--- John Bizwas <bizwas at lycos.com> wrote:
> Yeah , they just don't have socialist democracy,
> nor, to cite you, any law or government.
Who said anything about socialist democracy? They are mostly controlled by corrupt local elites.
>
> 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.
I think it probably was.
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.
It _can_ be given that, if you ignore the particular demands that were given, that had to do with Iraq. I think there may be a confusion here between seeing "international terrorism" as a shadowy worldwide organization devoted to wreaking havok, and seeing it as a lot of little groups with roughly coherent ideology and a lot of contacts between each other. Certainly the connections between Chechnya and "international terrorism" of the latter sort are not in doubt.
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).
I think internecine feuds may have something to do with it, but I do not think they are a sufficient explanation. I don't see how any Ingush cause is furthered by fanning ethnic conflict, especially since Moscow has become so much more pro-Ingush since 1999. There is no way the Ossetians are going to give over that territory now. It does however make sense if what you are trying to do is destabilize the Caucasus by turning the Chechnya conflict into an Orthodox-Muslim conflict, esp. if you already see the conflict in terms of infidels fighting believers, as the Wahabbis do. ("Wahhabi" here used in the sense in which it is used in the Caucasus.)
>
> 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.
Alsanbek Aslakhanov, who negotiated with several of the hostage-takers, said that they could not speak Chechen or Ingush.
> 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.
Dagestan's got about 34 sides. :) There were internally displaced people in Dagestan in 1999 BTW, displaced by the Wahabbi attacks led by Khattab and Basayev.
>
>
> > 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.
You just said there were "ethnically based moves to break away from the center in some form." I deny that thse moves exist, except in the case of ultranationalists.
>
> 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 says that 2 of the hostage-takers were Arabs. Two were supposedly ethnic Russians.
Certainly they planned. They appear to have learned from Dubrovka. People have been fighting in Chechnya for 10 years. They are pros.
>
> I thought B. isn't Wahabbi! Nothing I've read from
> the guy would make me believe he could live with
> Saudi-style Wahabbism.
Not Saudi. "Wahabbi" is the term the locals use in the North Caucasus to refer to the form of extremist fundamentalism that was imported into the area in the early 90s from _some_ sources in the Gulf (I do _not_ mean the Saudi government). It blended with local cultures, where it has the support of about 5%-10% of the population, according to my sources, and is by no means a simple copy of Saudi official Islam. The Shariah Code of Chechnya was copied from that of Sudan. Basayev is an Islamic fundamentalist of the Mullah Omar type. His ideology is almost indistinguishable from that of ObL -- but there has been some suggestion that it's all an act to get money from jihadi organizations and he doesn't really belive it.
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