Shamil Salmanovich Basayev (Russian: Шамиль Салманович Басаев) (born January 14, 1965) is a Chechen separatist leading an armed group acting in the north Caucasus region of Russia, principally in Chechnya.
Early life
He was born in the town of Vedeno in south-eastern Chechnya. His family is said to have had a long history of involvement in Chechen resistance to Russian rule, and suffered reprisals in the process. His grandfather fought for the abortive attempt to create a breakaway North Caucasus Emirate after the Russian Revolution. Other family members were killed during the Second World War. Along with the rest of the Chechen population, the Basayevs were deported to Kazakhstan on the orders of Joseph Stalin as collective punishment for alleged collaboration with Nazi Germany; they were not allowed to return until 1957.
Basayev graduated from school in Vedeno in 1982 and spent the next two years in the Soviet military serving as a firefighter. For the next four years, he worked at the Aksaiisky state farm in the Volgograd region of southern Russia before moving to Moscow. He attempted to enroll at the law faculty of the Moscow State University but failed, and instead entered the Moscow Engineering Institute of land management in 1987. However, he was expelled for poor grades in 1988. He subsequently worked as a computer salesman in Moscow, in partnership with a Chechen businessman named Supyan Taramov . Ironically, the two men ended up on opposite sides in the Chechen wars, during which Taramov sponsored a pro-Russian Chechen militia.
Basayev at war
When Communist hardliners attempted to stage a coup in August 1991, Basayev joined supporters of Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the barricades around the Russian parliament building in central Moscow. It is not clear what he was doing there, although it is noteworthy that the pro-Yeltsin chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, was himself a Chechen.
A few months later in November 1991, the Chechen nationalist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev unilaterally declared independence from Russia. In response, Yeltsin announced a state of emergency and dispatched troops to the region. The Chechens mobilized 60,000 volunteers to defend against a probable Russian invasion. Basayev realised at the outset that in a conventional military conflict, Russia was bound to prevail due to sheer weight of numbers. Together with a small group of like-minded Chechens, he decided to adopt guerrilla tactics to draw international attention to the situation in Chechnya. On November 9, 1991 he and two companions hijacked an Aeroflot Tu-154 plane, en route from Mineralnye Vody in Russia to Ankara in Turkey to protest the introduction of a state of emergency in Chechnya. The hijack was resolved peacefully in Turkey, with the plane and passengers being allowed to return safely and the hijackers given safe passage back to Chechnya.
The following year, Basayev traveled to Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia, to assist the local separatist movement against the Georgian government's attempts to regain control of the region. Basayev became the de facto commander of a volunteer army of Caucasian nationalists, representing not just Chechens but many other North Caucasian peoples. Their involvement was crucial in the Abkhazian war and in October 1992 the Georgian government suffered a decisive military defeat, after which the entire ethnic Georgian population of the region was driven out in a large-scale outbreak of ethnic cleansing. Basayev's army killed thousands of Georgian civilians in Sukhumi and the village Leselidze. Ironically, his efforts had the quiet support of Russia, which wanted to create a weak Georgia dependent on its old rulers. If anything, though, this backfired on the Russians; the battle-hardened Chechen volunteers in Abkhazia later became the backbone of the Chechen armed forces and Basayev's own guerrilla movement. He moved on to Azerbaijan, where he aided Azerbaijani forces in their war against Armenian separatists in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, before moving back to Chechnya.
Basayev and the First Chechen War
Baseyev's military experience was soon put to use when Russian forces invaded Chechnya on December 11, 1994 to restore Russian rule in the republic. The First Chechen War was a disaster for the Russians, who lost thousands of troops and had to resort to massive bombardments in the face of fierce opposition from the Chechens. Basayev came to international prominence in June 1995 when he led a hostage-taking raid at Budennovsk in southern Russia. 2,000 hostages were taken at a hospital, but 150 of them died when Russian forces stormed the building; Basayev himself managed to escape.
