Posted on 10/26/2002 11:35:05 AM PDT by MarMema
Well, I would rather agree if this were, say, 1995. The Chechens were well within their rights to fight for independence from Russia in the 1994-1996 war. Let us remember, though, that in 1996 that war concluded with Chechnya achieving de facto independence. For three years, Moscow's writ held no authority in Chechnya. By the end of that three years, most NGO's and even news agencies did not send people in, as the place had become so lawless that it was the kidnapping capital of the world. Non-Chechens were kidnapped right and left by various bandits operating in Chechnya, and they even made occasional raids outside of Chechnya.
Even that might not have been Russia's business, but then, in the summer of 1998, ~1500 Muslim fighters from Chechnya, under the command of Shamil Basayev and the late Arab warlord known only as Khattab invaded Russia. That's right, they invaded Russia. They planned for the people of Dagestan (another Russian province) to rise up and join them in a great jihad. The people of Dagestan demured, and the Russians kicked the Chechnyans out. Then, they came back again a few months later, and this time the Russians chased them all the way back into Chechnya. In the process, they also worked to eliminate the strangle-hold that the Wahabbis had been acquiring over Chechnya.
Now, while most Chechnyans were not happy to see the return of the Russians, they had no desire to live under the Wahabbis who had set up shop there. The Wahabbis have since been reduced to a few fanatics hold up in the Panshki Gorge (Shevardnaze really, really needs to clean that place out; otherwise given the circumstances, I've a funny feeling that our own State Department will look the other way if Russians go over the border this time).
Come-on, folks! This is Russia! Remember ten years ago??!!
And what has happened in that ten years? Well, the Soviet Union is gone, with some of its former states wobbling towards democracy, some miredin authoritarianism, and some stuck under Stalinist dictators. But in Russia itself, we have seen in the last few years alone that Putin has pushed through the Duma things like the right to own land, vastly reduced taxes, and the right to trial by jury in criminal trials. Yes, the Russian press is not quite as free as it was about five years ago, but that will pass. On the whole, in addition to the above reforms, Putin has also been working to make sure that his country is friendly to economic growth while also trying to reign in the worst of the criminal businessmen who made Russia such a crappy investment climate in the 90's. Yes, Russia is still bumbling along in her road to being a democracy with a rule of law, and is not quite there yet, but in no way is she the entity against which our fathers and grandfathers stood watch.
" they bomb a church, we bomb ten. they hijack a plane, we take out an airport. they execute an american tourist, we tactically nuke an entire city. "
we need to start thinking like him I no longer care about their civilians you can count on your hand the ones which don't support terrorism.
The Russians accepted help, in person, from the representatives of 29 countries. All of whom were in Moscow on the eve before the rescue operation. Included were USA, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France, China, Japan and the republic of South Africa.
These unsung heroes deserve credit, imo.
Good point. Why hasn't our official policy regarding Chenchya changed yet? What purpose does it serve to protect those Islamoterrorists? If all Putin wants is for us to turn a blind eye to Chechnya and assure them that the $8 billion debt Iraq owes Russia will be paid back (probably extracted from Iraq's oil fields), then we should do so without hesitation.
The chechen warlords are up to their eyebrows in money from Bin Laden and the Saudis. They had as much independence as they could get under the law and still wanted to invade and kill.
Btw, the death toll is now being reported as 90 and a new report is that one of the women in the raid was the widow of Arbi Barayev. Doesn't say if she was one of the two who survived the rescue.
And finally, HOW INTERESTING, Lenta.ru is reporting that the hostages say the terrorists called Turkey and spoke with someone named Shamil. They think it is Basayev of course. WHO ELSE LIVES IN TURKEY???
As exactly what the Palestinians will do to Israel if they are ever give a "State".
They do not want peace, they want to cover the world with Islam.
Thanks for translating this for us Marmema, his asking forgiveness is heartwrenching.
repost of Guardian article
Young, ruthless leader heads new generation of guerrillas
Jonathan Steele and Ian Traynor in Moscow
Friday October 25, 2002
The Guardian
Movsar Barayev, the young rebel said to be in charge of the hostage operation, is known to Russian intelligence as the leader of one of the most ruthless armed bands in Chechnya. According to intelligence officials, he heads a band of 40-50 terrorists of both sexes, a group known for their uncompromising militance.
The nephew of a notorious Chechen warlord who was killed by Russian soldiers last year, Barayev, 24, represents a new generation of rebels, about whom relatively little is known.
