Chechen actor who took up the gun to fight for freedom

Akhmed Zakayev, the actor who took up the gun to fight for Chechen independence before turning to political means, was not even born in his blood-stained homeland.

Like so many Chechens of his generation, Mr Zakayev was born in Kazakhstan, where his parents had been brutally exiled. Over two days in February 1944, the Chechens and their neighbours – the Ingush – who had resisted Stalin's forced collectivisation, were systematically rounded up by Russian troops and shipped off to the east in freight trains.

Now at the centre of an unpleasant tug-of-war between Russia and the European Union, Mr Zakayev is the right-hand man of Aslan Maskhadov, the fugitive but popularly elected Chechen President.

Mr Zakayev is considered to be one of the finest actors produced in a country better known for kidnappings and massive human-rights abuses by occupying Russian forces than the glories of Grozny's National Theatre. It was there that Mr Zakayev once played Hamlet and Coriolanus, although today it is an unrecognisable pile of rubble in a city of ruins where he and his fellow independence fighters took on the pitiless might of the Russian war machine. Mr Zakayev, by then a senior commander, was stretchered out of the battle, unconscious and badly wounded.

The Chechens have been resisting Russian intervention in the north Caucasus for 300 years. And when the Soviet Union broke up, the Chechens refused to accept the authority of the Russian Federation over their affairs.

Mr Zakayev was named Culture Minister by Dzokhar Dudayev, the leader of Chechnya's first government who struck a blow for independence in 1994. Russian forces then levelled Grozny, the capital, but Chechen rebels held most of the country through 1996, fighting from mountain enclaves.

When the Russians used indiscriminate force to attack urban centres, the Chechen fighters shifted to terrorist tactics. Humiliated Russian troops pulled out of Chechnya in 1996 and a wave of kidnappings and banditry engulfed the region.

The Chechen people subsequently elected Mr Maskhadov as the republic's president with Mr Zakayev again named Culture Minister. But in late 1999 Islamist extremists based in Chechnya – believed to have had links to Osama bin Laden and totally independent of the government of Chechnya – twice staged armed incursions into neighbouring Dagestan.

The Kremlin announced it no longer recognised the authority of the Chechen administration. Mr Zakayev slipped underground, popping up from time to time to issue official communiqués. Since 2001 he has been Chechnya's special envoy and spokesman in Europe. He has infuriated Moscow by drawing attention to abuses by the Russian military against the civilian population of Chechnya, including summary executions, disappearances, torture and looting.

In May, even the Moscow- appointed governor, Akhmad Kadyrov, admitted: "People are still disappearing without trace." This year, Mr Zakayev unsuccessfully lobbied the chief prosecutor of the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague to prosecute war crimes abuses.

Following the attacks on the United States on 11 September last year, President Vladimir Putin of Russia described the struggle in Chechnya as part of the global war against terrorism. He also said he was prepared to start a dialogue with the Chechens.

In November 2001, Mr Zakayev flew to Moscow for a meeting with Mr Putin's representative, Viktor Kazantsev. But nothing came of the talks.

He organised the recent world conference of the Chechen diaspora in Copenhagen in October. Moscow was furious the conference was taking place in the aftermath of the Chechen terrorist attack on the Moscow theatre, in which 119 hostages and 50 gunmen died.The Danish government refused to bow to Russian pressure and ban the congress but it did arrest Mr Zakayev, on the basis of an Interpol warrant.

On Tuesday Mr Zakayev was released by a Danish judge after 34 days in custody as the court said there was not enough evidence to extradite him.