Name: Arbi Barayev Location: Alkhan-Kala, Chechnya Affiliation: his own Profession: guerrilla fighter, slave-trader, mafia boss Born: 1973 Died: June 23-25, 2001 Claim to Fame: defense of free enterprise Body Count: 170 personally, hundreds more Other: a.k.a. The Terminator ... alt spelling: Arbi Baraev
The death of Chechen warlord Arbi Barayev in a special operation was celebrated as a triumph by Russian forces hunkering down for their third year in a war which was supposedly finished about 15,000 casualties ago. Predictably, his death has meant nothing in terms of squelching Chechen resistance, though it has made the Caucasus as a whole a much safer place. Barayev had an undeserved reputation as a leading military commander but earned his laurels as an all-around scumbag. The Russian government hurls invective and showers of phlegm against all of Chechnya's military leaders, but in the case of Arbi Barayev, what they said about a man who managed to marry the disparate practices of Islamic Fundamentalism and the slave trade was largely true.
Barayev was born in 1973 in the town of Alkhan-Kala, once known as Yermolovka, after the 19th century General Yermolov who was Czarist Russia's precursor to Colonel Kurtz. It was Yermolov who broke the back of Chechen resistance in a scorched earth campaign, coining the well-worn aphorism that Chechens "can never be pacified. They can only be exterminated."
By 1991, Barayev was on the payroll of the Chechen National Security Services, more or less acting as a bodyguard for important dignitaries - chief among them Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, one of Chechnya's leading ideologues and later the leading convert to Islamic Fundamentalism. After proving himself to Yandarbiyev, Barayev blossomed during the First Chechen war and found his calling commanding a small detachment of men near his stomping grounds in Alkhan-Kala. In January 1996 he kidnapped 29 visiting Russian engineers in Grozny and held them for ransom in support of the movement.
After the Russians withdrew from Chechnya, Barayev turned his gruesome wartime expertise into a professional business. Scores of tourists, journalists, government officials - even Boris Yeltsin's envoy to Chechnya - were nabbed from as far away as Kalmykia, brought to Chechnya and forced to write letters to their employers or their loved ones, begging for their lives and for their captor's ransom. Some were mere villagers from neighbouring republics such as Dagestan or Ingushetia, whose families struggled to come up with the money to buy their relatives out of captivity. Several particularly useful hostages were kept as slaves for years by high-ranking members of Barayev's mafia clan - one kidnapped during the First Chechen War was held in confinement for nearly five years, freed only after the Second Chechen War was well underway. It was during the lull between the two Chechen Wars that Barayev killed most of the 170 people he was fond of claiming as his personal body count.
His most high-profile abduction was the October 3, 1998 kidnapping of four beleaguered telecom workers who came to Chechnya to install a wireless phone system. The three Brits and one New Zealander were dangled on a string as the bidding went as high as $10 million before Barayev inexplicably called off negotiations for the lives of the four "spies." A sack which contained their bearded, severed heads was found on the side of the road near the Chechen border two months after their disappearance. Though no one knew at the time, a Dagestani official being held with them later claimed Barayev bragged that Yankee whipping boy Osama bin Laden had trumped the offer for the four captives by a cool $20 million, to be used to further the "jihad" against a Russian enemy which had already admitted defeat and gone home.
The next-of-kin of the four murdered captives sued Granger Telecom, their employer, for damages. Though Granger settled out of court on the eve of a hearing, the tort claims brought one Magomed Chaguchiev, a former captive along with the four, to London. The June 15, 2003 edition of the Sunday Times carried his account of the harrowing ordeal - of daily beatings, of being forced to watch scores of Barayev's past "accomplishments"; that is, videotaped beheadings.
Along with this lucrative business - Russian television station NTV admitted to paying close to US$2 million for the release of one of their journalists held by Barayev - the Chechen warlord also controlled the oil business at Chernorechye, where a system of homemade stills refined the oil pumped from nearby wells and dumped thousands of gallons of waste into Chechnya's water supply. Outsiders estimated Barayev's income from this scheme at more than a half-million dollars a month.
With the money to pay for more capos and soldiers, Arbi Barayev moved to establish his control over more of Chechnya with an attempted takeover of the city of Gudermes in June of 1998. To hear him tell it, an altruistic, devout Wahhabi heard the cry of his fellow believers in Chechnya's second largest city and answered their plea for help. His clerics carrying Kalashnikovs were met by the city's infidels and a shoot-out ensued. Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov dispatched a division to help them beat back Barayev's troops, issued an arrest warrant and stripped Barayev of his rank in the Chechen Armed Forces and all medals he had earned.
Just a few days later, assassins failed to kill Maskhadov with a remote-controlled landmine as his motorcade drove through Grozny. No one was ever charged.
Barayev's attachment to material possessions didn't diminish him in the eyes of fellow commanders Shamil Basayev or Khattab, who were both, for all of their sins, at least true believers in Wahhabism rather than fundamentalist mafia dons. In the Second Chechen War, Barayev had little to do with any of the fighting on the ground. Indeed, his inactivity - along with his very high-profile public life in Alkhan-Kala - led many to speculate that Barayev was living under the protection of the Russians who were supposedly out to kill him. It was alleged that local FSB head Yunus Magomedov was his partner in crime.
Mark Irkali writes "No matter what the truth of it was - and every prominent Russian politician of any weight has been accused of having 'friends' among the unsavory Chechen leaders - the Russian soldiers who garrisoned his district were absolutely in bed with Arbi Barayev. They controlled the Nazran-Grozny Highway during the day. He controlled it at night. This is a fact, because I dealt with both of them when I drove in from Ingushetia (and if you all are curious, Barayev collected a higher 'toll'). Barayev refused to send aid to Ruslan Gelayev when his troops were surrounded by the Russians. The two fought a small war about a year and a half ago."
A few months after Magomedov was sacked, Russian special forces conducted a six-day "cleansing" operation in Alkhan-Kala. No surprises awaited them: Barayev was holed up with about fifty of his men. House-to-house fighting left two dozen houses leveled and about 17 Chechens were killed. No one believed the rumours Barayev was among them until his blood-swabbed and blue corpse was broadcast on state-wide television. His empire crumbled into several smaller units and the kidnapping and slave trade industries, which were already in a slump after Russian troops poured into the country, dropped off considerably. The King of Mean may be gone, but family ties ensure that Arbi Barayev will not forgotten. Before shrugging off this mortal coil, Barayev had trained two of his nephews in guerrilla warfare. The first died in combat with Russian troops, but his second precocious protégé would go on to make the headlines that had always eluded his mentor. In October 2002, Movsar Barayev, several of his comrades and female Chechens with explosives strapped to their waists in place of chastity belts stormed the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow and held the cast, crew, and audience hostage. A stand-off with the authorities in the heart of the capital ended when Russia's elite Alfa squad stormed the building after a powerful (and mysterious) gas was pumped in through the ventilation system. Barayev the Younger, along with every other Chechen terrorist in the theatre and at least 125 of the hostages died - the latter photographed in a tableaux with a strangely erect bottle of alcohol, various hypodermic needles and other deritria of vice scattered about.
http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/dossier/barayev.html
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com