Until last summer he lived in the shadow of his powerful, older uncle, the clan leader Arbi Barayev, who was involved with another leading clan in two notorious crimes - the capture and subsequent beheading of three British telcommunications workers and a New Zealander in 1998, and the abduction a year earlier of British aid workers Jon James and Camilla Carr. They were freed in September 1998.
After his uncle's death last July, Movsar took over the so-called "Islamic regiment" of Chechen fighters, sources in the FSB security service told the Interfax news agency yesterday. Barayev junior is said to be a sworn enemy of the Chechen commander and elected president, Aslan Maskhadov. His band of fighters is said to be ready for suicide, making the crisis that much more difficult to mediate and resolve.
Five years of war over the last decade and the collapse of the government-owned oil industry have turned Chechnya into a failed state, with rival groups fighting over control of the republic's thousands of small oil wells. Kidnapping of foreigners and other Chechens became good business for hard-faced leaders in an area where there was no functioning economy outside small-scale agriculture.
What part Movsar Barayev took in the kidnappings of 1997 and 1998 is not known, but some believe he is acting in the Moscow theatre siege as a front man for two failed politicians, Chechnya's former vice-president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, and a former information minister, Movladi Udugov. Mr Udugov is known as an opportunist who harnessed himself to the Islamist cause and has been financed from Saudi Arabia.
The model for the theatre siege appears to be the Chechen capture of hostages in a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk in June 1995. The number of hostages - 1,460 - was even larger and their capture began more bloodily than this week's hostage taking.
The Chechens first tried to capture a police station, and were driven off. Forty-two people died. The gunmen then took over a hospital. Their demands were similar to those of their successors today: a ceasefire, a gradual withdrawal of Russian troops from their homeland, and talks on Chechnya's future status. As now, they acted to embarrass the Russian president, at that time Boris Yeltsin, on the eve of a meeting with western leaders.
The Russians conceded all their demands and allowed them to drive back into Chechnya in a bizarre convoy of buses containing a small group of hostages as military helicopters patrolled overhead. But this came only after five days of horror, including a bungled Russian effort to storm the building.
A total of 124 people died, but it was never established how many were executed by the gunmen and how many were killed in the botched Russian attack.
Why should he? Maybe Putin is smart enough to recognize the fact that Iraq is one of the few muslim countries that the Christian West can coexist with... you know, a secular, hardcore dictatorship. Iraqi or Turkish-style gov't is the only way of controlling a fanatical muslim citizenry. When you get your way, and those idiots in DC invade Iraq and topple Hussein, look for the same thing to happen there as happened in Iran and Kosovo and Afghanistan - anti-western jihad!
When people like me were posting in opposition of the attack on Serbia and were outnumbered 20:1 here during that brutal assault on fellow Christians, I felt the same frustration as I do now on the Iraqi issue, watching helplessly as we destroy another potential friend and ally and create another violent, bloodthirsty, anti-western islamic enemy state.
Turkey is not going to deliver Movladi Udugov to Russia – the major ideologist of the Chechen terrorists (if he is in Turkey, of course). This was said by the prime-minister of Turkey, who added that different countries had different positions pertaining to the anti-terrorist struggle.
However, on January 9 Turkey addressed to Russia with a request to give it the materials from Udugov's extradition file in order to consider the claim from Moscow about the arrest and delivery of the terrorist. Russia perceived that step as Ankara’s willingness to cooperate with Moscow in the field of struggle with the international terrorist, though.
Russian assistant president Sergey Yastrzhembsky declared that “we start a closer cooperation to detain the people, connected with the international terrorist network.” The Russian authorities knew Udugov was not in Turkey, that it was only like a show, that the statements about the broad cooperation with Russia were only the words. But it was pleasant in a way.
Now it just so happens that Ankara refuses from its words, although these words could be the opinion of the prime-minister only. We should remind here that Movladi Udugov has been searched for by the federal bodies since the spring of 2000. In case he is extradited to Russia, he is going on trial for the organization of the attack of the Chechen gunmen on the republic of Dagestan in the fall of 1999.
Udugov used to be Johar Dudayev’s press-secretary in the past (Dudayev is the ex-president of Chechnya). He has been waging the informational war against Russia since 1994. In august of 1996 Udugov became the first vice-premier for the state politics and information of the Chechen government.
Sergey Yugov
PRAVDA.Ru
Udugov is also the man running kavkaz.org, which was unable to be accessed for the days during the hostage crisis, and then is suddenly, completely gone - just a sign now that they are under construction. Everything else is gone....
Except in Iraq. < / sarcasm>
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