> Chris Doss Kapiital>With all these Pugliese postings...
> ---
> I was going to write a business column with the title Doss Kapital once.
>
> Seriously, the completely shameful behavior of Human Rights Watch and
> Amnesty International in the Caucasus has made those organizations
> irrelevant in Russia. They left Chechnya in 1996, because their members
kept
> getting kidnapped and killed by Chechen gangs. As a result, they breathed
> not one word about the horrific human rights violations at that time. The
> Russian Army is brutal, but they are nothing compared to Chechen warlords.
> Now, they lambast Russian conscripts from impoverished cities like Omsk
and
> villages who were too poor to bribe their way out of the army or get an
> educational deferment, and don't say a damn thing about the Chechen slave
> trade, the numerous bombings, the torture, the beheadings, the ethnic
> cleansing of non-Chechens. They are cowards. This total silence on the
part
> of those organizations is adduced by Russians as further evidence that
they
> are CIA fronts and that Westerners think Russians are n-words and don't
give
> a damn about Russian citizens getting kidnapped, enslaved, tortured,
> executed and blown up. I have no respect for Human Rights Watch any more.
> Complete hypocrites. I wouldn't give them the time of day.
>
> My ex-girlfriend, who is a Russian journalist (used to edit the arts and
> entertainment section of a German-language newspaper in Moscow) got a call
a
> while ago just out of the blue. It turned out it was the mother of a
former
> colleague of hers, also a Russian journalist. He had been down in Chechnya
> covering the war and, predictably, got kidnapped and tortured to death.
She
> wanted to talk to someone and just found my ex's card in her son's things
> and called her. She cried and cried.