Obituary of Shamil Basayev Chechen rebel leader responsible for
notorious acts of terrorism, including the school siege at Beslan
The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
July 11, 2006 Tuesday
SHAMIL BASAYEV, who was killed yesterday aged 41, was a hero to his
people in the Republic of Chechnya; elsewhere he was regarded as one
of the world’s most infamous terrorists.
The Chechens are a brave mountain race not noted for their
squeamishness; but there are those who would say that Basayev scaled
new heights of barbarity.
He achieved international notoriety in June 1995 when he led an attack
on a hospital at the city of Budyonnovsk, in southern Russia.
There was further revulsion in October 2003, when his Chechen militants
took 800 people hostage at a Moscow theatre. Two days later Russian
special forces stormed the building; 129 hostages died, along with
41 terrorists.
Basayev also took responsibility for the Beslan school siege of
September 2004; on the third day of the siege shooting broke out
between the terrorists and the Russian security forces, resulting in
the deaths of 344 civilians, 186 of them children.
The Russian government put a price on the rebel leader’s head, offering
a reward of 300 million roubles ($10 million) for information leading
to his capture. Although Basayev did not participate in the atrocity
at Beslan, he claimed to have organised it, boasting that the whole
operation cost only 8,000 euros.
In an an interview broadcast on American television last year he was
happy to describe himself as "a bad guy, a bandit, a terrorist". His
justification was that the Russians had "officially" killed 40,000
Chechen children, and were therefore terrorists as well.
Shamil Salmanovich Basayev was born on January 14 1965 at Vedeno, in
south-east Chechnya. His family is said to have had a long history of
involvement in Chechen resistance to Russian rule, and he was named
after Imam Shamil, who led the mountain tribes’ resistance against
the Tsarist armies in the 19th century.
His grandfather fought in the abortive attempt to create a breakaway
North Caucasus Emirate after the Russian Revolution, and the Basayevs,
along with much of the rest of the Chechen population, were deported
to Kazakhstan. They were allowed to return in 1957.
After leaving school Basayev served for two years as a fireman in the
Soviet army. He then worked at a state farm in the Volgograd region
of southern Russia before moving to Moscow, where he unsuccessfully
applied to read Law at Moscow State University. Instead he enrolled at
the Moscow Institute of Land-Construction before deciding to become
a computer salesman. A colleague later claimed that Basayev was more
interested in playing video games than in selling computers, and that
he appeared preoccupied with the career of Che Guevara.
Basayev is said to have taken to the streets of Moscow in support of
Boris Yeltsin when Communist hardliners attempted to stage a coup in
August 1991.
Two months later, however, the Chechen nationalist leader, Dzhokhar
Dudayev, unilaterally declared independence from Russia, and Yeltsin
declared a state of emergency and sent troops to the border with
Chechnya.
In response, Basayev and two others hijacked an Aeroflot passenger
plane bound for Ankara, threatening to blow it up unless the state of
emergency was lifted. On this occasion the crisis was resolved without
loss of life, and the hijackers were allowed to return to Chechnya.
In 1992 Basayev was fighting with the separatists in Abkhazia, a
breakaway region of Georgia. After the Georgian government’s forces
were defeated in October 1992, the ethnic Georgian population of the
region was driven out; Basayev’s unit is said to have killed thousands
of Georgian civilians, and it became the core of his "Abkhaz Battalion"
in the first Chechen war.
Basayev is also said to have fought with Azerbaijani forces in their
war against Armenian separatists in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh,
and to have established links with al-Qa’eda in Afghanistan. He was
later to subscribe to the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Islam.
There have been claims that he became an important figure in the
Chechen mafia, and was involved in drug-dealing. Certainly he appeared
to have access to considerable sums of money: he came to own several
large houses and was able to finance his own private militia.
But he himself maintained that he was supported by private benefactors.
In December 1994 the Russians invaded Chechnya in an attempt to
depose Dudayev, who appointed Basayev one of his military commanders;
by now his "Abkhaz Battalion" was 2,000-strong. After a gruelling
three-month campaign, the Russians took Grozny, Chechnya’s capital,
and the Chechens were forced into the hills.
The "Abkhaz Battalion" had lost all but about 200 of its men, and
on June 3 1995 a Russian air raid on Basayev’s home town killed 11
members of his family, including his wife and two children.
Less than a fortnight later Basayev led the attack on Budyonnovsk
hospital, 90 miles north of the Chechen border. For several days 1,500
people were held hostage inside the hospital, and more than 100 of
them died when Russian special forces unsuccessfully attempted to
storm the building.
Basayev was demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya.
While he failed to achieve this aim, he did succeed in negotiating
a halt to the Russian advance and the prospect of peace talks before
he and his fellow terrorists were allowed to escape back to Chechnya.
In 1996 Basayev was appointed commander of the Chechen forces, and in
August that year he led a successful operation to retake Grozny. The
Russians were forced to the negotiating table, and Chechnya effectively
achieved its independence. Basayev ran for the presidency of his
country, coming second to Aslan Maskhadov with 23.5 per cent of the
vote. In early 1998 Maskhadov appointed him prime minister; having
served his six-month term, Basayev stepped down, having failed to
make good his promise to crack down on crime and kidnapping.
In August 1999 Basayev and the Saudi terrorist known as Khattab led a
2,000-strong army of Islamic fundamentalists in an unsuccessful attempt
to help Dagestani Wahhabists to take over neighbouring Dagestan and
establish a new Chechen-Dagestan Islamic republic.
Meanwhile, in September that year, a number of Russian apartment blocks
were bombed, killing 293 people. Basayev denied that he was involved,
as did President Maskhadov, but the Russians had lost patience and
sent forces back into Chechnya.
As the Chechen rebels withdrew from Grozny in January 2000 Basayev
stepped on a landmine, and had to have a foot amputated. The operation
was videotaped and later televised, viewers seeing the foot being
removed under local anaesthetic while Basayev looked on impassively.
On December 27 2002 Chechen suicide bombers destroyed the republic’s
pro-Russian government’s headquarters in Grozny, killing about 80
people. Basayev claimed responsibility, saying that he had personally
detonated the bombs by remote control. He also claimed responsibility
for the bomb which killed the pro-Russian Chechen president Akhmad
Kadyrov at a stadium in Grozny in May 2004, and for the deaths of
10 people killed by a suicide bomber outside a Moscow metro station
in August.
He rejoined the Chechen separatist government in August 2005,
taking the post of deputy prime minister. Less than a fortnight ago,
Chechnya’s new separatist leader, Doku Umarov, named Basayev as his
vice-president.
Basayev received the highest awards of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria
(the separatists’ name for the once-independent republic of Chechnya):
"K’oman Siy" (honour of the nation) and "K’oman Turpal"
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
