In Dagestan, Rebel Leader Revives Russian Nightmare

With a watermelon under his arm and a broad smile on his face, Shamil Basayev looks for a moment like a man at a picnic, not a warrior, a hostage-taker, a terrorist. But the video snippet that plays repeatedly on national television is deeply unsettling to Russian viewers.

Basayev--even more threatening to Russians than Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden is to Americans--has returned to haunt the nation three years after he played a big part in its humiliating defeat in the separatist republic of Chechnya. Leading about 1,500 Islamic fundamentalist rebels, the Chechen warlord is staging a rebellion in the remote and inhospitable peaks of the republic of Dagestan, trying to split off a new chunk of Russia’s volatile southern territory.

For Russians, the conflict in Dagestan revives the nightmare of the 1994-96 Chechen war, and the images of soldiers’ coffins and weeping mothers. But there are important differences. Dagestan’s population is not united behind independence, as the Chechens were. Without solid popular support, it will be much harder for Basayev’s rebels to win the war outright.

Nonetheless, even if he doesn’t win the war, Basayev appears likely to loosen Russia’s grip on Dagestan, which he dreams of uniting with neighboring Chechnya.

Bearded, charismatic and soft-spoken, and always with an eye to history, Basayev is a sharp and ferocious military tactician--a born warrior who, like thousands of other intelligent young men in the troubled Caucasus region, has no meaningful peacetime role.

The ferocity of Russia’s recent military crackdown in Dagestan can be explained in part by oil and geopolitics. But something even more basic to Russian interests is at risk there: Moscow’s ability to control the chaos spreading throughout the region.

Basayev first shocked the Russians in June 1995 when he seized 1,000 hostages at a maternity hospital in the Russian town of Budennovsk. He was one of the most ruthless and effective rebel commanders during the Chechen war.

“This is a hell of an ambitious guy. Basayev’s a fighter like some people are big-business men,” said Anatol Lieven, an expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “Basayev by now is a professional fighter. There’s nothing else he can do. It’s his raison d’etre. And he’s got the backing of an awful lot of young Chechen men who have also got nothing to do but fight.”

Since the war, Chechnya has remained nominally part of Russia but is no longer under Moscow’s control.

Although Basayev probably will not defeat the Russian military outright, he can’t really lose in Dagestan. The more bombs that Russia drops over Dagestan and the more weapons it hands out to the local population to fight Basayev, the more it will destabilize the poverty-stricken republic, ultimately weakening its control of the region.

And, analysts argue, the harder the Russian military strikes, the better Basayev’s chances are of rallying alienated and unemployed young Dagestani men behind his fundamentalist Islamic battle cry.

Lieven said Russia’s geopolitical interests are now secondary to the crime wave sweeping through the northern Caucasus, with raids, kidnappings, bombings and other crimes terrorizing the region from Chechnya and the adjacent republic of Ingushetia.

“The whole of the Russian North Caucasus is beginning to look very dicey,” he said.

Russians have been subjected to some shocking television images lately conveying the horror of the region--a man, held hostage by Chechens, pleading for help, and then later lying blindfolded on the ground as a masked man swings an ax high to sever his head. On television, the clip stops before the ax falls, but in the original tape sent by Chechen kidnappers to relatives of others being held, the man’s execution is shown.

Kidnappings and shootings are routine. In March, in the region’s worst recent incident, a bomb exploded in a market in the city of Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, killing 60 people.

On Aug. 7, Basayev and his men, a mix of fighters mainly from Chechnya and Dagestan, attacked and took control of several remote Dagestani villages along the Chechen border.

The craggy, arid peaks of Dagestan where the war is being fought are so bleak and remote that they seem the very end of the Earth to most Russians. Yet Basayev’s attack cut deep into Russia’s sense of nationhood. Even though it is enormous, Russia feels diminished by its 1991 loss of the other Soviet republics--and its de facto loss of Chechnya. So Russia struck back hard, with a massive bombing campaign.

Russia does have strategic interests in Dagestan. Russia’s southern flank has been important psychologically since the days when Russian czars competed with Ottoman sultans for influence and power in the region. Also at stake is control of an existing oil pipeline from the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, on the Caspian to Novorossisk on the Black Sea--a pipeline that crosses Dagestan and Chechnya.

But just as in Chechnya, Russia’s tough military strategy in Dagestan is undermining its geopolitical interests in the region. One of the aims of Russia’s war in Chechnya was to regain control over the Baku-Novorossisk pipeline. But the war made things worse, destabilizing Chechnya--and thus the pipeline--and Russia risks the same result in Dagestan.

Western-led oil consortiums in the Caspian have been looking at routes for a larger oil pipeline. But Lieven says that Moscow’s battle to have that pipeline go through Dagestan is already lost and that Russia’s influence in the region has waned.

“Nobody’s going to invest in a pipeline through Dagestan,” he said. “So, geopolitically, there’s a lot less to play for.”

Another recipe for instability is the Russian policy of recruiting and arming locals--in a republic riven by ethnic tension, kidnappings and vendettas.

“Surely, by feeding in guns and arming volunteers, they’ll strengthen some groups in Dagestan at the expense of others, and that will start a civil war,” Lieven said. “There are already signs it is happening.

“If things get really bloody and messy, it then depends what happens in Moscow--whether the Russians decide to stay on or just throw up their hands and say, ‘To hell with it.’ Conceivably, they might withdraw, which would be a terrible defeat for Russia.”

Basayev’s goal of uniting Chechnya and Dagestan as an independent state is fired by history and religion. Basayev styles himself as a modern-day Imam Shamil, the 19th century leader of a sect of fundamentalist warriors called the Murids. In a bloody war in the mountains of Chechnya and Dagestan, it took the troops of Czar Nicholas I three decades to finally defeat this band of rugged mountain people.

Imam Shamil united all the disparate tribes of the Caucasus against the Russians, bending the people to his will by using a blend of terror and charismatic mysticism. And Basayev is trying to rekindle the legacy of his namesake.

In Chechnya, taking up arms to attack Russians with the goal of liberating Dagestan for Allah is an honored and respected activity.

“It’s the legacy of [Imam] Shamil and the legacy of all the Chechen wars,” Lieven said. “When people ask me who’s going to benefit, I say God. Allah will get a new part of the world.”

Dagestan is the poorest Russian republic, where just 200 families control the wealth in a population of 2 million.

“The young people, without any respect for anything, without jobs, without education, without money, without any hopes for a better life, easily become the objects for fundamentalist Islamic propaganda,” said Caucasus analyst Sergei A. Arutyunov of the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology in Moscow.

“The generals in Moscow now claim they will destroy the rebels within days or weeks,” he said. “But they fail to understand that the number of young people in the fundamentalist resistance will grow and grow--and, in a very short time, Moscow will be fighting just another no-win war which may result in the breakup of the Caucasus and the eventual breakup of Russia.”

In time, as the bombing continues, Basayev and his forces may pull strategically back into Chechnya, giving Russia’s military an opportunity to claim victory. Even so, Basayev and his men have made their point.

“They’ll just come back again after a few weeks or months,” Lieven said. “Sooner or later, Basayev will either extend his power in that region or he’ll come in somewhere else and occupy a new region of Dagestan.”