Chechen rebel leader killed

[Ferran]

Chechen rebel leader killed

Tuesday, March 8, 2005 Posted: 2:18 PM EST (1918 GMT)


Maskhadov was Chenchnya's president after the Russian military withdrew from the republic.

MOSCOW, Russia -- Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov -- who had a $10 million bounty on his head -- has been killed by Russian troops, according to Russian news agencies.

Russian NTV television showed Federal Security Service head Nikolai Patrushev telling President Vladimir Putin that Maskhadov had been killed in a "special operation" in the village of Tolstoy-Yurt.

CNN's Jill Dougherty said that Russian NTV television had shown pictures of a shirtless bearded corpse that resembled Maskhadov.

She said he had been hiding in a bunker when he died, according to Russian news agency reports.

Russian troops had wanted to take him alive, she said, but according to reports in Moscow the weapons of his bodyguards "were either misused or something went awry."

Earlier Tuesday, Russian officials reported that three rebels who were planning a large terrorist attack on the administration building in Tolstoy-Yurt had been detained.

Maskhadov, 53, led the Chechen separatists who fought Russian forces to a standstill in a 1994-96 war and he became the republic's president after the Russian military withdrew.

Under Maskhadov's leadership, Chechen rebel forces won many battles against Russian forces sent to crush them in December 1994, but did not win independence from Russia.

In 1997, Maskhadov and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed an agreement promising an end to 400 years of conflict between Moscow and the region. Moscow, however, still insisted the region was a part of the Russian Federation.

Maskhadov became a candidate for president, running against the more radical Shamil Basayev, a field commander with a popular following.

Maskhadov won a landslide victory in January 1997, swearing "to reinforce the independence of the Chechen state."

The election was declared fair by international monitors. Russian President Boris Yeltsin sent his congratulations, and Russia said it wanted to rebuild relations with Chechnya. But Russia still refused to recognize Chechnya's claim of independence.

Maskhadov worked with Basayev until 1998, when Basayev established a network of military officers that soon devolved into rival warlords.

Chechen rebel forces crossed into Dagestan in 1999 and Moscow held Chechens responsible for a wave of bomb attacks across Russia. Russia sent troops back into the republic, described Maskhadov's government as unlawful, and tried to build support for a parliament made up of Chechens in exile.

During fierce fighting, Maskhadov's government was removed from power and a pro-Moscow administration was set up.

After a deadly siege at a theater in Moscow in October 2002, Russian President Vladimir Putin ruled out talks with what he called "terrorists," including Maskhadov.

He said the separatist leader had "led Chechnya to economic collapse, hunger, and the total destruction of the spiritual and social sphere in Chechnya.

After Moscow-backed Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov was assassinated in May 2004, Maskhadov vowed to kill whoever replaced him.

Last autumn, after the horrific Beslan school siege in North Ossetia, Russia's Federal Security Service offered a reward of 300 million rubles ($10.3 million) for information that could help them hunt down Maskhadov and Basayev.

Maskhadov at the time said there was "no justification" for the seizure of the school, but also said recent terrorist attacks perpetrated by Chechens were "unavoidable" because of Russia's policies.

The siege led to the deaths of more than 300 people, including many students. Maskhadov vowed to bring to Basayev to justice over the Beslan incident, according to a posting on a Chechen rebel Web site.

"I responsibly announce that after the end of the war, individuals guilty of conducting illegal acts, including Samil Basayev, will be passed to a court of law," Maskhadov, who frequently uses that Web site to post remarks, had said.

"I announce that the leadership of the Chechen Republic and the armed forces under my control ... had nothing to do with this terrorist act." Maskhadov was born to Chechens in exile in Kazakhstan.

His family returned to Chechnya in 1957. He joined the Soviet army, serving in both Hungary and Lithuania, before becoming chief of staff of the Chechen army in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Last year, Maskhadov vowed to bring to justice warlord Shamil Basayev over the Beslan school hostage-taking that ended with the deaths of more than 300 people. (Full story)

He denied any link with the Beslan attack but Russian officials continued to assert he and Basayev cooperated in the bloody operation and put a $10 million bounty on each man. (Full story)

A temporary cease-fire called by Maskhadov expired late last month on the 61st anniversary of the Stalin-era deportation of Chechens to the barren steppes of then-Soviet Central Asia.

