinated in May 2004. The subsequent election, as expected, was won by Mr Putin’s candidate, Alu Alkhanov. Equally predictably, the poll was marred by ballot-stuffing and fraud.

Under Mr Alkhanov, the Chechen conflict has remained a many-sided power struggle between the Kadyrov militia (now controlled by the ex-president’s son, Ramzan), rebel groups and federal forces, and factions within these. Many Russian military commanders would be happy to see the conflict continue indefinitely, having made lots of money during it from lucrative scams such as oil smuggling.

Chechnya has long been a thorn in Moscow’s side. It was one of the mini-nations that Russia swallowed up in the 18th and 19th centuries. After the communist revolution, the Chechens initially accepted Soviet rule but later staged a series of uprisings. Though many Chechens fought valiantly in the Soviet army during the second world war, Stalin accused them of supporting the Germans and deported the entire Chechen population to Kazakhstan, where at least 100,000 died of cold and hunger (and where Mr Maskhadov was born and lived until he was seven).

In 1991, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, a son of one of those deported families, Jokar Dudayev, led the overthrow of Chechnya’s regional government and declared independence. Disorder ensued, and in 1994 President Boris Yeltsin sent in his troops, only to be forced to retreat after perhaps 14,000 of them had been slaughtered. Mr Putin’s attempt at crushing the rebellion has proved just as disastrous. Military casualties are approaching those of the earlier invasion, and of the million or so Chechens who lived there before the conflict began, hundreds of thousands have either been killed or fled. Unfortunately, the killing of Mr Maskhadov will do nothing to hasten the end of this long and terrible war.

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