I do indeed hope that in the future that Russia will be more supportive of the effort to crush and defeat international terrorism, especially the radical Islamic movement that was behind the attacks on both the United States, and on Russia. Find them and defeat them. If they wish for martyrdom, then let them have it in the deserts and caves of their sanctuaries. Their numbers are limited, and ours are not. The question is whether their Will to destroy the humanistic/materialistic values of Western Civilization is greater than our Will to defend them.
...
What are we fighting for in Chechnya? For the territorial integrity of Russia, of course. But territorial integrity does not mean uninhabited scorched earth. We are fighting in order to prove to the Chechens that they are citizens of Russia. In doing so, however, we are destroying their cities and villages and kidnapping innocent civilians whose corpses turn up bearing evidence of torture.
...
We consistently betray our own grand pronouncements in Chechnya. We prove to the Chechens day in and day out that they are not citizens of Russia, that we have not considered them to be such for some time, and that their cities and villages are also not Russian.
I do indeed think that the primary motivation for Chechnyen independence has been, and is rooted in the desire to setup an Islamic State governed by Islamic law. Religious secession from materialist Russia resulted in a civil war.
Putin vents his anger at the West: Don't tell me to talk to child-killers
At a time of national crisis, Mary Dejevsky is granted a rare audience with the Russian President
07 September 2004
Three days after the bloody end of the school siege in North Ossetia, the Russian President has attacked Western countries for observing double standards on terrorism, asking why they insisted on calling Chechen separatists "rebels'' while they always branded those responsible for the 11 September attacks in the United States as "terrorists''.
In an unexpected change of tone, however, Vladimir Putin also held out the prospect of a more conciliatory line towards Chechnya, praising Chechen traditions and suggesting there was a possibility of broad-based parliamentary elections there.
Mr Putin was answering questions from an international group of Russian specialists and journalists, including The Independent, at his residence at Novo Ogarevo, outside Moscow. In a wide-ranging conversation, which lasted for three and a half hours and ended only after midnight, Mr Putin said that Russia was quite prepared to show flexibility towards the rebellious region of Chechnya in future, but "not with those who do not stop at shooting children''.
His fists clenched, he said: "No one has the right to advise us to talk to people like that. I don't advise you to meet Bin Laden, invite him to Brussels and Nato or the White House, hold talks with him, and let him dictate what he wants so that he will then leave you alone. But you tell us that we should talk to everyone, including child-killers.''
Mr Putin had begun talking about Russia's problem with Chechen separatism in a much softer tone, however, charting a history of Russian- Chechen relations in which he paid tribute to the bravery of Chechens during the Second World War. Then, he said, they had probably had more heroes proportionately than any other ethnic group. One third of those defending the fortress at Brest on the Western Front were Chechens, and they had stood "until the very last bullet and the last drop of blood'', refusing to surrender, he said.
Mr Putin forcefully condemned what he said were serious mistakes made by Soviet leaders in dealing with the Chechens, starting with Stalin's order that expelled them from their homeland in the Caucasus to Central Asia and the far north of Russia. Many thousands died on the journey. "I have been to the camps in the far north and even today it's frightening to see,'' Mr Putin said. All these injustices together "could not but lead to separatism''.
Seeming to extend an olive branch to a much broader swath of Chechen opinion than hitherto, Mr Putin said: "We will continue our dialogue with civil society. This will include holding parliamentary elections, trying to get as many people as possible involved, with as many views and policies as possible.'' One of the big criticisms of Russia's policy in Chechnya is that it has held presidential elections from which the more popular opposition figures have been excluded, but delayed parliamentary elections.
Mr Putin gave a clear indication that he was open to the holding of parliamentary elections in Chechnya - although he did not give a date - in the hope of drawing many more people into the political process. He also said that the intention was to "strengthen law enforcement by staffing the police and other bodies in Chechnya with Chechens''.
The two moves together would amount to the continuation, even acceleration, of the policy of "Chechenisation'', which some believed would be reversed after the spate of recent attacks in Russia: the downing of two planes, a bomb near a Moscow underground station, and, last week, the siege of School Number One in Beslan that cost more than 300 lives.
In a little-noticed move two weeks before the attacks, the Russian government had decreed that Chechnya should be able to keep revenue from its oil, rather than remit the proceeds to Russia as currently happens. This was a major change in policy and one that irritated other regions that do not enjoy a similar right.
Mr Putin insisted, however, that Russia would retain troops in Chechnya. Their withdrawal is one of the separatists' main objectives. Russia had as much right to keep troops in the region as the US has to station its troops "in California or Texas'', he said.
