[lbo-talk] RE: Beslan: the real international connection by Brendan O'Neill

John Bizwas bizwas at lycos.com
Thu Sep 16 05:37:51 PDT 2004


I just changed time zones by 14 hours, so I'm applying for a different day's allotment. This will be my only post in the next 24 hours, promise. Fugazy

CD writes:
>Not meaning to quibble, and certainly a lot of people
>died in Chechnya, but the 100,000 figure is way out
>there. Nabi Abdullaev says 30,000, which seems much
>more realistic considering the population of Chechnya
>and the length of the war.<<end of that quote

I'm not going to quibble extensively over death figures either, but your writing is not clear here. Who says a population of 850,000 - 1 million can't sustain a loss of 100,000. By what evidence does Nabi Abdullaev make his claim of 30,000? Intuition? He counted them himself? He was in charge of an official body count? He averaged credible journalistic or governmental or military sources? I'm not saying it's wrong, but it certainly doesn't agree very closely with the limited amount of independent information I could find.

Of course, complicating body counts is the huge numbers of refugees in the region, including large numbers of ethnically and linguistically related Ingush 'cleansed' from N. Ossetia. This could be a good lead in understanding some of what happened at the Beslan school. So much for the 'rootless Islamic terrorism virus going around theory'. More likely it's good old fashioned Caucasian 'the blood of your children too' revenge on Russified Ossetians, who themselves know a thing or two about using the Russian center to stand on the Ingush and Chechens. Also, you say 'length of war' which is misleading, since there have been at least two periods of sustained combat, one under Yeltsin, and one under Putin, and an occupation lasting much longer than the 'short' war you seem to be alluding to.


>And the Chechen radicals don't interpret the
>destruction of Grozny in the way you do. This is
>Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, who is the main ideologue of the
>Chechen radicals (and was the subject of late Paul
>Khlebnikov's last and still-unavailable-in-English
>book), speaking on the subject of the destruction of
>Grozny:<<end of quote

Well, there is nihilism of the mouth and nihilism in action. This particular ideologue would appear to be more anti-modern, anti-industrial and anti-urban than particularly Wahhabist or even traditional Sunna-Hanafi turned militant-radical. The two cities of Chechnya were started as Russian military outposts founded during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, so perhaps his Khmer Rouge-like nostalgia for the lost communal, village society might be empathized with, if we try.

Still, isn't it a bit out there to assert that Khozh-Adhmed Nukhaev speaks for all Chechens or even all Chechen 'radicals' or any of the dead, however you want to count them (who might choose life in a rather crappy post-Soviet Grozny over death and a graveyard in smoking pit?) And I'm not at all sure yet how I should interpret the events of this conflict let alone how you should interpret how I interpret them. I'm trying to understand what happened in Beslan because I wonder why, if it should be so outrageous and beyond reason, why it all seemed so 'predictable' as I watched it transpire on CNN-I?

Also, what was interesting to me, based on the video that made it into the western media, the terrorists seemed to have a military demeanour and body language. Moreover, although they brutally murdered these children and non-combatants, it was also reported that they killed over 10 Russian special force troops and some of them escaped. This means that the group had a very good plan and knew Russian military and police operations very well.

And to conclude, I tried to find numbers that agree with yours and the closest I could find was 'uncounted tens of thousands', which is a good way to sum up the 'truth' in such matters in this post-modern episteme. Not all of these are impartial web sites, but the material they often cite was gathered completely independent of their agendas (no Spiked online sorry).

http://slate.msn.com/id/2106287

The war, which began on Dec. 11, 1994, lasted nearly two years, cost at least 80,000 Chechens and about 4,000 Russian soldiers their lives, and ended in military defeat for Russia.

http://www.hrvc.net/main.htm

Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, razed to the ground - 150.000 dead - 300.000 refugees. War on terrorism or state terrorism?

http://www.cdi.org/Russia/204-13.cfm

The Russian forces are bent on terrorizing in order to subjugate a people who have already undergone an ordeal: perhaps 150,000 dead since the last offensive, that of 1999, while only 300,000 to 400,000 Chechens out of a population of 1 million before the war are said still to be living inside the country.

http://www.rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=219

If we look at the 1990s alone, the human carnage is staggering: 2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in 90 days in Rwanda; a quarter of a million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter of a million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; and untold tens of thousands killed in the border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the fighting in Colombia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, southeastern Turkey, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the Persian Gulf War (where estimates are that 35,000 Iraqi civilians were killed) and so on.

http://www.peaceinchechnya.org/bg_crisis.htm

The U.S. Government conservatively estimates that 80,000 Chechen civilians and resistance fighters have died since 1999. Total deaths, including those from the first Russo-Chechen war (1994-1996), are believed to be around 180,000, though figures compiled by both Russian and Chechen non-governmental organizations suggest that this number may be closer to 250,000.

http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/cau/cau_200210_151_2_eng.txt

Since then, human rights activists calculate that up to 100,000 Chechens have died in fighting and far more forced to flee the republic. Around 150,000 refugees are registered in Ingushetia alone.

http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/massacre.html

1991-: Russia-Chechnya civil war (200,000)

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