Umar Khambiev, once Maskhadov's spokesman abroad, confirms the existence of a decree on that score. The website is also circulating a video footage in which Maskhadov and Sheikh Abdulkhalim together acknowledged responsibility for an attack on the neighboring Daghestan in summer 2004.
Despite all that documentary proof, we are dealing with mere conjectures, which give rise to no end of consternated queries. First, Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdulkhalim is no ethnic Chechen but of Saudi extraction. With him for top leader, Chechen separatism acquires a peculiar look as if another country were fighting for Chechnya's secession from the Russian Federation. As it appears, the talk of Chechen separatism must be given up to consider only international terrorism, whose attacks on Russia involve Chechnya among other areas.
There is another peculiarity. The new paramilitary chieftain is known not only for his Shari'a judicial activities but as an ardent preacher of Wahhabism, an Islamic trend on which Maskhadov hotly and repeatedly blamed the trials and tribulations that befell his native land-suffice it to quote a statement he made on the republican television, July 15, 1998. The newspaper Al-Qaf carried its unabridged text in October the same year.
"I have always been warning: don't refer to Wahhabism. This ideology is artificially planted on us. It is our enemies who are disseminating it. That is a bad trouble-we have always taken pride in being Chechens. Now, certain people are out to rob us of our fathers' faith, of our customs and traditions, of the adat. We are to do away with the Wahhabi ideology. Alims (theologians) shall address the people in every mosque and every village square to explain the way things really are," etc., etc.
It looks surprising, to say the least, that Maskhadov's choice fell on an alien Wahhabi preacher. Possibly, it was not the late Maskhadov behind the man but Basayev, who is alive and kicking, and has long got under the influence of Saudi theologians, with their terrorist inclinations. This assumption looks far more plausible.
There is another dubious point. The Shari'a law court became notorious during the short spell of self-styled Chechen independence during Maskhadov's presidency. The West was profoundly shocked with a public execution as several men met their death by the firing squad in one of Grozny's squares. Even the most pro-Ichkerian of European human rights partisans would certainly not have the chief judge of such a court for a partner in negotiations.
The execution I mentioned is only a tiny above-water part of a huge iceberg-I mean the atrocities of Chechnya's Shari'a court during Maskhadov's rule. It is enough to mention only one instance, when Arbi Barayev, warlord and the biggest of Chechen slave-traders, was summoned to court. He needed merely to swear on the Koran to whitewash himself-and off he went to go on with his heinous business, chopping off children's fingers, beheading adults, and tormenting every man or woman he had taken hostage or kidnapped.
At any rate, we are dealing with a man-of-straw. That is evident. The big bandits like Shamil Basayev or Doku Umarov, who are at large to this day, were, in fact, not subordinate to Maskhadov. They have even a smaller reason now to bow to a puppet-even though that puppet comes from Saudi Arabia, and is a dedicated Wahhabi prominent on the Shari'a court.
Basayev is offering that puppet to the West. Will the West like to move it?
