>
> Which region do you have in mind? Russia's ethnic
> regions have enormous autonomy.
Yeah , they just don't have socialist democracy, nor, to cite you, any law or government.
Tatarstan is
> completely different from Dagestan, which is
> completely different from Bashkortostan, which is
> different from Chuvashia etc. In fact Chechnya has
> always had full autonomy within the Russian Federation
> and has it now. That is not what the fighters are
> fighting for. Maskhadov is fighting because he wants
> to be president of Chechnya. Basayev is fighting
> because he wants a Taliban-style state throughout the
> Caucasus, and not just in Chechnya. He has said this
> clearly many times. You don't seem to mention it
> though.
Because my point was, counter the spiked online article, that the Beslan attack wasn't a good example of globalized terror that the Clinton liberals gave the world by denying state authority or rights to self-determination. My point was to critique the spikedonline article's weak argument. As I already said, the violence in Spain can be given a traditional imperialist-nationalist interpretation, since it was Moroccans accused of the train attacks. And in this case, internecine Russian Federation feuds do , in fact, help us to motivate this violence as 'humanly possible', however despicable we might think the killing of children is (at least when we see it, since we don't get to see it when, for example, it's the Marines and their airwings assaulting Fallujah).
Reports are now that quite a few of the Beslan attackers were Ingush--that is certainly what a lot of Ossetians think anyway. This might also account for their inability to deal with non-native speakers of Chechen trying to communicate with them in that language(native speakers of these related languages can achieve some mutual intelligibility, but only after some major adjustments in their communication style). So Russian became the common language of the negotiations.
>
> There is _one_ region that wanted full independence
> and obtained it de facto. That region was Chechnya.
> That didn't work out too well, what with the Chechen
> hostage/slave trade and the attacks on Dagestan, which
> you also don't mention.
Where does one delimit what one is going to discuss in a thread? I chose to discuss the article by attacking its main argument where I thought it was strongest. Sorry, Dagestan didn't feature prominently in that, though again, as you know, at least two sides to every story, and what with all the internally displaced people, that's more than two sides.
> Then there is the ethnic diversity. And then
> > there is the ethnically based moves to break away
> > from the center in some form.
>
> Guess what again? None of these ethnic groups wants to
> break away from the center!
Local autonomy and subsidiarity in a federal form of government doesn't mean breaking away from the center. That's why I used those terms. And where have I said that the 'ethnic' groups want to break away? I even just dismissed the legitimacy of most such centrifugal movements in the last how many posts?
>
> Evidence that they were "proxies," please.
Go talk to the police force in Beslan. They would know more about that by now than either your or I. There is also the need to account for the terrorists training, methods, equipment, and ability to anticipate police and troop actions. Anyone can buy weapons, but an operation of this scale takes planning and execution. Moreover, even after the wild reports of Arabs and Africans, there were also reports of two of the terrorists passing for Russian or Ukrainian.
> Basayev has no credibility?
>You know, Basayev, that
> guy who is, hmm, you know, Wahabbi? Wait no, I see it
> -- BASAYEV IS THE PROXY! Basayev is an FSB agent. Just
> like Ben Laden is a CIA hireling, and Bush planned
> 9/11. There actually are no Wahabbis in the world at
> all! It is all a great plan cooked up by evil
> Washington and Moscow. There are no Wahabbis in Iraq
> either -- that's all a myth. All the people kidnapped
> and all the stuff getting blown up is organized by a
> joint operation of the FSB, CIA and, of course, the Mossad.
I thought B. isn't Wahabbi! Nothing I've read from the guy would make me believe he could live with Saudi-style Wahabbism. Even OBL couldn't. I haven't argued what you say above. On the one hand I don't think it constitutes your position on the discussion, but I certainly can't attribute these thoughts to me. Now I'm done, for at least another 24 hours.
F
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