Basayev: From Rebel to Vicious Extremist
How a student radical became the mastermind of insurgent outrages.
By Thomas de Waal in London
Institute for War & Peace Reporting, UK
July 11 2006
Shamil Basayev did not look like a man responsible for horrific
atrocities. He was soft-spoken, and with his domed forehead, bushy
beard and long Russian phrases, could have been mistaken for a Moscow
intellectual. But if he was not frightening close up, few men have
managed to terrify so many people across so wide an area.
Basayev played on his reputation and treated the long vain attempts
of the Kremlin to catch him as a kind of game. In rare interviews
over the last few years, he suggested he enjoyed being labelled a
dangerous terrorist and, in the last four years of his bloody career
when he planned the hideous operations to seize the Dubrovka Theatre
in Moscow and School No. 1 in Beslan, he lived up to the reputation.
He not only planned the detail of the operations, he designed them to
create maximum publicity and to cause the greatest possible humiliation
for his enemies in the Kremlin.
It is misleading to label Basayev as an Islamic militant. His
background was as part of a Russified generation of Chechens who
developed a strong streak of nationalism and despised all authority.
As a student radical, he idolised Che Guevara and had a poster of
the famous revolutionary on his wall.
Basayev was born in 1965 in the traditionally warlike mountain
village of Vedeno, once headquarters in the 19th century for the
great Dagestani warrior leader Imam Shamil. His family had recently
returned from collective Stalinist exile in Kazakstan, where they
had suffered sickness from Soviet nuclear testing.
Basayev studied in Moscow, where one of his teachers was Konstantin
Borovoi, who later became a famous entrepreneur and politician. In
August 1991, he joined the pro-democracy demonstrators defending the
White House in Moscow in opposition to the attempted coup d’etat.
In November 1991, he began his career of publicity stunts, hijacking
an airliner to proclaim the Chechen pro-independence cause and then
releasing all the passengers unharmed.
Basayev then became a career warrior, restless and bored unless he
was fighting someone somewhere. He fought on the Azerbaijani side in
the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, being one of the last men to leave
the besieged citadel of Shusha in May 1992 before the Armenians
captured it.
He then moved on to Abkhazia, where he joined a coalition of North
Caucasian volunteers, Cossacks and Russian special forces officers
in helping the Abkhaz win their bitter conflict with the Georgian
government. He was appointed deputy defence minister of Abkhazia
and still has many supporters there – though they do not voice those
views in public in what is now a very pro-Russian region. Persistent
rumours that he collaborated with the Russian secret services date
from this time, but they have never been substantiated by any evidence.
Basayev finally found his metier when Boris Yeltsin sent his troops
into Chechnya in December 1994. He was involved in all major operations
of the war of 1994-6, including the masterfully planned recapture of
Grozny from the Russian army in August 1996.
He should not have got out alive from his most extraordinary operation,
his raid in June 1995 deep into the heart of southern Russia, which was
halted when he seized a hospital in the town of Budyonnovsk. Following
a botched assault by Russian special forces and the death of over a
hundred people, the then Russian prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin,
negotiated the free passage of Basayev and his men out of the town
in return for the release of the hostages.
In Russia, Basayev was seen as a bloodthirsty terrorist but in much
of Chechnya he was regarded as a hero.
Basayev was driven by a new motive with deep roots in Chechen culture,
blood revenge, after 11 members of his family were killed in a bombing
raid near Vedeno. By this time, many who talked to him found him more
than slightly deranged. British journalist Victoria Clark, formerly
Moscow correspondent of The Observer newspaper, recalls interviewing
him in August 1995, when he was at the height of his popularity in
the mountains of Chechnya.
"We were spirited off to a place in the hills, where he was waiting
for us," Clark recalled. "He spoke all night without stopping. Things
got really out of hand when he started talking about sprinkling
radioactive dust on the Kremlin."
In the interview, Basayev revealed a strange obsession with the history
of Russia, telling Clark, "The [Russian symbol, the] double-headed
eagle is the epitome of unnatural evil. No living thing can survive
like that, so it has to become a parasite on the blood of other
nations."
Basayev still had sufficient prestige in January 1997 to collect around
a quarter of the vote in Chechnya’s only ever internationally-monitored
presidential election. But as Chechnya gained de facto independence and
collapsed into chaos, his reputation began to plummet as he and other
warlords were accused of corruption and involvement in kidnapping. His
alliance with Saudi jihadist Emir Khattab alienated those Chechens who
were tired of conflict and wanted a sensible accommodation with Moscow.
Basayev appeared to positively enjoy being Russia’s Enemy Number One,
a mindset that had fatal consequences for both Russians and Chechens.
In 1999, in defiance of Basayev’s rival and president Aslan Maskhadov,
he and Khattab led an armed incursion into the neighbouring republic
of Dagestan. This was the cue for Russia’s new prime minister Vladimir
Putin to fly to Dagestan and begin preparations for a re-invasion
of Chechnya.
Basayev lost a foot fleeing the Chechen capital Grozny across a
minefield at the beginning of the second Chechen conflict, confirming
an almost mythical reputation amongst Chechen radical fighters that
he could defy death anywhere. To the amazement of many, he lasted
another six years, eclipsing the more moderate Maskhadov as he took
on the role of an Islamic radical. He used the Internet to mock the
Kremlin and boasted that he moved freely across the North Caucasus
and even that he had married for a third time to a Russian woman in
the Krasnodar region.
The attacks on the Dubrovka Theatre and the school in Beslan confirmed
that Basayev now had no compunction about targeting civilians anywhere
in Russia. The deaths of 330 people in Beslan, half of them children,
marked the final nadir in the descent of a man who had once claimed
to be a democrat
Basayev was a talented warrior and brilliant propagandist, and a very
twisted and cruel human being. Very few will mourn his demise, with
most Chechens breathing a sigh of relief that someone who blackened
their reputation round the world is dead.
Thomas de Waal is IWPR’s Caucasus Editor.