Ruthless rebels who dream of an Islamic empire

Telegraph ^ | 9/5/04 | Damien Mcelroy

[swilhelm73]

When the Chechen terrorist mastermind Shamil Basayev hijacked hundreds of hostages including many schoolchildren in Beslan last week, it was not for a narrow nationalist cause.

His objective is more radical - and less likely to be achieved - than the aims of more run-of-the-mill Chechen nationalists, who merely want full independence from Russia.

He dreams of establishing an Islamic Emirate across the North Caucasus, and to do so, he has been fomenting the Islamic rebellion that plagues states across the broad stretch of territory from the Red Sea to the Caspian.

As President Vladimir Putin waded through the cold Caucasian dawn yesterday, it was a point that he was keen to stress. "One of the tasks pursued by the terrorists was to stoke ethnic hatred, to blow up the whole of North Caucasus." Not just Chechnya, in other words - and not just Chechens.

In the horror of that moment, the Russian leader was briefly united with his sworn foe: Alsan Maskhadov, the exiled Chechen president, who disputed the suggestion that this terrible outrage could be blamed on the cause of independence.

Akhmed Zakayev, Maskhadov's London spokesman, insisted that the militants who took hundreds hostage at the school in Russia were not Chechens at all. "They were Ingush, Ossetians, Russians, but not Chechens," he said .

"But, of course, their demands have all to do with Chechnya, so whatever has happened the Chechens will be held responsible. That's what I'm afraid of."

When a senior adviser to the Kremlin announced on the day of the assault that 10 Arabs were among the hostage takers, his claim was designed to link the hostage-takers with a wider foe: jihadists who support Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network.

By yesterday, however, it was clear the bulk of the hostage-takers were a mixture of Chechen and Ingush, from the neighbouring and equally troubled republic of Ingushetia.

Last week's events cast yet another terrible stain on the long history of Chechen resistance to Moscow's rule.

For 29 years until 1859, the clans and tribes used the mountains and gorges of Chechnya to hold back the Russian imperial advance.

From then until a decade ago, Chechnya was little different from other territories struggling to establish independence from Moscow. It briefly became independent before Boris Yeltsin decided, as Russia's president, to reimpose Moscow's rule.

In the process Grosny, the provincial capital, was razed, countless villages cleared and thousands of men and boys "disappeared". Independent observers estimate that more than 80,000 Chechens have died and more than 6,000 Russian troops have lost their lives in the continuing battle to quell resistance in the republic.

Now the leaders of the original civil war have been superceeded by increasingly ruthless Islamic guerrillas, under the leadership of Basayev - who have been willing to kill indiscriminately in increasingly shocking acts of terror.

In pursuit of his goal of establishing an Islamic republic stretching across Chechnya, Ingushetia and North Ossetia, Basayev has followed a strategy of staging sudden raids, putting hundreds of lives at risk and provoking a deadly, but usually incompetent, Russian response.

In one of the first attacks under Basayev's leadership in 1995, a rebel gang took hundreds of hostages in a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budennovsk. An estimated 139 people died during their assault and a botched Russian commando raid.

Within a year, the same tactic was used again in a hospital in Dagestan. Hundreds of hostages were taken by bus to a town on the Chechen border. Russian warplanes and artillery pounded the area, killing many of the hostages, but most rebels escaped.

Each time Basayev ordered an attack, criticism of the Kremlin's mistakes outweighed the outrage against the perpetrators. Until last week, the worst horror came in October 2002 when rebels seized a Moscow theatre and 129 hostages died alongside 41 Chechen rebels.

Since then, the terror has intensified. In February, a suicide bombing killed at least 40 people on the Moscow subway and in May a bomb in a stadium in Grozny killed the Moscow-backed Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov and five others. Last month, two Russian civilian airliners exploded in mid-air, killing 89.

[Fast1]

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