Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev - Life

Life

Originally a literary scholar, poet and children's literature writer Yandarbiyev became a leader in the Chechen nationalist movement as the Soviet Union began to collapse. In May 1990, he founded and led the Vainakh Democratic Party (VDP), the first Chechen political party, which was committed to an independent Chechnya. The VDP initially represented both Chechen and Ingush until their split after Chechnya's declaration of independence from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

In November 1990 he became a deputy chairman to the newly formed All-National Congress of the Chechen People (NCChP), which was led by Dzhokhar Dudayev and which ousted the Soviet-era leadership. With Dudayev, he signed an agreement with Ingush leaders splitting the joint Chechen-Ingush republic in two. In the first Chechen parliament, from 1991–1993, Yandarbiyev headed the media committee. Since 1991 he served as Vice-President of the self-proclaimed republic.

In April 1996, following the assassination of his predecessor Dzhokhar Dudayev, he became an Acting President. In late May 1996, Yandarbiyev headed a Chechen delegation that met President of Russia Boris Yeltsin and Prime Minister of Russia Viktor Chernomyrdin for peace talks at the Kremlin that resulted in the signature of a ceasefire agreement on May 27, 1996.

In 1997, during the signing of the Russian-Chechen Peace Treaty in Moscow, Yandarbiyev famously forced his Russian counterpart President Yeltsin to change seats at a negotiating table so he would be received like a head of sovereign state. Yandarbiyev stood in the presidential election held in Chechnya in February 1997, but was defeated by the Chechen separatist top military leader, General Aslan Maskhadov, getting 10 per cent of the votes and landing third behind Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev. Together with Maskhadov, Yandarbiyev took part of signing of the "lasting" peace treaty in Moscow. The two Chechen leaders fell out badly the following year, when Yandarbiyev was accused of being behind an assassination attempt against Maskhadov. In September 1998, Maskhadov publicly denounced Yandarbiyev, accusing him of importing the radical Islamic philosophy of "Wahhabism" and of being responsible for "anti-state activities" including anti-government speeches and public meetings, as well as the organisation of illegal armed groups. Yandarbiyev subsequently joined forces with the hard-line Islamist opposition to Maskhadov's rule.

In August–September 1999, Yandarbiyev was assumed as a key figure behind the invasion by the Islamic International Brigade-led coalition of Islamist guerrillas on the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan. At the beginning of the Second Chechen War, Yandarbiyev traveled abroad to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates and eventually settled in Qatar in 1999, where he sought to obtain Muslim support for the Chechen cause.

After Yandarbiyev's involvement in the October 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, Yandarbiyev was placed on Interpol's most wanted list and Russia made the first of several requests for extradition in February 2003, citing Yandarbiyev as a major international terrorist and financier of the al-Qaeda-backed Chechen resistance. In June 2003, his name was consequently added to the United Nations Security Council Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee's blacklist of al-Qaeda-related suspects. Yandarbiyev played a key role in directing funding from foundations in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf in order to support a radical Chechen faction dubbed the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment, a militant group responsible for the Moscow theater hostage crisis. In January 2004 he was interviewed extensively in Qatar for the BBC Four documentary The Smell of Paradise, where the film-makers called him the "spiritual leader of the Chechens and a poet on the road to jihad."