[lbo-talk] Testy

[Chris Doss]

You know, one not altogether unlikely result of all
this if such events keep occuring in the area around
Chechnya is a mass pogrom of the Chechens, not on the
part of Russians, but Ossetes and Avars. Pogroms
against Chechens have already barely been averted in
Dagestan. Things could get really ugly.

I think people don't understand how complicated that
part of the world is. You have 40 or so ethnic groups
all living in close proximity to each other with a
long history of doing each other in. If you go down
from a mountain village in the Caucasus, the people at
the top (Mountain Jews, say) will be speaking a
different language from those (Avars or Chechens, say)
on the slope, who then speak a completely different
language from the people in the valley (Ossetes,
maybe), and they all hate each other because somebody
back in 1750 killed somebody else's
great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. It's
very volatile.

		
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