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)
Perhaps this author should ask some of the ethnic groups of Dagestan their opinions about the right of secession for Chechens - the ones that fought bravely in defending their villages against the brutal incursions into their land by Chechens - not once but twice. Their dead = inconsequential?
Doesn’t attempts at territorial expansion somewhat negate this 'absolute' right to secede?
No. A decade ago, as we were coming out of the Cold War, many people were sympathetic to the Chechens, and anyone else trying to get out from under Moscow. Clinton and Albright consistently spoke up for the Chechens. And it fit with our overall policy of supporting both Turkish and Saudi foreign policy in the region. The Turks were pursuing their pan-Turkic policy, the Saudis were promoting the return to Islam in the former Soviet republics. Due to our ties and sympathies to both of them, we were prepared to support the Chechens in Russia, as well as, for example, the Uighars in China.
The Uighars are still a relatively sympathetic bunch of people, and I would like to see us continue to help them where we can. But the Chechens have burned their bridges with us, with their tactics of targeting civilians, with their ties to the same Al Qaeda groups that have targeted us. When our guys went into action in Afghanistan, they were fighting not only Arabs and Pakistanis and Pashtuns, but Chechen Al Qaeda fighters as well.
Of course, none of this happens in a vacuum. We have supported Muslim activism in general over the last decade for various reasons. In part it was out of a desire to win it over, and perhaps to use it to our benefit. In part it was due to our loyalties to the Saudis, and perhaps even in part to close business ties between some of our leaders and the Saudis, some public, and some perhaps not public.
In any case, our loyalty and support of Muslim causes has not been reciprocated. The very people we supported have targeted us, and killed our people again and again, in Africa, in Arabia, in America. So in the last year or so we have been forced to reevaluate our relationship with Muslims in general, and the Saudis in particular.
While Al Qaeda was targeting Russians and Chinese, we were quite prepared to support them, even to the point of rather shamefully ignoring attacks on Christians in Indonesia and in the Philippines. But those days are over.
The Muslims have burned their bridges with us. Their atrocities against Russian civilians, and Indian civilians, and Philipino civilians, and most especially against the US has caused us to lose the sympathy we once had. For them to attack Russia and the US at once was supreme foolishness. In the article posted, the writer tries to make their foolishness seem endearing, but there is nothing endearing about people who slaughter even their friends.
Yes, we are quite the ogres. We are responsible for hunger, poverty, crime, meaness, killing children and old people, controlling the worlds wealth to the benefit of an elite few, bad weather, and bad breath.
To listen to this guy you would think that the Russians would be down there raping and killing wither the Chechens were kidnapping and killing people or not? He's an idiot and probably ought to be shot along with his murderous Chechen buddies.
I get so sick of "its all about the oil" mantra.
Certainly, petroleum has much to do with national interests. As does arable land, water, strategic location and even national pride.
But the above is a clue that the author has no clue. Because one very large Uranium deposit is in the mountans of Chechnya. If Chechnya gained independence, it would join Afghanistan as a third world Islamic ****-hole with a huge source of fissionable material; a material as valuable for fuel as it is for weapons.
The attacked people in this case are the Russians. After Russia granted independence to Chechnya in 1995 the Chechens continued to kidnap Russians for ransom, including large scale hostage situations which killed hundreds of Russians. They attacked police stations in neighboring provences. Chechnya became an outlaw Republic where there was no law or order.
All the Chechens would have had to do to be left alone by the Russians is leave the Russians alone. Like most Islamic terrosts, they couldn't do it. Islamic terrorists are not happy unless they are killing infidels. Thats you and me and the Russians.
If these are the kind of people you support, I would say it is you who reads the Nation.
PS. The Soviet Union was dissolved in 1989. Try to keep up.
If they let themselves be used by al-Qaida or other terrorist Muslim groups, it was their own VERY stupid error. Few things could have been more predictable to thoroughly piss off the Russians. Now all the gloves will be off, and if they thought the Russians were tough before - just wait.
I guess it is safe to assume you will also support the Mexican seperatists when they start kidnapping US citizens for ransom and blowing up hospitals and theators in their quest for independence of the the American Southwest?
You realize that the only freedom that Chechens are fighting for is the freedom to be murdering bandits. It is not that the Russians are oppressing them anymore than any other people, its just that the Russians won't let them rob and kidnap and murder with impunity.
Oh woe is them, what a terrible plight. /sarcasm>
You know, if the Mexicans tried to take back Texas, and we went to stop them, it would just because of all of the oil reserves in Texas...
Parents of young Russians soldiers are terrified of their boys serving because of what will happen to them if they're captured.
One Russian soldier was interviewed at the site of a battle where the Chechnyans had murdered all surrendering Russians. He said, "If they thought we should die, they should shoot us, but cutting off body parts and then heads...". He couldn't finish. It was so sad.
Just like Kosovo, very few people even know that Chechnya is Muslim. The international press stands firmly on the side of terror.
Read some history on the subject, then come back to me when you get a clue.
Tuor
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