Corin Redgrave: A great actor, hled prisoner by Russia's dirty war

Zakayev is awaiting extradition, and if that happens, he will be tortured and probably executed

Ahmed Zakayev is an actor, one of the finest actors Chechnya has ever produced. In former times, when Chechnya was an autonomous republic within the Soviet Russian Federation, he was also the Secretary of the Theatre Workers' Union for Chechnya, directly responsible to the great Russian actor, Mikhail Ulyanov.

It was as an actor that I came to know Zakayev. He visited the National Theatre in London last year when I was playing in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. He told me, through his interpreter, that although he hardly knew the play, he felt he had understood every word of my performance. A fine compliment from one actor to another.

Grozny's National Theatre, where Zakayev once played Hamlet and Coriolanus, is now a pile of rubble. So is every other building of importance in Chechnya's capitol, at the end of a bombardment by Russia more savage and pitiless even than the destruction of Guernica or Dresden. The last time Zakayev left Grozny he was on a stretcher, unconscious and hideously wounded. Like thousands of his young compatriots he had been fighting against the Russian invasion of his city.

Zakayev was no ordinary soldier, though. His popularity and his ability as an organiser had brought him to the attention of Dzokhar Dudayev, the leader of Chechnya's first government in the struggle for independence. He became Minister for Culture in Dudayev's government, and after the Russians killed Dudayev, he was appointed again as Minister for Culture by Aslan Maskhadov when the latter was elected president in 1997.

Those elections, endorsed and approved by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), paved the way for negotiations between Maskhadov and Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, in which Zakayev played and important role. He is now Maskhadov's envoy and spokesman abroad.

In that capacity, he organised the world conference of the Chechen diaspora that has just concluded in Copenhagen. Moscow was furious that this conference was to take place, and tried to bully and blackmail the Danish government into stopping it.

Copenhagen refused, but then did the next best/worst thing: they arrested Zakayev, on charges of terrorism supplied by Moscow. He is now awaiting possible extradition, though there is no treaty for that. If it happens, he will be tortured and most probably executed. In which case the best hope for an honorable negotiated settlement to Chechnya's and Russia's agony will be all but extinguished.

Zakayev knows, as does his president, better than anyone the harm that fundamentalist terrorism has done to his country. Terrorism brought Putin to power in 1999, when three bombs exploded, killing 300 people, in Moscow and Ryazan. Those bombs, and Shamil Basayev's idiotic proclamation of an independent Islamic state of Dagestan, enabled Putin to launch a second, even more devastating war against an already ruined Chechnya.

The little detail that those bombs were planted by the FSB/KGB, which was widely acknowledged in those far-off days when Britain and the US both spoke about human rights in Chechnya, has now been conveniently forgotten. It would be impolite, after 11 September, to remind the leader of the world's second largest nuclear power and possessor of the world's second largest oil reserves that he came to power by killing 300 of his own citizens in 1999, and has even pulled off the bizarre trick of improving his standing in the polls by gassing 117 more of his own citizens in Moscow the other day.

We have forgotten, apparently, the outcry when that brave journalist Sergei Babitsky, who criticised his country's war on Radio Liberty, was arrested and tortured by the Russian forces. We have forgotten also how Mary Robinson, then the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, was refused entry by the Russian authorities when she asked to inspect the filtration camps in Chechnya.

We have forgotten Anna Politskovskaya's magnificent book, A Dirty War, even though it was published only last year and was awarded Amnesty International's highest honour. We are amnesiac prisoners of the war against terrorism, and the fiction that Chechens were fighting in Afghanistan has numbed our memory and our consciousness of what Putin's army has done to Chechnya, and what his police are now doing to any Caucasians they can arrest in Russia.

If Britain, or America, or any country could act with sufficient principle, they would have long since recognised Maskhadov's government as the only legitimate representative of the Chechen people. If Denmark now would recall its own noble and not so distant history, it would ignore Russia's threats and blackmail as once before it stood up threats from the Gestapo. More Jews were saved from arrest in Denmark than in any other country – a proud fact which was acknowledged and remembered by the Chechens in their Copenhagen conference.

Denmark should remember its history now and release Zakayev. For Chechnya's sake, for the sake of much abused and still more to-be-abused human rights in Russia, and for all our sakes, I hope and pray that my friend Ahmed Zakayev will be safe.

The writer is an actor