Chechens Hold On to Image of Daring Rebel : Caucasus: Guerrilla who led raid on Russian city is a hero. His getaway could derail peace talks.

Among the rows of banners unfurled by Chechen demonstrators each day at the site of Russian-Chechen peace talks, one of the most striking is a heroic portrait of guerrilla commander Shamil Basayev.

“Imam Shamil II,” it reads. “He who laughs last laughs best.”

There is nothing funny about this message. Basayev led the latest attack in the 6-month-old Chechen war--a siege of the Russian city of Budennovsk in which more than 1,000 civilians were held hostage for days and more than 100 people died. Imam Shamil was a 19th-Century Muslim warlord who resisted Russia’s imperial army for four decades; Basayev is his spiritual heir.

The young field commander is not present at the negotiations, but he looms over them as conspicuously as the bearded, floppy-hatted portrait on the banner. It was his daring raid that forced Moscow into this latest round of talks with all-but-defeated Chechen separatists. And it is his getaway, his implicit threat of new strikes at Russia, that could derail them.

In fact, Basayev looms everywhere in the tiny southern republic of Chechnya. To militant separatists, who salute him with graffiti on the walls of Russian-occupied Grozny, he has eclipsed Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev in the pantheon of living heroes. To many Chechens yearning for peace, he is a sudden curse, another reason for Russian troops to stay and punish them.

Basayev has not been seen in public since he vanished Tuesday night into southern Chechnya’s Caucasus Mountains after freeing his last remaining hostages in return for safe passage from Budennovsk.

But his younger brother and guerrilla sidekick, Shirvani, turned up last week as a participant in the peace talks, which are being held at the Grozny mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He was mobbed by the crowd, made up largely of women whose sons and husbands are fighting the Russians.

“Your wonderful brother saved our people from extermination,” Emilia Akhmadova, a 33-year-old geography teacher, exclaimed as she embraced Shirvani.

Russian leaders would like to embrace Shamil and put him in jail. One clause of the still-unfinished peace accord that began taking shape last week obliges the Chechens to help the Russian army arrest him and his men on criminal charges for the Budennovsk raid.

Any peace settlement could easily break down unless Basayev is turned over. The Russians launched an artillery attack Sunday 35 miles south of Grozny “to suppress incessant armed resistance of Basayev’s group and detain the terrorists” of Budennovsk, a spokesman told the Itar-Tass news agency.

Yet Chechen negotiators are so vague about their commitment to detain Basayev that few here believe in the possibility of such treachery.

“We will never turn him over,” predicted Yaragi Demilkhanov, the separatist deputy mayor of the foothills village of Chiri-Yurt. Chechens, he said flatly, do not betray their brothers.

Salambek Khadzhiyev, Chechnya’s Moscow-appointed prime minister, told reporters last week that Basayev and other guerrilla field commanders have become so dispersed, independent and powerful that Dudayev and his military chief of staff, Gen. Aslan Maskhadov, no longer control them. He said that any final accord not signed by all Chechen field commanders would be unworkable.

Indeed, mistrust between the two sides seems stronger than the tentative military protocol they signed last week to set procedures for an exchange of prisoners, disarmament of Chechens and withdrawal of Russian troops.

“They’re just waiting for a chance to pounce on us,” said a Russian armored platoon commander in southern Chechnya, a senior lieutenant who identified himself only as Viktor.

On the Chechen side, a 29-year-old guerrilla named Umar Sagaikov warned: “If the Russians dare double-cross us, they will learn one interesting thing: There is more than one Shamil Basayev in Chechnya. We can and will do things much worse than Budennovsk.”

That threat could hang over Russia for decades. Among Basayev’s admirers are boys as young as Aiub Khadzhimuradov, 5, who recently told his mother he would compete for prize money in their village’s annual arm-wrestling contest.

What would you do with the money? his mother asked.

“Buy a machine gun and go kill Russians,” said the boy.

Not every Chechen adores Shamil Basayev. Nepiset Khadasheva had never heard of him until June 15. Now she shudders at the sound of his name.

Khadasheva was one of eight residents who chose to remain in Maliye Varandy, a mountain village of 115 families, after it was bombed and occupied by the Russians in late May.

The day after Basayev’s deadly raid, Khadasheva said, five soldiers from a Russian unit rounded up the eight residents, held them at gunpoint and ordered them into a bomb shelter.

“Your Shamil has killed 30 people in Budennovsk, and now we are going to kill you,” she recalls her chief captor saying.

“I don’t know who Shamil is,” Khadasheva says she replied as the villagers began shouting, crying and praying to Allah. “Why should I answer for him?”

Khadasheva, 75, somehow managed to run away and alert a separate unit of Russian paratroopers, who saved her and all but one of the others--a 38-year-old man who was taken away by the captors.

Despite harassment by the Russians, the villagers say they feel no affinity with Chechen guerrillas who took to the mountains after being driven out of Grozny and other settlements on the plains.

“I don’t know where they came from; they just seemed to drop from the skies,” said Maria Kalayeva, a 37-year-old woman nursing her fifth child. “I wish they would go away. Who needs them?”