By 1996, he had been promoted to Commander of the Chechen Armed Forces. In August 1996, he led a successful operation to retake the Chechen capital Grozny. The Russian defence collapsed and the Yeltsin government sued for peace, bringing in former General Aleksandr Lebed as a negotiator. A peace agreement was concluded between the Chechens and Russians, under which the Chechens acquired de facto independence from Russia. He stepped down from his military position in December 1996 to run for president in Chechnya's first presidential election. He came second, obtaining 23.5% of the votes.
Around January 1, 1998 he was appointed prime minister of Chechnya by president Aslan Maskhadov for a six month term, after which he resigned.
Basayev in the Second Chechen War
In August and September 1999, Basayev and Ibn-ul-Khattab led a small army (some sources claim up to 2000 strong) of Islamic fundamentalists in an unsuccessful attempt to take over the neighboring Republic of Dagestan and establish a new Chechen-Dagestan Islamic republic (with a later invasion of Ingushetia planned as well). At the same time, a series of bombings of Russian apartment blocks took place, killing 293 people. The attacks were blamed on Chechen terrorists, although this attribution remains controversial and has been denied by Basayev. The Russian government blamed the Chechen government for allowing Basayev to use Chechnya as a base. Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov denied any involvement in the attacks. This may well have been the case - his government had only a shaky grip on much of its territory - but it was disbelieved by the Russians. The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, promised a harsh crackdown on Chechen separatists: "We'll get them anywhere. If we find terrorists in the shithouse, then we'll blast them in the shithouse. That's all there is to it." Putin kept his promise; by the end of September the Second Chechen War was underway.
During the rebel withdrawal from Grozny in January 2000 Basayev lost a foot after stepping on a landmine. Somewhat morbidly, the operation to amputate his foot was videotaped and later televised by Russia's NTV network and Reuters, showing his foot being removed by doctors using a local anaesthetic while the shaven-headed Basayev watched impassively. Despite this injury, Basayev eluded Russian capture together with other rebels by hiding in forests and mountains. He welcomed assistance from Islamist groups including the Taleban of Afghanistan and encouraged foreign fighters to join the Chechen cause. Basayev's father Salman was reportedly killed by the Russians in January 2002. [1]
Around November 2, 2002 Basayev said on a rebel website that he was responsible for the Moscow theatre siege. He also tendered his resignation from all posts in Maskhadov's rebel organisation, apart from the reconnaissance and sabotage battalion. He defended the operation but asked Maskhadov for forgiveness for not informing him of it.
In 2004 he was accused of commanding a raid on the Russian republic of Ingushetia. In fact, he was shown in a video made of the raid, in which he led an army of 570 militants. Around 90 people died in this attack. On May 9, 2004 the pro-Russian Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov was killed in a bomb attack for which Basayev later claimed responsibility.
The Russian government has accused him of being responsible for the Beslan school massacre in September 2004 in which over 350 people, many of them children, were killed and hundreds more injured. It has announced a reward of 300m roubles ($10m) for information leading to his capture. Baseyev himself did not participate directly in the seizure of the school in Beslan - he was not among the hostage-takers, all but one of whom were killed. On September 17, he issued a statement claiming responsibility for the Beslan massacre. Newspaper reports have also linked his Ingush deputy, Magomet Yevloyev, to the school attack. Maskhadov has been named as well by Russian government officials, but most western observers seem to think Maskhadov's denouncement was sincere.
Basayev also claimed responsibility for the attacks against civilians during the previous week, in which a metro station in Moscow was bombed, killing ten people, and two airliners were apparently blown up by suicide bombers, killing 89 people. [2]
On February 3, 2005, British Channel_4 announced that it will air Shamil Basayev's interview. In response Russian Foreign Ministry said that the broadcast could aid terrorists in achieving their goals and demanded that the British Government call off the broadcast. But the British Foreign Office replied that it can not intervene in affairs of a private TV channel and the interview was aired as scheduled. [3] The same day, February 3, 2005, Russian media reported that Shamil Basayev has been killed. It was the 6th such report about Basayev's "death" since 1999.
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Last updated: 05-07-2005 13:19:59
Last updated: 05-13-2005 07:56:04