Maskhadov had ordered his fighters, including Basayev, to observe a weeks long cease-fire through February 22, the eve of the anniversary. He also renewed a call for talks with the Russian leadership, which has consistently turned them down.

Russian officials had dismissed the cease-fire call as a publicity stunt and maintained that rebels kept up their attacks.

Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty contributed to this report




Source: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe...led/index.html

[Rusalka]

Maskhadov had ordered his fighters, including Basayev, to observe a weeks long cease-fire through February 22, the eve of the anniversary. He also renewed a call for talks with the Russian leadership, which has consistently turned them down.

Russian officials had dismissed the cease-fire call as a publicity stunt and maintained that rebels kept up their attacks.

This is the main point, the fact that he got killed after he announced a cease fire and asked for talks with Russia. I must say that, as opposed I am to the Islamist leanings of the Chechen cause, I don't support Putin's position either. The current Russian stand against the Chechen issue is no different than what the Turkish government's had been against the Kurdish rebel group PKK, and believe me, PKK was a bad ass terrorist organization compared to the Chechen "government" of Maskhadov, and of Dudaev's before him.

My fear is that Maskhadov's death will make the Chechens more fanatic and the seriously sick individual Basaev will get the leadership position which Maskhadov so conveniently emptied. I even have suspicions that the Russian government (or "parts" of it) may have worked with Basaev in the Beslan incident, and in this one as well. It's not unheard of of governments to employ "enemies of their enemies'" to clean up stuff they don't want to mess up with.

Politics is so unbelievably corrupted..

[Cristoforo]

I agree with you. On Avemelita I commented that it was strange they they killed the moderate leader and not the extremist leader. Certainly that's not the way to solve this problem. Rather, it's the best way to force moderates to join the extremists.

[Lynx]

Greetings!

Here goes my first intervention in the forum.

I think mister Vlad Putin has always missed those old communist times, hasn't he? Guess he was a KGB officer at those times.

[Rusalka]

Yours was a lucky guess, then. It is actually well known that Putin was a KGB officer and although he has renounced his 'ties' with the KGB his staff consists of KGB personas by a great majority. His overseas post was Dresden where he worked with the Stasi. He also served within the USSR in recruiting/uncovering missions.

Here's more information:

[quote]
Putin later recalled that the KGB targeted him for recruitment even before he graduated in 1975. "You know, I even wanted it," he said of joining the KGB. "I was driven by high motives. I thought I would be able to use my skills to the best for society."

After a few years spying on foreigners in Leningrad, Putin was summoned to Moscow in the early 1980s to attend the elite foreign intelligence training institute, and then was assigned to East Germany. He arrived in Dresden at age 32 when East Germany was a major focus of Moscow's attention. The German Democratic Republic was home to 380,000 Soviet troops and Soviet intermediate-range missiles. Berlin was a constant source of Cold War tensions and intrigue.

At the time, several thousand KGB officers reported to a headquarters at Karlshorst, outside Berlin; Soviet military intelligence also was stationed in East Germany. But the biggest intelligence operation was the East German secret police, the Stasi, who monitored hundreds of thousands of citizens and kept millions of documents on file.]

There is little information about Putin's specific tasks in Dresden, but specialists and documents point to several assignments, including recruiting and preparing agents. The work likely involved Robotron, a Dresden-based electronics conglomerate, which was the Eastern Bloc's largest mainframe computer maker and a microchip research center.

Here's a bit about his relationship with the Stasi:

Putin also turned to the Stasi for help with routine logistics, such as obtaining a telephone – they were strictly controlled – and apartments. Putin was formally assigned to run a Soviet-German "friendship house" in Leipzig and carried out the duties, but this apparently was his own cover story. Intelligence specialists and political scientists said Putin may have had a political assignment to make contact with East Germans who were sympathetic to Gorbachev, such as the Dresden party leader Hans Modrow, in case the Honecker regime collapsed.

Putin's work with the Stasi won him a bronze medal in November 1987 from the East German security service, but the reasons for the award are unknown. It was described by one source as the next level up from the lowest, basic award for service.

