Posted on 09/03/2004 11:17:03 PM PDT by LiberalBassTurds
I don't know, I'm still a child of the 60's and if I had to make a choice between "Russia" or "Independence",I would side with Independence any time.
Decades of desperation will result in the the most desperate of measures I guess.
I can't imagine living as the hated step-child under various communist regimes as they have under Stalin, Lenin, Kruschev, and all the succeeding others without this generation being genetically predisposed to hating Russia. Is there any difference between the Chechans and the way they have been treated by Mother Russia and the Kurds by Mother Iraq?
This is not a statement of support of what the Chechans have just done, I am still in shock at the horror of it all and those individuals who commited this horrible act should be killed. However, it is time Russia gives serious thought to granting the Chechans their long deserved independence.
Hey no problem. If you prefer to identify yourself via ignorance, based on....sorry, I'm chuckling a little too hard to type well, here...based on MSNBC's reports from "deeeeeep inside" the clandestine services, it's no skin of my nose.
If, on the other hand...
Back in early 79, after Afghan army captain Ismail Khan had called for jihad in Afghanistan, against the "communist usurpers", an internecine power struggle arose between different factions of Soviet military and intelligence and their respective Afghan pawns.
To save a long boring stretch of background, individuals under an umbrella we'll label "KGB" outlined a strategy for consolidating power to their front man in Afghanistan, Nut Mohammad Turaki. Part of this strategy was to falsely engage the Americans in order to secure a wider power base in political Afghanistan as the hardline Islamist movement, inspired by the Iranian Revolution, gained ground.
Another rival communist in Afghanistan vying for power, Hafizullah Amin, became just a bit too convinced of his destiny for greatness, and a little too greedy, and asked his handlers at "KGB" to grant him check writing authority for their considerable accounts earmarked to support communist rule in Afghanistan.
That set off alarms up and down the chain, and so the "KGB" faction more loyal to Turaki planted the seed that Amin was a CIA plant to discredit him.
Coincidentally, Amin then proceeded to meet with certain organizations known to have CIA contacts, and the original authors of the CIA rumor began to wonder if their own story wasn't true.
The KGB then sent a cable to Brezhnev in November 1979 noting that Amin "has had contacts with the American charge d'affairs several times" but had not filed contact reports with his Soviet handlers.
Official Moscow, notably Brezhnev and rising potential rival Andropov, having no other information to contradict the KGB assertions that Khan was a CIA "double", decided to assassinate Amin and invade Afghanistan to re-establish Soviet control.
The first Politburo decision to invade was taken on November 26th, 1979. On December 7th, Babrak Karmal, the KGB's "heir designate" landed at Bagram AB in a Tu-134. Over the next couple of days, KGB attempted a failed poisoning of Amin, and a failed sniper attack, and abandoned the assassination effort, instead to wage a massive frontal assault and deal with Amin after the military takeover.
Certain non-State personnel stationed at the US Embassy were aware of large parts of this picture at the time, but not aware of the original KGB sowing of disinformation designed to restrain Amin, and were also not aware of later KGB assertions that Amin really was working with CIA, and were therefore, essentially totally surprised when the Soviets actually invaded Afghanistan in December. Their impression was that Amin was a bad egg, involved in the assassination of a US diplomat, hostile to US interests and growing more antagonistic by the day.
Well after the fact, when cables sent from local KGB handlers to Moscow became available to western intelligence, it was with wonder that CIA field analysts finally understood their mistake and the phenomena that led to both it, and the unanticipated Soviet invasion.
Blowback.
Now you know.
;-)
September 2, 2004: When Chechnya first declared independence from Russia in 1993, the Russians promptly invaded. The Russians quickly tired of getting a lot of their troops killed for what appeared to be little gain. In the wake of their 1994 withdrawal from Chechnya, Russia simultaneously declared Chechnya still a part of Russia (and paid pensions and government salaries there) and left the Chechens to their own devices. But the Chechens could not govern themselves. It was as simple as that. The central government in the province controlled little beyond the capital Grozny. At least six major warlords held sway, and then quite loosely, over the rest of the province. Criminal activity rapidly increased. Between 1997 and 2000, some 1300 Russian civilians from southern Russia were kidnapped for ransom. When the money did not appear to be forthcoming, the victims were murdered. Hundreds of these captives were rescued as Russian troops again advanced into Chechnya in late 1999. But kidnapping wasn't the only racket. There was also auto theft, rustling, drug running and diverting oil from pipelines running through the province. This last scam was abetted by gangsters taking over local oil refineries and going into the fuel business. Add to this the usual gambling, extortion and prostitution rackets and you have a pretty grim place. For while a lot of the victims were fellow Chechens (who didn't belong to a particular gangs clan), most were in neighboring areas.
But what really mobilized public support for another invasion of Chechnya was one gang that specialized in religious fanaticism (in addition to some more secular crimes, everyone found kidnapping and smuggling too lucrative to give up for religious reasons.) Not content with just turning Chechnya into crime central, the Besayev gang decided to turn all the southern Caucasus into an Islamic republic. Most Chechens practiced the more laid back Sufi form of Islam, but Besayev and his followers managed to convert a few thousand Chechens to the more hard nosed Wahhabi form of Islam. It aid in this, non-Chechen fundamentalists came in to join the jihad. A few hundred converts were made in neighboring Dagestan. In the Summer of 1999, Besayev and company decided it was time to stop preaching and start fighting. Several thousand holy warriors invaded Dagestan. The Chechen criminals were bad enough, but this was too much for the Dagestanis, and they fought back.
