Chechnya’s pro-Moscow government has hinted that top rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov may soon surrender amid charges that authorities forced another top separatist to lay down arms by kidnapping and threatening his family.
| "Hang it up, Magomed, or Granny gets it!" |
"I think it’s 70 percent possible that within a week or two Maskhadov will surrender," Ramzan Kadyrov, who heads the security service for his father, pro-Moscow Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, said on local television Monday.
| Hokay. I'll set the timer for two weeks... |
But a Maskhadov spokesman called the suggestion "absurd."
"That is an absurd statement," Akhmed Zakayev told AFP from London, where he has been shacking up with Vanessa Redgrave granted political asylum. "It is absolutely out of the question and is pure and simple propaganda on the part of Kadyrov and his team."
| He's probably right, but we can always hope, can't we? |
Kadyrov’s comments came amid charges that Magomed Khambiyev, Chechnya’s former defense minister and a Maskhadov ally, surrendered on Monday after numerous members of his family were kidnapped by Russian and pro-Kadyrov forces. "Russian secret services... had selectively kidnapped 16 relatives" of Khambiyev throughout Chechnya, said a rebel statement quoted by several rebel websites. "Some time later, authorities said that those detained would be sentenced to death unless" Khambiyev and his brother Umar, a former health minister, surrendered.
"Vlad, you got any ruth left?"
"'Fraid not. I'm pretty much ruthless." |
Umar Khambiyev is currently in France, where a group called the Chechen Committee also decried the detentions.
| "Hey! Youse leave Grammaw alone!" |
Magomed’s surrender "was staged by Kadyrovtsy" (as pro-Kadyrov forces are known), "who took hostages... including women," Umar Khambiyev told AFP by telephone. "As a brother, I am proud of his actions, he sacrificed himself," he said. "But I regret that he has created a precedent, giving into Russian terrorism." The press office of Chechnya’s interior ministry confirmed to AFP that 16 relatives of Khambiyev had been detained recently as part of operations looking for rebels. Among those detained were Khambiyev’s 22-year-old cousin Aslanbek, a medical student who was taken by armed men from Grozny’s university on March 1. His brother Shita, also a medical student, was taken from his apartment on the same day. After a week of student protests, Aslanbek was released, though Shita remains missing. Although Akhmad Kadyrov called Khambiyev’s surrender, which came less than a week before Russia’s presidential elections, a major blow to the Chechen resistance, both Umar Khambiyev and Zakayev denied it had any bearing. "The resistance will not be affected, it is not just made up of Khambiyevs," Umar Khambiyev said. Zakayev said that Khambiyev had not been active in the separatist movement for at least two years and dismissed the surrender as a publicity stunt on the eve of Putin’s reelection bid. "This is all part of a pre-election campaign on the part of Putin and his entourage," he said.
| Pretty good one, wasn't it? |
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