#15 - JRL 6524
Jerusalem Post
October 30, 2002
The Russian connection
BY URI DAN
The writer is the Mideast correspondent of The New York Post.

The Kremlin is convinced that a foreign agency, not Chechen, provided substantial aid to the gang responsible for the hostage drama and tragedy in the Moscow theater. "The Chechen terrorists were equipped and clothed like the suicide bombers acting against you." a senior Russian official told his Israeli colleague, who was also in contact with him regarding the war against Muslim terrorism.

He meant that the terrorists wore explosive belts, and head bands bearing the words in Arabic: "There is no God but Allah," just like the Hizbullah terrorists in Lebanon, or the Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers.

During my visit to Moscow at the beginning of October, a senior official, who heads a Russian defense research institution, told me that Chechen terrorists were maintaining phone contact with people from the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in the territories, in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Anyway, the investigation being conducted by the Kremlin is taking into account that a Moslem country, possibly an Arab one, aided the Chechen gang that perpetrated in Moscow a Russian version of the American September 11. In other words, a terrorist act that would shock the whole of Russia, just as the massacre in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon has shocked American society.

It was clear to President Vladimir Putin, even before he was elected to his high position in the Kremlin, that organizations like al-Qaida were aiding the Chechens in their war against the Russians. At the beginning of 1999 Putin was still serving as the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. It was that January that he met Ariel Sharon for the first time in a dinner that he held for Sharon in Moscow, when the latter was paying a visit as foreign minister.

Sharon was accompanied on that visit by Maj. Gen. (Res.) Meir Dagan, who this week took up the position of head of the Israeli Mossad. Dagan told me afterwards, in Moscow, that Putin had frankly expressed his anxiety about the danger of Islamist terrorist organizations helping the Chechens to organize operations against Russia.

In this context Dagan, who was then serving as advisor for combating terrorism to prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, told me that Putin proposed close cooperation with Israel against the Moslem fundamentalist terrorist threat that endangered both countries.

Putin not only referred to the Chechen links with Bin-Laden, but also mentioned that Jordanians of Chechen origin were involved in terrorist attacks.

In particular since Sharon was elected prime minister, and in the light of the war that he has been waging against the suicide bombers , the link between Moscow and Jerusalem has been strengthened in this matter also.

It came as no surprise, therefore, that when Yasser Arafat phoned and asked to talk to Putin immediately after his meeting with Sharon, Putin refused to accept the call.

Among his close aides Putin refers to Arafat with contempt, just as he talks about the Chechen terrorists whom he calls "criminals." This is because Putin treats those who engage in terrorism with disgust, whether they are Bin-Laden, Arafat, or the Chechen.

In his negative attitude to Arafat, President Putin is therefore close to the stance of President George W. Bush, who totally rejected Arafat as a partner to diplomatic negotiations with Israel. Putin disagrees with the European Union, which is trying to return Arafat to center stage.

THE GREAT tragedy in the Moscow theater only strengthened the Russian understanding and support for the stance of Jerusalem in its war against the Palestinian terror. It may confidently be said that the relations between Moscow and Jerusalem have never been so close and friendly as those now existing between Putin and Sharon.

The Chechen present a challenge that the new Russia has never experienced. It was clear that negotiations with the gang in the theater would have been fruitless. On the other hand there was great danger to the lives of hundreds of hostages that the Chechen notorious for their cruelty since they controlled the Moscow Mafia in the 1980s would not hesitate to snuff out, along with their own.

Putin was therefore forced to use the ultimate weapon, a debilitating and deadly gas. Though the use of such a gas to free hostages was unprecedented, so was the succees of the terrorists in trapping hundreds of hostages simultaneously.

This terrible dilemma, the decision to release hostages by force even though it is clear that some or all of them are liable to be harmed, is well known to the Israelis. In 1974, in a school in Ma'alot, defense minister Moshe Dayan decided to sent an elite IDF unit to rescue students from the Palestinian terrorists, and about twenty students were killed.

In 1976 prime minister Yitzhak Rabin took a courageous decision to send the IDF to Entebbe, Uganda, in order to rescue hostages from the hands of Idi Amin, although he knew that there was a risk that a tragedy was liable to occur to both the hostages and the soldiers.

But in the case of the tragedy of the Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympic Games in September 1972, it took place when Israel took a resolute stand not to give in to the Palestinian terrorists who kidnapped the Israeli athletes as hostages. The Bavarian unit in Germany was not equipped and trained to rescue the Israelis from the Palestinian kidnappers, and they were slaughtered at Munich airport.

In fact the war against terrorism is sometimes liable to cause civilians to be killed by their rescuers, as in the case of the hostages in Moscow. This is the cruel dilemma that the terrorists present to the democracies, when Muslim fascism is currently waging a global war against them that the world has not known before: From Bali to Moscow, from New York to Amman, Jordan, where this week an American diplomat, Laurence Foley, was murdered.

The strengthening Russian connection with Israel in the war against Muslim terrorists will undoubtedly aid Israel in the coming decisive months. This is particularly true when the Kremlin is convinced that a Islamic organizations were behind the unprecedented Chechen terrorist attack in the heart of Moscow.