But the women there are sooooo sexy.
Posted on 10/28/2002 8:26:21 AM PST by dead
OF all the enemies you could pick in the world, the Chechens would probably be your last choice. There is something about this people's toughness which demands respect - even fear.
Compared with the Chechens, the Palestinians are pussycats. The Chechens have the rare ability to plan and execute daring operations, and seem impermeable to attempts by the Russians to penetrate their organisation.
Between 1994 and 1998, I visited Chechnya several times to report on the first Chechen war and its bloody aftermath. I became convinced that they were a people not to be trifled with.
Ten years ago, there was little deeply Islamic about them. The high Caucasus mountains were converted to Islam only in the 16th century, and their law was that of the tribe and the clan, not of the Koran and the Sunna. No woman went veiled.
The Chechens were great drinkers and there was little in Chechen society with which the Wahhabi imams of Saudi Arabia would approve. If the Chechen male worried about drinking vodka it was only because he feared it would make him impotent. They attributed to the fiery liquid the drastic decline in the Russian birth rate - a luxury the Chechens cannot afford because their numbers have been brutally diminished by the Russians every two generations.
Under Stalin, the whole Chechen population was deported to Siberia and the steppes of Central Asia, where hundreds of thousands died.
The remnants of this ethnic cleansing were allowed back in the 1950s, only to face the wrath of the Russian army in the 1990s when they tried to declare independence. For the Chechens, the right to their own state goes without saying, but the Kremlin refuses to let them secede from the Russian Federation. Chechnya is a great oil-producing region, and Moscow wants control of its pipelines.
When the press descended on the republic's capital Grozny, the Chechens were hoping that the world would support them as the valiant underdog fighting the Russian bear. Times had moved on, though. The world was behind Boris Yeltsin, and the Russians had done a good job of presenting the Chechens as bandits and racketeers.
Everything about the Chechens seemed designed to send shivers down the spine. Their leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a retired Soviet air force general, dressed to shock. His pencil moustache marked him out as a villain; his long leather coat seemed to be a cast-off from the SS. The Chechen flag was a wolf baying at the moon. These unwholesome images outweighed the terrible crimes committed by the Russians in flattening Grozny - an industrial city - so that it looked like Dresden in 1945.
The Chechens' military campaign was run on a guerrilla basis. Fighters would go into battle for weeks at a time, shivering in trenches without proper coats or gloves, and then return to their villages to tend their frostbite and rest.
One snowy winter's day, a white-clad figure leaned into my car and snarled: "You are all spies. You will be shot. Get out of the car now."
I was speechless until I saw the smile on the face of the fighter. He turned out to be the owner of the last restaurant in Grozny - now shut down so that he could battle the Russians.
It was a joke, but it had a brutal edge of truth to it. As the Chechens lost any hope of help from the West, their society retreated to the most brutal clan rule.
Westerners became fair game for kidnapping. If their employers did not pay a fat ransom, the abductors would cut off their fingers before a video camera to show they meant business - and then their heads.
The Chechens turned to the Islamic fundamentalists and welcomed veterans of the Afghan struggle. Money from Gulf states spread a form of Wahhabi fundamentalism which the country had never seen before.
This has led to the scenes in the Moscow theatre - women in chadors with explosives strapped to their waists, like extras from a bin Laden extravaganza. I recognise the old urge to scare, but this time it has gone into overdrive.
However, I must lay some of the blame on the West for abandoning the Chechens to the mercy of the Russians.
They have sought help in the only place they could find it. It was a poisoned source, and the Chechens will pay the price for years to come. ( Daily Telegraph, London)
Hmmmph!
I hope that the Russians crush these terrorists (oops, separatists). Any group that will join with Al Queda deserves whatever is coming to it!
It seems like this was the only solution that worked. Seriously...
The Chechens would be cast in a much better light if they would stick to military targets, treat prisoners humanely and kill the criminals posing as "rebels"
I am also amazed that the Germans got very close to Gronzy during WWII.
They have sought help in the only place they could find it. It was a poisoned source,
Bullsh!t
Strapping explosives to yourself to blow up a theater full of innocent people is wrong. It doesn't matter who you turn to for help. It doesn't matter what the ideology. It's just wrong. There is no need to be sympathetic with the root causes of such brutal insanity.
If the Chechens were not inclined to do such things, they could not be convinced to do so. The Islamabomers found a fertile field in Chechnya, because the people there were of a similar mind-set. Not to defend Stalin, but do you suppose he might have had a reason to go through the trouble and expense of exporting the entire population of Chechnya to Siberia?
These are the Fruits of Islam. They have them there. We have them here.
Looks like FreeRepublic is turning into the Nation, all Soviet/Russian atrocities are explainable, understandable and the fault of the attacked group.
Too bad many people, including many here on FR, will not realize the above fact. It saddens me the way statism has taken over the site, so that The Law, lawfulness, and obedience to authority is more important than freedom, liberty, and what is right.
I have supported the Chechen's attempts at freedom ever since I heard about their plight. I wish them luck in their attempts to regain their long-lost independance.
The worst thing we can do in this situation is to provide *any* aid to the Russians against the Chechens. The Chechens would not forgive or forget that, and they are *much* more nasty than the Saudi Muslim terrorists.
Tuor
There is value however, in recognizing mistakes so that they are not repeated.
Of course it's our fault.
And probably overblown, too. The Chechens are obviously a tough crowd. But IMHO they're not nearly so invincible as the author would have us believe. The Russian difficulties in Chechnya probably have mostly to do with Russian tactics. Of course the Chechens are going to fight to the death, because they know the Russians will kill them anyway.
But the women there are sooooo sexy.
But the women there are sooooo sexy.
Where did you get this from???
We tried the Nazis and hung them by the score. And I don't see Russians blowing up office towers or theater houses just to cause civilian (infidel) deaths.
Compared with the Chechens, the Palestinians are pussycats. The Chechens have the rare ability to plan and execute daring operations, and seem impermeable to attempts by the Russians to penetrate their organisation.
Between 1994 and 1998, I visited Chechnya several times to report on the first Chechen war and its bloody aftermath. I became convinced that they were a people not to be trifled with.
You can see, perhaps, that I was not the only one to see a genetic difference or something similar. It's the personal meeting of them that does this to you, I believe. I am still cured of the hatred but not entirely of the belief about these people being unique as a people.
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