Window on Eurasia

Not All Fallout from Basayev’s Death Works to Moscow's Advantage

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 14, 2006 – The death of Shamil Basayev has boosted President Vladimir Putin’s standing with Russians pleased to see the last of a Chechen militant long identified as Russia’s “number one terrorist” and set the stage for him to present himself and his country at the G-8 meetings this weekend as full partners in the war on terrorism.

But not all the consequences arising from Basayev’s timely demise
work to the advantage of the Kremlin leader. Indeed, as Russian commentators
are beginning to note, it almost certainly will now be more difficult
for Moscow to dismiss the Chechen cause as the work of terrorists or to
justify the excesses of the Kadyrov regime in Grozny.

And these problems are in addition to any of those that may arise as
Russian journalists and commentators of various stripes point to
inconsistencies in Moscow’s accounting of how and even when Basayev
died, problems that will only increase the cynicism of many Russians
about their government.

For most of the last six years, Russian officials from Putin on down
have pointed to Basayev’s role in the terrorist attacks in Beslan and
elsewhere and to his flaunting of Islamist ideas in order to deflect
criticism of the actions of Russian forces in Chechnya and to isolate
and discredit those who support the idea of Chechen independence.

With Basayev out of the picture, it will be far more difficult for
Moscow spokesmen to do either. Indeed, as Demos Center analyst
Tat’yana Lokshina argues in an essay posted online yesterday, world
leaders will eventually have to reexamine what is going on in Chechnya
[http://www.polit.ru/author/2006/07/13/lokshina.html].

When they do – something she says will not happen at the G-8 meeting
this weekend – they will see that Basayev and his kind did not and do
not define the situation in Chechnya, as Moscow officials have
repeatedly claimed, and that the situation there is both more
complicated and more tragic than many have been willing to acknowledge.

Indeed, Lokshina says, they will come to see that most of the Chechens
who are fighting today “have taken up arms not for the independence
of Chechnya or a North Caucasus Khalifate but for their fathers, brothers,
and sisters” who have been brutalized by all sides in this conflict.

The Kremlin’s problems with the pro-Moscow government in Grozny are
likely to be larger and more immediate. “The spectre of the Shamil of
the 21st century,” Geidar Dzhemal, head of the Islamic Community of
Russia, said yesterday, “had legitimized the presence in office of
such an odious figure as Ramzan Kadyrov”
[http://portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=news&id=45117].

But with Basayev now dead, Dzhemal continued, the Russian government
will have to find a new bogeyman to justify Kadyrov, whose actions have
been as thuggish as those of some forces he is up against, or find
someone else to take his place. Neither of these tasks is likely to be
easy.

On the one hand, there is no one among the Chechen fighters who has the
notoriety that Basayev had achieved. Moreover, none of them can gain
such questionable stature without precisely the kind of terrorist
actions that President Putin has implied are now a thing of the past.

And on the other, Ramzan Kadyrov has built a brutal, but effective
power base in Grozny. He has thus been able to act far more independently of
Moscow on certain questions than anyone expected. And any effort by the
Kremlin to displace him could lead Kadyrov to shift his allegiance from
Moscow to those still fighting in the mountains.

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