Now, I don't know the situation in Chechnya, so I can't comment there. But the point is that even if it is a recent national identity it could be a real one.
Btw my old Soviet politics teacher from grad school, Matthew Evangelista, now at Cornell, and a very smart and pretty progressive guy, has apparently written a book about the Chechen war. Some who has time and interest should read it and report.
jks
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com, Wed Jun 8
> 14:50:19 PDT 2005:
> >>Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed
> toward a strategic
> >>objective: From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to
> Kashmir to
> >>Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign -- 18
> organizations in all
> >>- are seeking to establish or maintain political
> self-determination.
> >
> >What ignorant crap. The (apparantly for the moment
> defunct) "let's
> >blow up widows!" wing of the Chechen "resistance"
> is motivated by
> >greed and Islamism, with the corresponding desire
> to "liberate" the
> >pro-Russian Muslim territories from Russian
> "oppression," probably
> >in that order.
>
> Surely, greed and Islamism aren't mutually exclusive
> to the idea that
> suicide terrorist campaigns are "directed toward a
> strategic
> objective" and their sponsors seek to "establish or
> maintain
> political self-determination," as Robert A. Pape
> puts it.
>
> >Actually the whole idea is ridiculous. "Chechnya"
> is an
> >administrative district arbitrarily created by the
> Bolsheviks, and
> >Chechens are not indigenous to large sections of
> it. Naursky
> >district (which is very big) has been the territory
> of the Terek
> >Cossacks since the 16th century. Several Chechen
> clans fled to join
> >the Tereks when Chechnya was islamized, due to
> their centuries-old
> >ties of intermarriage. But who needs knowledge when
> you can just
> >write bullshit.
>
> The origins of modern Iraq were similarly arbitrary
> -- Iraq was made
> of three vilayets (administrative districts) of the
> Ottoman Empire --
> Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra -- that British
> imperialists carved out for
> as a mandate for the British Empire:
>
> <blockquote>The history of modern Iraq begins with
> the last phase of
> Ottoman rule, during the 19th century. Until the
> 1830s Ottoman rule
> in Iraq was tenuous, and real power shifted between
> powerful tribal
> chieftains and local Mamluk rulers. Many of the
> nomadic Arab tribes
> were never fully brought under Ottoman control.
> Local Kurdish
> dynasties held sway over the mountainous north. In
> the second half of
> the 18th century the Mamluks established effective
> control over the
> territory from Al Basrah to north of Baghdad. The
> Mamluks imposed
> central authority and introduced a functioning
> government. In 1831
> the province of Iraq, then subdivided into the three
> vilayets, or
> administrative districts, of Mosul, Baghdad, and Al
> Basrah, came
> under direct Ottoman administration. From 1831 to
> 1869 a series of
> governors came and went in rapid succession.
>
> From 1869 to 1872 Midhat Pasha, one of the Ottoman
> Empire's ablest
> and most scrupulous officials, at long last imposed
> effective central
> control throughout the region. He modernized
> Baghdad, in everything
> from transportation to sanitation to education, and
> he imposed his
> rule on the tribal countryside. ("Iraq,"
>
<http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761567303_11/Iraq.html>)</blockquote>
>
> <blockquote>[B]ecause Britain, along with its French
> and Russian
> allies, coveted the Ottoman domains. Lloyd George
> wished to acquire
> two provinces above all: Palestine, on behalf of
> Jewish Zionists from
> Europe, for whom the fundamentalist chapel-goer had
> a messianic
> sympathy, and Mesopotamia -- with Baghdad at its
> heart -- for its oil
> and its position as the Arab world's frontier with
> Persia,
> Afghanistan and India. (Some things have not
> changed.) Although the
> twin campaigns in Mesopotamia and Syria, which
> included Palestine,
> were similar Allied land-grabs, the differences were
> significant.
> Syria's population sought independence from the
> Sublime Porte, Iraq's
> did not. Syria wanted to remain united; Iraq for the
> most part
> preferred to retain separate identities for Kurds,
> Sunni Arabs and
> Shiite Arabs. Britain would divide Syria, and unite
> Iraq.
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>
> . . . [T]he King-Crane Commission confined its
> investigations to
> Syria, where it found the population overwhelmingly
> in favour of the
> two goals Britain had specifically excluded:
> independence and unity.
> In the event of their having to accept a mandate --
> a term invented
> by Jan Smuts at Paris to disguise what would in fact
> be protectorates
> or colonies -- the Syrians asked that the mandatory
> be the United
> States. Syria was actually carved into four mandate
> territories --
> mini-Syria and Lebanon under the French, Transjordan
> and Palestine
> under the British. (Charles Glass, "Iraq Must Go! A
> History of
> 'Regime Change' in Iraq,"
>
<http://www.zmag.org/content/Iraq/glass_iraqmustgo.cfm>,
> 9 Oct.
> 2002)</blockquote>
>
> The experience of having its borders drawn by great
> powers is a
> common fate among the majority of existing states
> today. Only states
> that are still or used to be great powers and their
> settler colonies
> have had a chance to draw their own borders more or
> less on their own
> terms.
>
> Nations and states are both historical constructions
> (as opposed to
> entities found ready-made in nature), so they are
> basically whatever
> human beings make of them, mostly based upon the
> principle of might
> makes right.
> --
> Yoshie
>
> * Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/>
> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/>
> * Bring Them Home Now!
> <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
> * Calendars of Events in Columbus:
> <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
> <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, &
> <http://www.cpanews.org/>
> * Student International Forum:
> <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
> * Committee for Justice in Palestine:
> <http://www.osudivest.org/>
> * Al-Awda-Ohio:
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
> ___________________________________
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