Russian television showed what is said to be the corpse of Aslan Maskhadov. His envoy in London told Ekho Moskvy radio that Mr. Maskhadov was probably dead, though he had no personal confirmation. If the reports of Maskhadov's death prove true, experts say leadership is likely to pass to Shamil Basayev, engineer of terrorist attacks such as last September's Beslan school massacre and leader of the extremist wing of the Chechen independence movement. "Things will get worse," says Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent security expert. "Maskhadov was a force for moderation."
| Oh. Well. Then they shoulda left him alone, right? |
Aslan Maskhadov, the only Chechen leader ever to win an internationally-recognized election, was born in 1951 in Central Asian exile to a family which - like most Chechens - had been deported from their homes by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1944. Trained as an artillery officer in the Red Army, Maskhadov became chief of staff of Chechen rebel forces during Chechnya's first war of independence between 1994 and 96. He outmaneuvered numerically superior Russian armies and finally drove the Kremlin to the bargaining table.
| He outmaneuvered a larger but poorly-led force of conscripts and drove a Kremlin in chaos over the dissolution of the Soviet Union to the bargaining table. The Russian army's still crummy, but Yeltsin's gone and the Russers have had a longer glimpse at the enemy they're dealing with. Eventually, if they keep this up, they'll get Shamil... |
In January 1997 Maskhadov won a hard-fought election against hard-line field commander Mr. Basayev to become the only internationally recognized president of Chechnya. As Chechen president, Maskhadov failed to rein-in the powerful warlords, especially Basayev, who turned the tiny republic into a terrorist training ground and haven for kidnappers and arms smugglers.
| If it'd have mattered, he'd have reined them in. Therefore it didn't matter. Reading the Koran mattered. |
In the summer of 1999, forces under Basayev invaded the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan, prompting a harsh response from Moscow.
| Real bright. Demonstrate a threat to that larger neighbor, the one with all the artillery... |
A series of still-unsolved apartment bombings, which killed 300 Russians, led Russia to invade Chechnya and the second war - now dragging into its sixth year - began. Maskhadov's death "would change the equation in favor of Basayev," says Vitaly Naumkin, director of the independent Institute for Political and Strategic Studies in Moscow.
| Well, yeah. Since there isn't much in the way of leadership but Basayev, that's prob'ly true. |
"Basayev is a hard-core terrorist, but he is a national hero in Chechnya and the only other figure capable of leading the Chechen rebel bands.
| He's a national hero in Chechnya because he's a hard-core terrorist. |
"Maskhadov's death doesn't mean a final victory for the regime. The war will continue, but power will shift to the more extreme wing of the Chechen rebel movement. It will be more difficult now to have negotiations, since there will be no figure of Maskhadov's stature to act as a negotiating partner."
| I thought Putin said "no negotiations," that he was going to hunt them down and kill them all? |
Maskhadov's predecessor, the father of Chechen independence Dzokhar Dudayev, was killed by a Russian missile that homed in on his satellite telephone in the spring of 1996. In what may be his last official statement, dated March 4, Maskhadov said the Chechen independence struggle will continue as long as the Kremlin refuses to negotiate, but claimed that the war could be ended "in a 30-minute meeting" between himself and Russian President Vladimir Putin. |