Hakki wrote:
Chris Doss wrote:
|| I'd also like to point out that, despite what you may have been lead to
|| believe, there is no "genocidal campaign" or "war of terror" against
|| Chechens in Russia. The abuses of the Russian Army, which are
|| legion, are
|| not the result of some Kremlin order. They are because the army
|| is broke.
To expand on that, let's take the flattening of Grozni. This is a result of Soviet military doctrine which has always favored massive artillery bombardment and trained/equipped itself accordingly. Added to that is the terrible shape the troops are in. The Soviet generals had no "targeted killing" capability like Israel's death squads so they only had the choice between sending in their untrained men to get slaughtered or blowing everything up. ---------------
Western coverage of Chechnya is totally f'd up. I remember one particularly dumb editorial in the Post, I think it was, that argued that the Russians' having dropped notes over Grozny telling people to leave before the shelling was an act of sadism (hey, maybe due to their sadistic personalities formed by poor family structures). Like it would have been better and more humanitarian to just bomb with no warning and kill everybody, like in Afghanistan.
Another thing is accusing the Russians of obstructing human rights workers in Chechnya. Before the Russians came in, it was IMPOSSIBLE to get human rights workers into Chechnya AT ALL. They all got kidnapped and/or killed immediately, and not by Russians.
The Israel-Palestine metaphor is not at all applicable. It's more like if the Palestinians fought a war for independence against Israel, won it, got a Palestinian state, and then turned around and attacked Israel. Sheesh.
Noble secessionists my ass. There was an open slave market in the center of Grozny until 1999, for God's sake.
British journalist Anatole Lieven wrote a very good article on Western misperceptions of Chechnya a while back I can forward to anyone interested. I love Noam, but reading him on Chechnya just makes me grit my teeth. He obviously knows nothing about it. He should stick to the areas he knows, Latin America and the Middle East.
Maybe I'm particularly testy about this because a friend of an ex-girlfriend, who was a journalist who went down to cover the war for Russian media, got tortured to death for his pains.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal