Death of a Terrorist

Shamil Basayev, a Chechen warlord, was Russia's Osama bin Laden.

TO THE KREMLIN and to ordinary Russians, the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, killed in an explosion in southern Russia early yesterday, embodied the same brand of unqualified, unsettling evil that Osama bin Laden represents for Americans. Although little known in this country, he was one of the world's most bloodthirsty and prolifically lethal terrorists, specializing in mass hostage-takings and indiscriminate carnage involving innocent Russians -- most notoriously, as the self-proclaimed mastermind of the horrific attack on a school in the Russian town of Beslan in 2004 that left more than 330 people dead, half of them children.

Like all terrorists, Shamil Basayev had his grievances, and in that he was aided by Russia's inglorious history of atrocities, murders, rapes, ethnic cleansing and officially sanctioned mayhem in largely Muslim Chechnya. Like Osama bin Laden, he nurtured a personality cult fed by his messianic ruthlessness, his uncanny knack for evading capture and his self-proclaimed role as an avenger of a people with a deep sense of historical oppression. And like Osama bin Laden, he seemed to relish playing the part of Public Enemy No. 1 in a country scarred and brutalized by terrorism. If his ambitions were less vainglorious than Osama bin Laden's -- Shamil Basayev's beef was with Russia, not the West writ large, and his rather more narrow cause was independence for Chechnya -- he was just as fanatically addicted to killing.

Well before he shocked the world by victimizing Beslan's pupils on the day they returned to school from summer recess, he had preyed on civilians and embarrassed the Kremlin with a prolonged rampage of savagery. His vicious résumé included taking more than 1,500 civilians hostage, and leaving 120 of them dead, in the southern Russian town of Budennovsk in 1995; ordering the storming of a Moscow theater, resulting in the death of 129 people, in 2002; and dispatching suicide bombers to blow two Russian airliners out of the sky in 2004 -- to say nothing of the odd airplane hijacking, subway bombing and bloody rampage. The Russians did their best to dispatch him, at one point killing more than 15 of his close relatives, including his wife, daughters and siblings, by bombing his home in 1995. But Shamil Basayev himself always managed to slip away, though he lost a foot to a landmine while fleeing Moscow's forces in 2000. Having taken a centuries-old fight to the Russians outside Chechnya's borders, he was a folk hero to some of his countrymen.

Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed an act of "just retribution," while acknowledging that Shamil Basayev's death will not quiet the seething ethnic hatred and tumult in the rebellious Russian province of Chechnya. For more than a decade, violence there has been sustained not only by the cruelty, separatist dreams and (more recently) fundamentalist Islamic fervor of Chechen militants but also by Moscow's willful vengeance and oppression. Yet the complexities of that situation, and the guilt on both sides, cannot obscure the pure evil that Shamil Basayev perpetrated against the innocent.