Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [135]
“Then the FSB uses gas that is supposed to be nonlethal and shoots all the hostage-takers. But they screw up the gas, and lots of people die. And by the way, they pin it on Zakayev and Maskhadov; that’s their response to Rybkin and Zakayev’s meeting in Zurich.”
It was true that the terrorists did not harm the hostages. Those poor souls died mostly from suffocating on their own vomit, because no one bothered to tell the rescue teams how to handle the inhalation of a tranquilizer. Still, I wasn’t convinced.
“A typical FSB mishap, something akin to Ryazan,” Sasha observed. “Good planning, bad execution. Otherwise it would’ve been a brilliant operation: all hostages alive, all terrorists dead.”
“One thing does not fit in your scheme,” I said. “Basayev took responsibility for the theater.”
“Basayev is bullshitting,” said Sasha. “The terrorists are dead now; for Chechens they are heroes—shahids. So Basayev jumped on the bandwagon.”
The theater siege greatly hurt the Chechen cause and the opponents of the war in Russia and became a PR bonanza for the Kremlin. By design or accident, it gave Putin leverage in his dialogue with the West: now, he was able to say, the Chechens had finally qualified as real terrorists, and Russia had to be viewed as a true victim of terror. The war in Chechnya should be certified as just and honorable.
Immediately after the siege, the Kremlin embarked on a concerted propaganda effort to blame the Maskhadov government for the attack. At a press conference in Moscow on October 31, Putin’s spokesman, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, played an FSB tape of a telephone conversation between the terrorists’ leader, Movsar Barayev, and one of his accomplices. On the tape the name “Aslan” can be heard; this was supposed to demonstrate that the terrorists were acting with Maskhadov’s knowledge.
Maskhadov’s government denied any role and disowned both Basayev and Barayev. Nonetheless, attacks on Maskhadov dominated the Russian message.
“We can see that the image of Maskhadov—even in the eyes of those who pushed Moscow toward negotiations—has seriously paled,” declared Yastrzhembsky. “Name one leader [in Chechnya] with whom we could negotiate. I don’t know of any such person.”
Next, they moved against Zakayev. The warrant for his arrest cited no evidence, simply the charge that he was connected to the siege. The Danish government had to decide whether or not to turn him over to Russian authorities.
An unlikely coalition rose to defend him. From Washington, a bipartisan duo of seasoned cold warriors, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former secretary of state Alexander Haig, appealed to the Danish government not to extradite Zakayev. In Britain a “Save Zakayev” campaign was championed by such politically diverse personalities as the leftist actress Vanessa Red-grave and the ultraconservative author Lord Nicholas Bethel. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued statements in support of Zakayev.
If there was one Chechen who consistently opposed terror, it was Zakayev. But his case became a test of different things for different people: the legitimacy of Russian actions in Chechnya, the notion that Russia had failed as a democracy, the extent to which the war on terror justified compromises on human rights. For Chechens in the mountains and throughout their far-flung diaspora in Europe—and, indeed, for moderate Muslims around the world—the Zakayev case became a test of Western fairness. For Putin, it was a way to assess the