You write:
>Why the lack of interest in Chechnya among progressive lef-wingers by
>comparison with East Timor?
>
>It would not have anything to do with the religious and cultural
>affiliations being the other way round would it?
Your suspicions are mine, Chris. They're doing brutal mass murder over there and no mistake. One other factor might be the paucity of information, though. I'd never even heard of Chechnya before that last sad business, and
Whatever, it's done a nice job of taking the erstwhile aparat's nation-destroying corruption (including Yeltzin's alleged complicity and the West's steadfast complicity in complicity) off the front pages just as it was brewing into a nice political disaster. Boris's time with big Bill has obviously not been wasted - Grozny is his Sudanese aspirin factory. Funny to remember that the destruction of the Chechen capital, thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands of livelihoods all started with a coupla hundred infiltrators over in long-forgotten Dagestan ...
Anyway, it'd be nice to hear from someone who has an inkling of what's going on.
Cheers, Rob.