By turns, Shamil Basayev has been a terrorist in the murderous mold of Osama bin Laden, a top candidate for the presidency of Chechnya and the Chechen prime minister. Now he is back in his Osama-bin-Laden mode.
As Americans debate our future foreign policy -- in an era when terrorism is the greatest threat -- we would do well to study the Russian experience with Basayev. It raises the question: Will promoting democracy in remote lands be effective in defending America against terrorists?
Basayev took credit last week for the hostage-taking raid on the school in Beslan, Russia. He also claimed responsibility for other recent terror attacks: the suicide bombing of two Russian jetliners, a suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station and another bombing at a Moscow bus stop.
For Russians, it was no surprise Basayev was behind the Beslan raid. He had done this before.
In "Chechnya -- Calamity in the Caucasus," co-authors Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, who worked as reporters for the Moscow Times during the first Russo-Chechen war, describe the June 14, 1995, raid Basayev personally led against the Russian town of Budennovsk. Basayev and his raiders shot up the police station, rounded up civilians -- "many of them old men and women and housewives sitting at home" -- and blockaded themselves in a hospital with more than 1,000 hostages.
He was contemptuous of innocent life. "I thought, what difference is there, whatever means I use, if they are Russian, they are jackals. My people are more important to me than these Russian children or women," Gall and de Waal quote him as saying.
After the Russians failed to free the hostages through force, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin agreed to allow Basayev and his terrorists safe passage back to Chechnya in a convoy of buses. They took hostages with them as human shields.
A year later, Russia agreed to withdraw its forces from Chechen territory and allow a Chechen presidential and parliamentary election. But the Russians did not recognize Chechen independence, saying Chechnya's status should be decided in five years.
Now, Basayev, the bloody terrorist, became Basayev, the presidential candidate.
His main opponent was Aslan Maskhadov, the one-time Soviet colonel who had commanded Chechen forces in the war. Both candidates stood for Chechen independence, but Maskhadov was deemed the "moderate."