by Yana Dlugy
MOSCOW - Aslan Maskhadov, the longtime Chechen separatist leader killed by Russian troops, was a legitimately elected president of the Muslim republic and a moderate rebel chief who advocated negotiations to end the bloody 10-year conflict with Moscow.
As the man who was elected president of a de facto independent Chechnya in 1997, after the first Russo-Chechen war, Maskhadov was the sole rebel leader to advocate negotiations as the way to end the conflict and the only man with whom Moscow could be pressured to hold talks by the West.
"There really isn`t anyone in Chechnya with whom to hold talks because the only person who believed that you could talk with Moscow was Aslan Maskhadov," said a letter posted Wednesday on a rebel website.
"Now there is no longer such a person in Chechnya," it warned grimly. "Now the war can`t be halted, it can only be finished."
The soft-spoken 53-year-old Maskhadov was a colonel in the Red Army who returned to Chechnya after the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 and, like most Chechens, favored independence from Moscow.
He became a close associate of first post-Soviet Chechen leader Djokhar Dudayev and emerged as one of the leading commanders during the first Russo-Chechen war from 1994 to 1996, which ended with the withdrawal of Russian troops and de facto Chechen independence.
A talented military commander who was regarded by many Chechens as having decency and integrity, Maskhadov was elected Chechnya`s president in January 1997 with 60 percent of the vote in an election recognized by the Kremlin and judged by international observers to be free and fair.
His downfall, according to many observers, was not being able to stand up to radical Islamists who flooded into Chechnya at the end of the first war with Russian forces, turning it into a lawless place where caning, kidnapping and murder became commonplace.
When Russian troops rolled back into Chechnya in October 1999 at the start of the second war that continues to this day, the new masters in the Kremlin, which signed a ceasefire with Maskhadov in 1996, had by then branded him a "terrorist".
Unlike many of his associates who went abroad, Maskhadov remained in Chechnya, hiding in the mountains that hug its southern edge from where he directed the resistance to Russian forces.
He had repeatedly denied responsibility for the most horrific terror attacks in Russia during the past several years claimed by Shamil Basayev, the radical leader who served as Maskhadov`s defense minister and who welcomed radical Islamists from abroad to his camp, like the Dubrovka and Beslan hostage takings.
"He was a restraining force," his longtime ally and spokesman Akhmed Zakayev told AFP by phone from Britain where he had received political asylum.
"He was trying to prevent this conflict from escalating and spreading throughout the North Caucasus," he said.
"The situation now risks spinning out of control," he said.
Born in 1951 in Kazakhstan, the desert republic where Stalin deported much of the Chechen population during World War II for alleged collaboration with the Nazis, Maskhadov returned to his homeland at the age of six.
He studied at artillery academies in Tbilisi and Leningrad and rose through the ranks of the Soviet armed forces to become an artillery colonel. In 1981 was posted in Hungary as an artillery regiment commander and in 1986 he was transferred to Vilnius.
Maskhadov was married and had a son and daughter.
03/09/2005 11:50 GMT