9. Re: RE: Beslan: the real international connection by Brendan Sorry to be so slow on the follow up, but was away for the weekend. Here's my last word on the matter:
CD:
> The reason I am skeptical about 100,000 [dead in Chechnya] is this:
> according to the 1989 Soviet census, the
> Chechen-Ingush Republic had a population of about
> 1,250,000, of which about 730,000 was Chechen
> (http://www.nupi.no/cgi-win/Russland/etnisk.exe?Chechnya-Ichkeria).
> When Chechnya and Ingushetia were separated, that
> lopped off about 250,000 people (if memory serves).
> This leaves a population of 1 million, including both
> Chechens and non-Chechens. Non-Chechens (and Chechens,
> but mainly the former) began to leave immediately in
> 1992. Let's say that 50,000 people left from
> 1992-1994. I'd say this is a conservative figure.
> About 300,000 people were refugees in Dagestan in the
> first war, and perhaps 100,000 others fled to
> elsewhere in Russia, including almost the non-Chechen
> population. That means that Chechnya had a real
> population in 1994-1996 of 550,000. The 100,000 dead
> figure is usually cited for the First Chechen War --
> I'm not going to project the figures because that
> would get really complicated. That would mean that
> almost 1 out of 5 people, men and women, young and
> old, in Chechnya were killed in a war that lasted 18
> months. I think that is implausible.
Consider the US still hasn't given one figure for the dead of 9-11. Despite your demographic discussion, I still find a total of 60-100 thousand quite credible, though as I've pointed out before, direct deaths and resultant deaths make accounts vary. Certainly my use of those figures is better than CNN-I's recent figure of a total of 800,000 dead.
> Are you saying that Moscow defined the Chechens and
> Ingush as a people? Chechen-Ingush refer to themselves
> collectively as Vainnak. Dudayev denounced the Ingush
> as race traitors for refusing to rebels against
> Russia.
The terms Chechen and Ingush aren't what they call themselves. But no, I wasn't saying Moscow defined them as a people or two related peoples with related languages (with quite a bit of mutual intelligibility). They also have native terms to refer to themselves as related but separate people. As for what Dudayev says, all the more reason to condemn Russia's expulsionist interventions in N. Ossetia.
>
> I believe that your version of events is incorrect,
> but prove me wrong if you know otherwise. I was under
> thr impression that the Ingush wanted territory and
> property that was taken from them and given to the
> Ossetians when they were deported by Stalin:
I didn't really give much of a version of these events. I simply referred to events in 1992, even before the Russian-Chechen Civil War really got going. Sure, the Ingush claims go way back. That doesn't make them completely illegitimate. My point was that N. Ossetians and Ingush were in conflict. So much for the proclaimed innocence and neutrality of the Ossetians. This is in counterpoint to how recent events have been reported.
> Are you suggesting that Russia instigated this
> itself?!?!?
What I'm saying is that Putin ought to take a good look at his own government's 'anti-terrorism' and 'counter-insurgency' efforts if he wants to calm down the Caucasus. In this case I think it quite possible that the attackers had indeed been trained and equipped, at least originally, by the Russians or their proxies. That was what they looked like to me watching the videos. Also, its a region of multiple cultural and linguistic identities, so I think that one reason why Beslan was such a success for the attackers was people, quite knowledgeable of the police and military there, passing as Ossetian in setting up the attack.
In parallel (perhaps sidetracking to another thread in its own right) we could look at the US's Iraq (where of course the US has no legitimate historic basis for its interventions) and ask: Gee, where did all these armed Shia come from? Well, this is one that won't get squarely pinned on the global Wahhabis, though I suppose someone at Spikedonline is now arguing, like Tony Blair, that Iraq is the crucible for the West's war on global, inchoate, de-nationalized terror. Answer: It was the US, in part, financing many anti-Saddam groups in Iraq, including Shia groups, with intensification of those activities in the period 1998-2001. And pro-Allawi groups are as capable of terror outrages as the Saddam holdouts, more general anti-US Baathists, religious Sunna, clerical Shia, etc. So just who did kidnap the Italian aid workers? And just who did assassinate the Sunni clerics? What Sunna or Shia insurgent group would want all-out civil war amongst themselves while the US military co
ntinued to occupy Iraq (and destroy it) and the secular Kurds were setting up ties with Israel?
F
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