Putin's evasive replies on his former role in the KGB and about KGB itself in general:

In a long, private talk recently with the Moscow PEN writers group, Putin tried to evade the question of the KGB's role in the Soviet system's legacy of terror. Referring to the Stalin-era purges, in which millions were sent to prison camps and death, Putin said, according to a transcript, "Of course, one must not forget about the year 1937, but one must not keep alluding to only this experience, pretending that we do not need state security bodies [such as the KGB]. All the 17 years of my work are connected with this organization. It would be insincere for me to say that I don't want to defend it."

Putin then went on to offer a strangely oblique explanation for the Great Terror, which seemed to avoid blaming the KGB.

"The state security bodies should not be seen as an institution that works against society and the state; one needs to understand what makes them work against their own people. If one recollects those hard years connected with the activities of the security bodies, and the damage they brought to society, one must keep in mind what sort of society it was. But that was an entirely different country. That country produced such security bodies."

And lastly his replies on the Chechen issue and a Russian writer's comments:

Putin's role in the blatantly misleading information issued by the government about the Chechnya offensive also has been criticized. His talent for creating legends has been evident in his explanations about the war. For example, Putin told the writers group that the military had been open with the news media, when the military has in fact hidden information about casualties, combat events, attacks on civilians and its goals and methods.

Felix Svetov, a writer who spent time in Stalin's prison camps as a child and who lost his father in the purges, was present at the writers meeting. He said Putin's comment "does not correspond with reality." Putin is a typical KGB type, he added. "If the snow is falling, they will calmly tell you, the sun is shining."

More here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...agov/putin.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/415124.stm
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/stories/s99054.htm
and here: http://www.mndaily.com/daily/2000/04/12/news/new1/



Personally I have a hard time trusting a man such as him.

[Awar]

Nothing new in the world of politics.

[Rusalka]

Originally Posted by Cristoforo

I agree with you. On Avemelita I commented that it was strange they they killed the moderate leader and not the extremist leader. Certainly that's not the way to solve this problem. Rather, it's the best way to force moderates to join the extremists.

Exactly. Even as of now the Chechen forces have promised revenge (which was to be expected, obviously) and most likely the next leader will be either Shamil Basayev, who was in fact in opposition to Maskhadov and had big issues with him; or Doku Umarov, who is along the same lines as Basayev. Needless to say, neither of these candidates are even close to Maskhadov in terms of policy or diplomacy and Basayev especially is a sworn fighter of the Jihad. Unlike Maskhadov I don't see him declaring ceasefire or asking for peace talks, which in fact is very close to Putin's policy over the issue and that's why I have my suspicions over the whole thing. In the Beslan incident, which Basayev owned, there was considerable foulplay by the Russian soldiers themselves. In politics it's best to look at who is (or are) benefiting in a certain situation and in this situation both Basayev and Putin benefit without a doubt. Putin's whole policy in the previous elections was built over the Chechen issue which is far too similar to Bush's policy over the war in Iraq for my taste.

[Rusalka]

Obituary: Aslan Maskhadov



As chief of staff of the Chechen armed forces, Aslan Maskhadov did more than any other fighter in Chechnya to win the 1994-1996 war against Russia. He also did more than any other negotiator to bring peace.


The softly-spoken general succeeded against the odds in co-ordinating the actions of the numerous Chechen field commanders.

He turned a swiftly mobilised scratch army into a force capable of repelling Russian tanks, air power, and artillery. At the same time, he was at the forefront of peace negotiations in 1995 and 1996. His quiet pragmatism won the respect of Russian negotiators.

Chechens elected him president in January 1997 because of his war record, and because he promised a more peaceful future than younger and more radical rival candidates.

He insisted that Chechnya must be independent, but he was prepared to negotiate a close relationship with Russia.

He called for peace talks as recently as February 2005, but Russia scorned the suggestion.

In recent years Moscow had branded him a terrorist, along with other Chechen leaders.

After rebels seized a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan in September 2004, causing more than 300 deaths, Russian authorities offered a $10 million reward for the capture of Mr Maskhadov and the Chechen warlord, Shamil Basayev.

