>
> by KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL
>
> The bloody end to the hostage crisis in Beslan
> resulted in
> unfathomable human suffering. More than 300
> children, parents and
> teachers died in the gruesome fifty-two-hour siege
> that began when
> heavily armed Chechens--and possibly other
> guerrillas from the
> Caucasus--stormed Middle School No. 1. This
> unconscionable slaughter
> of the innocents came just days after a bomber--most
> likely one of
> the "black widows," women who have lost husbands,
> brothers or sons at
> the hands of Russian forces in Chechnya--
Some of the black widows have lost relatives. Some have not.
blew
> herself up at a Moscow
> subway station, killing ten and wounding scores of
> others, and the
> August 24 crashes of two airliners, apparently blown
> up by terrorists.
>
> These latest acts expose the bankruptcy of President
> Vladimir Putin's
> war policy toward Chechnya. After three years of
> peace, negotiated by
> Boris Yeltsin's Kremlin with the Chechen
> secessionists in 1996, Putin
> came to power by championing a renewed military
> offensive in that
> already war-torn region.
She forgets that Chechen warlords started the war, not Putin. And Yeltsin sent in the military, not Putin. He wasn't president yet.
>From the beginning, he
> built his career and
> image on a promise to bring permanent stability,
> order and security
> to Russia's people. Instead, his brutal policies,
The policies aren't brutal so much as the execution of them, i.e., they are implemented by untrained conscripts and pro-Moscow Chechens who are driven in part by blood feud.
> particularly
> against Chechen civilians, have spurred the wave of
> terrorism that
> now afflicts Russia.
Probably, but it's not just that. She's reducing it to a monocausal relation that omits the Wahabbite ideology.
No less self-defeating has been
> Putin's refusal
> to negotiate with the Chechen government, which his
> troops overthrew
> in 1999, headed by its last freely elected
> President, Aslan
> Maskhadov.
The freely elected president that presided over a kidnap industry and slavetrade and introduced Shariah law.
During the past two years alone, more
> than 1,000 Russians
> have been killed in a series of increasingly lethal
> terrorist acts
> inside Russia itself, including those in a Moscow
> theater in October
> 2002. Meanwhile, since the first war began in 1994,
> more than 100,000
> Chechens, most of them civilians, have died,
This figure sounds very suspicious to me.
(snip)
> While some foreign fighters have joined the Chechen
> guerrillas during
> the past ten years, the essential driving force
> behind the resistance
> remains a nationalist struggle.
This is totally untrue. The main Chechen warlord is Shamil Basayev. Shamil Basayev is a Wahabbi whose ideology is almost identical to that of Osama bin Laden and wants to establish an Islamic caliphate throughout the Caucasus.
(Indeed, initial
> claims by Russian
> security forces at Beslan that the hostage takers
> included ten Arabs,
> widely reported by the Western media, have now been
> disclaimed by the
> Kremlin.)
>
I keep hearing different things about this.
But it's clear
> that Maskhadov
> would accept something less than full independence
> from Russia, as
> indeed some other ethnic republics have within the
> Russian Federation.
Maskhadov is barely fighting. Shamil Basayev is fighting.
>
> For once, the State Department is right. For the
> first time in many
> years, voices can be heard in Russia calling for a
> political solution
> as the only way out.
She can say this because she omits what the last political solution led to -- a slave trade and an attack by Islamists on Dagestan. She doesn't even use the world "Dagestan" anywhere in this editorial.
And yet Putin continues to
> reject the political
> nature of the Chechen war, blaming everything from
> Yeltsin's legacy
> and the breakup of the Soviet Union to international
> terrorists and
> shadowy Western forces that support them, while
> trying to shut off
> discussion at home by cracking down on the media.
Pribt media and the Internet have not been cracked down on. They print anti-Putin material all the time, as a quick perusal of Johnson's Russia List should make clear (go to the JRL archives and do a search on "Novaya Gazeta").
> But if he continues
> to refuse to negotiate with Maskhadov, who has
> repeatedly stated his
> readiness for talks and denounced the Chechen
> terrorists at Beslan,
He also took credit for the terrorist attack in Ingushetia.
> the situation in Russia can only grow worse: more
> acts of terror,
> possibly even against one of the country's scores of
> nuclear
> reactors; more civilian deaths on both sides; and a
> widening civil
> war throughout the Caucasus.
Maybe. But it's the only argument a Nation editorial is able to make, for ideological reasons.
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