Some 32,000 Dagestani civilians who fled the invasion, and the 1,500 locals were killed in the fighting, sometimes massacred by the holy warriors for resisting. Twice the Russian police and troops drove Besayev's warriors back into Chechnya. But after the third invasion, the new prime minister of Russia decided to reestablish control of Chechenya.
In February 2000, the senior Islamic cleric of Chechnya, Mufti Akhmed Khadzhi Kadyrov, proclaimed that the Russian occupation of Chechnya was the only way the people were ever going to be free from all the criminal activity. During the late 1990s, the Russian government had basically ignored the pleas of Chechnya's neighbors for relief from the increasing criminal activity. Reassuring press releases and more border guards were all that was sent to paper over the situation. But the local resentments built up, not just in the Caucasus, but throughout Russia. What was going in Chechnya was symbolic of the lesser degree of lawlessness throughout the country. Russians were waiting for someone to do something. But no one wanted a lot of Russian troops to get killed in the process. The 1993 battles in Chechnya had been humiliating for the Russian military, and people as a whole. In 1999, the Russians were more careful, numerous and decisive. This time the Chechens were also divided. The Russians soon occupied the entire country and began negotiating with many of the clan based groups for some kind of deal. The Russians wanted to get a majority of Chechens to agree to keep the crime rate, especially against people outside of Chechnya, down.
Chechen independence was not a major issue, Chechen's disruptive effect on the entire region was. This was nothing new. The Chechen's had, for centuries, been one of the more powerful ethnic groups (out of over fifty) in the Caucasus. The Chechens were used to doing as they wanted, and were tough enough, and ruthless enough, to get away with it. Two centuries ago, this unruly attitude brought the Chechens into violent contact with the expanding Russian empire. The Russians kept killing Chechens until the survivors agreed to behave. But such bloodletting is never forgotten in places like the Caucasus. The Chechens hate the Russians and want to be free to do whatever they want. And that's what the war in Chechnya is all about.
Thank you!
Then came the events of August, 1991 and the attempted coup to hold the USSR together by force. Basayev was in Moscow, and armed with a couple of hand grenades, went to help defend Yeltsin in the Russian Parliament.(12) The ripples from the failed coup attempt were felt in distant Chechnya, where local communist leaders had initially supported the coup plotters. Using this as a pretext to demonstrate, Chechen nationalist leaders began to consolidate power and prepared for local presidential and parliamentary elections. On 2 November 1991, newly-elected President Dudaev proclaimed Chechen independence. In response, President Yeltsin announced a state of emergency for Chechnya, dispatching troops to arrest the renegade general, Dudaev. The Chechens mobilized some 60,000 volunteers to defend against a probable Russian invasion.Huh... pretty nimble, pretty smart. Almost hate to see him strung up with piano wire and his testicles fed to pigs. ;')
Quite interesting.
"President" Dudaev was killed early on when the Russians traingulated his cell phone conversation and sent a cruise missile down his ear canal.
gee, i'm gonna miss him. ;') I meant Basayev. (':
bump for later read
You will want to take a look at this article.
Your post 43 describes recent history as I understand it. I think I have said before that at the fall of the USSR I was inclined to be sympathetic to the Chechens, knowing nothing about them other than they were yet another nation subject to the Soviets, I saw them as being in a similar situation to the Estonians.
Had they confined their attacks to Russian military, I would have continued to sympathize with their desire for independence. But of course, that isn't what happened. They launched numerous attacks against civilian targets in the neighboring republics and in Moscow itself, and that soured me on them.
In the mid-nineties they achieved defacto independence, and promptly their territory began to fill with islamists, and they began to launch attacks on their neighbors, again, taking every opportunity to slaughter civilians. Thats when I knew that Chechen independence could not be allowed to stand.
I know that Russian troops are famous for blunt tactics that cause heavy collateral damage, but Chechens actually focus on soft targets, such as schools and hospitals. That puts them in the same league with the Palestians and their ilk. You don't give such people their own territory, they won't use it to build a country, they will only use it as safe haven to launch more attacks. And that is exactly what the Chechens did.
Consequently, I continue to be completely in sympathy with Estonian independence, but where the Chechens are concerned my sympathies lie with the Russians who must suffer with their depradations.
I don't apologize for US help to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan, it was an important piece of a larger battle. But the Saudis who funded much of that war must be introduced to cold reality, which is that betraying a friend carries a price tag. I want to believe they will be faced soon with overthrow. And an invitation to liberate one country from Soviet occupation was not an invitation to conquer Central Asia in a post-Soviet world, and there is a price to be paid for that miscalculation too, I hope.
Foreign policy can't be operated on auto-pilot, you can never take your hands off the tiller. Policies that made sense when we were at war with the Soviets must be changed when the circumstance has changed. Russia is no longer our enemy, we are partnered with them at several levels, and if the Saudis don't get it, they must be dealt with.
I think we should be planning the breakup of the Saudi state, and once we are past the elections we should set the project into motion.
What I have been saying as often as possible here too. Thanks.
I am going to ping you next time I am trying to explain this on a thread. You do it better.
I wonder if you have Basayev confused with Dudayev?
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