They disregarded the fact that Mr Maskhadov publicly condemned the bloody attack, said that forces under his command had nothing to do with it, and called for Mr Basayev to face trial.

Artillery officer

Like all Chechens of his generation, Aslan Maskhadov was born in exile. His family was deported from Chechnya by Stalin, along with the rest of the Chechen nation, in 1944. They returned home from Kazakhstan in 1957, when he was a child of six.

The future president became a career artillery officer in the Soviet army. He served in Hungary and took part in the Soviet army's attempt to suppress Lithuania's nationalist independence movement in January 1991 - an episode he quickly came to regret.

He became breakaway Chechnya's chief of staff the following year.

People who met him in this role said he always retained the air of a staff officer, neatly dressed at all times despite a life spent on the run from Russian forces.

But in a personal tragedy for him and for Chechnya, Mr Maskhadov enjoyed less success as a politician than as a soldier.

His main rival in the January 1997 election was the charismatic Shamil Basayev. Mr Maskhadov's instinct was to build consensus after his victory, first making Mr Basayev deputy chief of the Chechen army, then acting prime minister.

In 1998, however, Mr Basayev joined many other former field commanders in an unruly opposition and Chechnya gradually spiralled out of control.

The commanders evolved into warlords, running areas of Chechnya as their own fiefdoms, operating rackets and taking over parts of the economy.

Some came under suspicion when Mr Maskhadov twice narrowly escaped assassination in car bomb explosions.

According to one reports, his former subordinates even threatened him with a gun.

Powerless

Mr Maskhadov's weakness was illustrated by a series of high-profile kidnappings in 1998 and 1999.

Foreign aid workers and Russian envoys joined hundreds of less well-known victims held for ransom in Chechnya.

Mr Maskhadov and his government were powerless to release them.

The Chechen president was also unable to prevent the warlords launching a "holy war" to drive Russians out of neighbouring Dagestan.

Mr Maskhadov's own attitude to Islam was characteristically conservative. He encouraged the rebirth of Chechen religious traditions, but attempted, unsuccessfully, to ban the fundamentalist trend of Islam known as Wahhabism.

When Russian forces flooded back into Chechnya in 1999, Mr Maskhadov and the warlords stood side by side again, in an uneasy alliance.

But he appeared to have been progressively sidelined.

Funding from sympathisers in the Islamic world reportedly flowed primarily to the radical Chechen commanders, and to the Arab commanders fighting alongside them.

The radicals have carried out daring, headline-grabbing attacks on civilians - including the Beslan school attack and the earlier seizure of a Moscow theatre.

Mr Maskhadov described the perpetrators of Beslan as "madmen" driven out of their senses by Russian acts of brutality.

To the end, he condemned the killing of civilians.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ope/459302.stm

Published: 2005/03/08 18:24:42 GMT

© BBC MMV

[Vojvoda]

Chechen rebel leader shot dead, says Russia

March 9, 2005 - 10:51AM



Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, blamed by Russia for last year's school hostage crisis and other terrorist acts, has been killed during a raid, the head of the Federal Security Service told President Vladimir Putin today....

[Lynx]

Chechens elected him president in January 1997 because of his war record, and because he promised a more peaceful future than younger and more radical rival candidates.

He insisted that Chechnya must be independent, but he was prepared to negotiate a close relationship with Russia.

He called for peace talks as recently as February 2005, but Russia scorned the suggestion.

In recent years Moscow had branded him a terrorist, along with other Chechen leaders.

After rebels seized a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan in September 2004, causing more than 300 deaths, Russian authorities offered a $10 million reward for the capture of Mr Maskhadov and the Chechen warlord, Shamil Basayev.

Chechenia, IMO will never be independent. Nor any other north caucasian nation. Nor Tatarstan. Not even East Prussia (*Kaliningrad Oblast) will ever return to Germany. Russia will never give away 1 single square inch of territory, no matter how fair it would be. If possible Russia will make everything to have Belarus, South Ossetia, Kazakhstan (?)... anything back.

Many independent nations on the world should be thankful to someone or something... for not bordering with Russia.

*Kaliningrad... huh! Kalinin was the man responsible for the infamous Katyn Massacre. Why Poles and Germans remain so silent about this?