Chechnya's Separatists Weakening

Fighting Had Waned Before Rebel's Death as Terrorism Spread

MOSCOW, July 11 -- Just before the killing Monday of the Chechen guerrilla Shamil Basayev, the pro-Kremlin prime minister of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, was ridiculing the strength of the rebel forces that at one time fielded tens of thousands of men to battle Russian forces in two brutal wars.

Basayev, said Kadyrov, had only 20 men. Another leader of the guerrillas, Doku Umarov, has 13 fighters. And, Kadyrov said, there are 60 to 70 foreign mercenaries operating in Chechnya.

Even allowing for exaggeration, Kadyrov's mocking of the insurgents reflects an essential truth. The Chechen separatist movement has been severely weakened. Chechen forces loyal to Moscow, many of them former rebels, now control much of the territory in the republic, which tried to break away from Russia in the early 1990s.

The Kremlin has turned much of the governance and policing of Chechnya over to Kadyrov, the son of a former rebel and Chechen president who was assassinated on Basayev's order in 2004. And Kadyrov has coaxed hundreds of fighters out of the hills and into his paramilitary formation, which has been blamed by human rights groups for hundreds of murders and disappearances in a ruthless drive to stamp out extremism.

Chechnya, over the last two years, has been the site of less and less serious fighting.

"There is no war there today," Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week. "There are outbreaks of terrorism there but no war. All law enforcement issues, 80 to 90 percent, are dealt with primarily by the law enforcement agencies of the Chechen Republic, which are almost 100 percent manned by Chechen residents."

But as the war has been contained in Chechnya, terrorism has spilled across the republic's border. Basayev was killed in neighboring Ingushetia, an internal Russian republic increasingly plagued by bombings and assassinations. And violence has roiled other majority Muslim republics, such as Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria, where Chechen guerrillas were joined by youths from the previously quiet republic in an assault on government and police building in October 2005, which left 60 people dead.

The spreading violence reached its bloody height in the 2004 Beslan school siege in predominantly Christian North Ossetia, a Russian republic that borders Ingushetia. The taking of the school, an act organized by Basayev, led to the deaths of 331 people, 186 of them children.

The killing of Basayev, Russia's most-wanted man, is unlikely to be the kind of decisive victory that some Russians and Chechens proclaimed it to be Monday.

"Basayev's death, from a psychological point of view, will be a very serious blow," said Alexander Golts, a journalist and expert on military affairs. "The resistance in Chechnya has been weakened but the rebel movement is spreading all over the North Caucasus and it's very possible another Basayev will appear."

Fueled by poverty, repressive police tactics, corruption and intolerance for anything but the officially sanctioned version of Islam, violent discontent has been bubbling up across the North Caucasus. Yet support for Islamic extremism is still relatively marginal, according to a recent survey of men ages 16 to 39 in Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria and North Ossetia.

The survey was conducted in May and June by Moscow's Yuri Levada Analytical Center on behalf of two American scholars.

"We do not find much evidence that the socio-economic environment of this region has, to this point, generated unusual levels of hostility towards government institutions, Russians or Westerners nor has it produced a widespread desire for the Islamization of politics, support for the Chechen cause, or animosities among local ethnic groups," wrote Theodore P. Gerber, of the University of Wisconsin, and Sarah E. Mendelson, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, in a paper published this month.

The death of Basayev, who had divided Chechen fighters with his ruthless targeting of civilians, coupled with a population that is principally concerned about the lack of economic opportunities, suggests that the Kremlin may have an opportunity to sideline the potential of extremists in the region if it promotes better governance, economic growth and more responsible policing.

"Basayev wanted to see this as one holy war inflaming the whole region, but you have to pause and question the conventional wisdom," said Mendelson. "When we look at young males, we don't see seething ethnic hatred. There is more opportunity than we expected. It's going to be whoever gets there first -- it could be radical Islamists under guise of providing social services or the Russian government and Western donors delivering jobs and socials services."