Just before the killing Monday of the Chechen guerrilla Shamil Basayev, the pro-Kremlin prime minister of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, was ridiculing the strength of the rebel forces that at one time fielded tens of thousands of men to battle Russian forces in two brutal wars. Basayev, said Kadyrov, had only 20 men. Another leader of the guerrillas, Doku Umarov, has 13 fighters. And, Kadyrov said, there are 60 to 70 foreign mercenaries operating in Chechnya.Even allowing for exaggeration, Kadyrov's mocking of the insurgents reflects an essential truth. The Chechen separatist movement has been severely weakened. Chechen forces loyal to Moscow, many of them former rebels, now control much of the territory in the republic, which tried to break away from Russia in the early 1990s. The Kremlin has turned much of the governance and policing of Chechnya over to Kadyrov, the son of a former rebel and Chechen president who was assassinated on Basayev's order in 2004. And Kadyrov has coaxed hundreds of fighters out of the hills and into his paramilitary formation, which has been blamed by human rights groups for hundreds of murders and disappearances in a ruthless drive to stamp out extremism.
Chechnya, over the last two years, has been the site of less and less serious fighting. "There is no war there today," Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week. "There are outbreaks of terrorism there but no war. All law enforcement issues, 80 to 90 percent, are dealt with primarily by the law enforcement agencies of the Chechen Republic, which are almost 100 percent manned by Chechen residents."