repost of Guardian article
Young, ruthless leader heads new generation of guerrillas
Jonathan Steele and Ian Traynor in Moscow
Friday October 25, 2002
The Guardian
Movsar Barayev, the young rebel said to be in charge of the hostage operation, is known to Russian intelligence as the leader of one of the most ruthless armed bands in Chechnya. According to intelligence officials, he heads a band of 40-50 terrorists of both sexes, a group known for their uncompromising militance.
The nephew of a notorious Chechen warlord who was killed by Russian soldiers last year, Barayev, 24, represents a new generation of rebels, about whom relatively little is known.
Until last summer he lived in the shadow of his powerful, older uncle, the clan leader Arbi Barayev, who was involved with another leading clan in two notorious crimes - the capture and subsequent beheading of three British telcommunications workers and a New Zealander in 1998, and the abduction a year earlier of British aid workers Jon James and Camilla Carr. They were freed in September 1998.
After his uncle's death last July, Movsar took over the so-called "Islamic regiment" of Chechen fighters, sources in the FSB security service told the Interfax news agency yesterday. Barayev junior is said to be a sworn enemy of the Chechen commander and elected president, Aslan Maskhadov. His band of fighters is said to be ready for suicide, making the crisis that much more difficult to mediate and resolve.
Five years of war over the last decade and the collapse of the government-owned oil industry have turned Chechnya into a failed state, with rival groups fighting over control of the republic's thousands of small oil wells. Kidnapping of foreigners and other Chechens became good business for hard-faced leaders in an area where there was no functioning economy outside small-scale agriculture.
What part Movsar Barayev took in the kidnappings of 1997 and 1998 is not known, but some believe he is acting in the Moscow theatre siege as a front man for two failed politicians, Chechnya's former vice-president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, and a former information minister, Movladi Udugov. Mr Udugov is known as an opportunist who harnessed himself to the Islamist cause and has been financed from Saudi Arabia.
The model for the theatre siege appears to be the Chechen capture of hostages in a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk in June 1995. The number of hostages - 1,460 - was even larger and their capture began more bloodily than this week's hostage taking.
The Chechens first tried to capture a police station, and were driven off. Forty-two people died. The gunmen then took over a hospital. Their demands were similar to those of their successors today: a ceasefire, a gradual withdrawal of Russian troops from their homeland, and talks on Chechnya's future status. As now, they acted to embarrass the Russian president, at that time Boris Yeltsin, on the eve of a meeting with western leaders.
The Russians conceded all their demands and allowed them to drive back into Chechnya in a bizarre convoy of buses containing a small group of hostages as military helicopters patrolled overhead. But this came only after five days of horror, including a bungled Russian effort to storm the building.
A total of 124 people died, but it was never established how many were executed by the gunmen and how many were killed in the botched Russian attack.
Turkey is not going to deliver Movladi Udugov to Russia – the major ideologist of the Chechen terrorists (if he is in Turkey, of course). This was said by the prime-minister of Turkey, who added that different countries had different positions pertaining to the anti-terrorist struggle.
However, on January 9 Turkey addressed to Russia with a request to give it the materials from Udugov's extradition file in order to consider the claim from Moscow about the arrest and delivery of the terrorist. Russia perceived that step as Ankara’s willingness to cooperate with Moscow in the field of struggle with the international terrorist, though.
Russian assistant president Sergey Yastrzhembsky declared that “we start a closer cooperation to detain the people, connected with the international terrorist network.” The Russian authorities knew Udugov was not in Turkey, that it was only like a show, that the statements about the broad cooperation with Russia were only the words. But it was pleasant in a way.
Now it just so happens that Ankara refuses from its words, although these words could be the opinion of the prime-minister only. We should remind here that Movladi Udugov has been searched for by the federal bodies since the spring of 2000. In case he is extradited to Russia, he is going on trial for the organization of the attack of the Chechen gunmen on the republic of Dagestan in the fall of 1999.
Udugov used to be Johar Dudayev’s press-secretary in the past (Dudayev is the ex-president of Chechnya). He has been waging the informational war against Russia since 1994. In august of 1996 Udugov became the first vice-premier for the state politics and information of the Chechen government.
Sergey Yugov
PRAVDA.Ru
Udugov is also the man running kavkaz.org, which was unable to be accessed for the days during the hostage crisis, and then is suddenly, completely gone - just a sign now that they are under construction. Everything else is gone....