Chechen rebels expected to keep fighting Russians

MOSCOW — Shamil Basayev was the face and the brains of the Chechen rebels, but his death Monday is unlikely to be a fatal blow to the insurgency that has bloodied Russian troops for a dozen years.

Just as Basayev thrived for years after a Russian mine blew off one of his legs, the Chechen rebels have kept up their fight despite the loss of an array of charismatic and wily leaders. The violence has spread throughout Russia's poor and resentful, largely Muslim North Caucasus.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's fight against regional terrorism has been widely criticized for focusing on military actions at the expense of addressing root causes including poverty and repression of unofficial Muslim sects.

Although the Kremlin touts the money it's putting into reconstructing the war-shattered Chechen capital, widespread complaints persist of abductions and detentions by police and shadowy security forces. There are also complaints that money intended for displaced people has been siphoned off in corruption or unpaid through inefficiency.

These allegations contribute to widespread distrust of Russian authorities that could easily evolve into support for the rebels.

Meanwhile, angry forces in other parts of the Russian North Caucasus have launched their own Chechnya-inspired insurgencies. Dagestan, to the east, is plagued with almost-daily shootouts and explosions, and Ingushetia, to the west, is nearly as blood-drenched.

The violence may have spread too far to be contained, some observers say.

"The destruction of one Basayev will not solve the problem of fighting terrorism in Russia," said Anzor Shakhmurzov, head of the liberal Union of Right Forces party in Kabardino-Balkaria, where fighters under Basayev's direction launched attacks last year.

And although Basayev was an inspiration to the rebels, they've persisted despite the killings of other major figures, including Aslan Maskhadov, the president of Chechnya after separatists drove out Russian forces in 1996, and Dzhokhar Dudayev, whose drive for independence sparked the first Chechen war in 1994.

"Dudayev was killed in 1996, but there's still no peace in that republic," said Georgy Zozrov, a leader of the Liberal Democratic Party in North Ossetia, a tense republic bordering Chechnya. "Somebody else will come into the place of Basayev."

The major consequence of Basayev's death might be financial. He was well-connected overseas and apparently key to hustling foreign funds to keep the rebels armed and fed.

However, Basayev's increasingly savage terrorist acts — notably the 2004 Beslan school seizure that ended in the deaths of more than 330 people — appeared to significantly undermine foreign sympathy for the rebels' cause.

Doku Umarov, likely to take the most prominent role among the separatists after Basayev's death, has shown indications of being more pragmatic than Basayev — though no less determined. Last month he vowed that rebels under his command would renounce attacks on civilians but increase their attacks on Russian forces. Such a strategy could rehabilitate the rebels' image to some extent and inject new life.

The separatist cause also has been severely weakened by counter-insurgency operations of the Russians and Russian-backed Chechen forces, many of whom are former rebels who accepted an offer of amnesty. But Akhmed Zakayev, who holds the title of foreign minister in Chechnya's self-declared separatist government, which operates underground or in exile, said in a telephone interview from London that the insurgency would not end until there was a political settlement that satisfied Chechen demands.

Zakayev said it is "absolutely groundless for the Kremlin to think that with the death of Basayev the problem of Chechnya can be solved." "For hundreds of years, Russian propaganda has been trying to ... tie this struggle to the personalities of one or another leader or a hero in order to hide the nationwide character of our efforts toward freedom," Zakayev said. "It would be possible to talk about certain stability in Chechnya only when this conflict is solved politically, by achieving mutually acceptable decisions."

"The death of Basayev is a symbolic act for the Russian state because he was the cruelest of enemies," said Sergey Markedonov, a specialist on Chechnya at the Institute for Political and Military Analysis in Moscow. "But Chechen separatism is only one part of the challenge to Russia now. Islamic extremism is spreading and Basayev's liquidation is not the end of terrorism."