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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Chechen insurgency continuing to spread |
| 2005-03-13 |
| Early last month, gunmen pulled alongside the car of Maj. Gen. Magomed Omarov, a deputy interior minister in Dagestan, a Russian republic squeezed between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea. They opened fire, killing him and three bodyguards near the minister's home. On Feb. 20, in Kabardino-Balkaria, another Caucasian republic in the Russian Federation, Russian forces killed three insurgents who in December allegedly killed four government employees, looted their offices and set them ablaze in the capital, Nalchik. On Tuesday, after the killing of rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, 53, the Kremlin and its allies declared a major success in arresting a decade of war in Chechnya. But Russian forces have failed to prevent the conflict from spreading outside Chechnya's borders. With a drumbeat of attacks on policemen, assassinations and bombings, insurgents are destabilizing the patchwork of small Russian republics in the North Caucasus. The most brutal operation was the school siege last September in which 330 people were killed, most of them children, in Beslan, a town in the republic of North Ossetia. Other attacks pass with little publicity, even though they sometimes result in pitched fighting. In the Dagestani city of Makhachkala, for instance, a recent stand-off ended with the deaths of five gunmen and the destruction of more than 15 houses set alight by flamethrowers and smashed by a Russian tank. Maskhadov's death "is a very serious moral, psychological and political blow on terrorism," said Gennady Gudkov, a member of the security committee in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, speaking on television Wednesday. "Maskhadov's death will trigger disintegration processes, including abroad where there are centers that patronized Maskhadov, and I don't know how they can continue to exist without him. The terrorists have no one to replace Maskhadov." Some Russian analysts and opponents of the war in Chechnya predict the opposite effect. They say the Kremlin has handed control of the Chechen resistance to its most brutal and fundamentalist leader, Shamil Basayev, an Islamic radical who asserted responsibility for the school siege in Beslan. They contend he will continue to widen the war outside Chechnya. "Basayev is now the single, top and unquestionable leader, and he is much more intransigent than Maskhadov," said Alexei Arbatov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. " ... Maskhadov was his only rival, and he had disassociated himself from some of the more horrible terrorist attacks. He was more moderate, more flexible. The war was already spreading outside Chechnya, but Basayev will make this process faster and broader." In a recent interview broadcast on Britain's Channel 4 television, Basayev said he regarded Russian civilians as legitimate targets. "We are planning more Beslan-type operations in the future because we are forced to do so," he said. Russian security service officials, quoted by Russian media Wednesday, said Maskhadov was killed when a grenade was thrown into a bunker where he was hiding in the village of Tolstoy-Yurt, north of the Chechen capital, Grozny. With Basayev opposed to any form of negotiation, Russian critics of the war say the Kremlin is now locked into a conflict in which it has just killed its one possible peace-making partner. The Kremlin has insisted that Maskhadov was intimately linked to Basayev's operations, including the Beslan attack. It contends that his apparent effort to distance himself from attacks on civilians, like his peace overtures, was a ploy to maintain standing as a moderate, particularly in the West. "The whole region is becoming a hot spot," said Ida Kuklina, co-chair of the Russian Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, a human rights group, which recently took part in talks in London with a Maskhadov envoy at which both sides agreed the conflict had no military solution. Dmitry Rogozin, leader of the nationalist Rodina Party in the Duma, questioned whether Maskhadov's death would lead to a reduction in violence. "Young militants have emerged in Chechnya," he said. They are establishing radical Islamic cells "in all republics of the North Caucasus." And on Wednesday, another insurgent voice said the possibility of talks is dead. "A new period has begun in the modern history of the Russian-Chechen military confrontation, which not only allows for no negotiations, but also for no end to the war," wrote Movladi Udugov, a militant ideologue, on the Kavkaz-Center Web site, which Maskhadov had used to press for peace talks. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #2 One more... "A new period has begun in the modern history of the Russian-Chechen military confrontation, which not only allows for no negotiations, but also for no end to the war" Do they teach algebra in madrassas? Let me guess... no. |
| Posted by: Sobiesky 2005-03-13 6:36:37 AM |
| #1 In a recent interview broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4 television, Basayev said he regarded Russian civilians as legitimate targets. "We are planning more Beslan-type operations in the future because we are forced to do so," he said. Two things. 1. Basayev wants apparently speed up the transfer of all Chechens to paradise in the earnest. He does not want to negotiate (don't recall he ever did). In a way, that makes some things simpler. 2. Why is this POS given a platform on Britain’s Channel 4? |
| Posted by: Sobiesky 2005-03-13 6:30:59 AM |