Asked about human rights violations by Russian troops in Chechnya, Mr Putin again went on the attack, saying: "Compare the torture of Iraqi prisoners. This hasn't happened on the direction of the top US leaders, but because of how individual people behaved in these circumstances. Those who are to blame must be punished.''
Russian troops had been responsible for "ugly phenomena'' in Chechnya, Mr Putin admitted, but this too was a product of the circumstances, he said, and the perpetrators were punished.
The Russian President also appeared to extend an invitation to foreign countries to assist with reconstruction in Chechnya - the first time that Russia has come near to soliciting any outside involvement. "We need to rehabilitate society in Chechnya to know there is another sort of life, and we would appreciate assistance with that.''
Why blame the terrorists, when we have Bush and Putin so handy. The terrorists aren't responsible for the innocent deaths, its all those nasty governments who are unable to prevent murder by being saintly.
The article does readers who don't know the background of last week's events a great service, but there is still the hard reality that this group of men were set on massacring a thousand children. An event of nearly the same magnitude as the September 11 attacks in the US, I would suggest ...
Al Qaeda is more a rhetorical device than an organization, so to say that Al Qaeda is probably not present in Chechnya is true but not illuminating. The mad ruin of Chechnya is a training ground and radicalizing force for a lot of young men the rest of us are going to have to worry about later.
Like Afghanistan before it, Chechnya is a focus for Arab jihadists, and I think this is something to be concerned about. According to Aukai Collins, the (somewhat reliable) American jihadist who spent a few years fighting the Russians in Chechnya, there are plenty of Arabs in the militant groups he fought with. Meaning that, though the war there was not caused by international Islamism, it's going to send another generation of angry, radical, and war-experienced young men back to their home countries and to the West.
The LAT's Kim Murphy, filing from Chechnya, details how during the school takeover Russian soldiers took their own hostages: about 40 family members of Chechen rebel and political leaders. "We figured they wanted to exchange us for the hostages in Beslan," said one of those taken. The Chechen hostages, including a 5-month-old baby, were released the day after school siege ended.
The challenge I am laying out [..] is simple. Come up with the gray area that could justify the actions taken by the terrorists in Russia. To me it is black and white. No gray. Nothing they want, nothing they hold dear, can possibly justify what they did. Nothing they want, nothing they hold dear, can possibly even mitigate what they did.
It is black and white.
If things are never black and white- find the gray. Find the justification that makes sense to anyone in a civilized society. If you can't, then you should admit to yourself that sometimes, things are simply black and white.
"Come up with the gray area that could justify the actions taken by the terrorists in Russia. To me it is black and white. No gray."
What if it's black and black?
Obviously, I'm not talking about what happened last week, but about the Chechen/Russian conflict, per se. The school, last week, is simple black and white, no argument there. Terrorist hostage-takers shooting children trying to flee = black. The innocent hostages, who never did nothing to noone = white. Could put up an argument about the chaotic, hapless strategies of the Russian special ops (and thus, the government), but at least they tried.
But now, zoom out. Chechen rebels turned terrorists on the one hand, kidnapping hospitals, blowing up buildings, murdering innocent children. We've seen the harrowing images now again. On the other hand, the Russian government and its army, pillaging, torturing and raping its way through Chechnya. Random scores of men hauled off the street and "disappearing" into detention camps and earth-pit "prisons", where torture and summary executions are legion, Chechen women raped on a massive, if not systematic scale, a republic bombed into oblivion for daring to try using its formal right to pronounce its independence.
Black and white? Or black and *black*?
And if it's black and black - two parties totally out of control and the civilian population terrorised - then what do we ask ourselves?
Who's the least black so we can express unwavering solidarity with them and stand with them shoulder-to-shoulder? I dont think so. What the hell has happened here and why, would be the better question, no? And I think the Slate article you linked in (and criticised) earlier, http://slate.msn.com/id/2106287/ , does an excellent job at that.
The underlying point here is the claim that if any of us points out that the Russian army (and government) has behaved criminally and despicably in Chechnya, people like you appear to accuse us of being apologists for the terrorists, as if we claimed that they are *innocents*. How does that reasoning work? Why wouldn't it be possible to point out the vileness of the Russian state's behaviour without implying that the terrorists are somehow innocent?
The Slate article, too, does not put up any argument that last week's terrorists are anything less than guilty, and the hostages anything less than innocent. It does track the history of the past ten years of war and terrorism, what happened when and who did what. I find that extremely helpful in an age when everyone in the West simply projects 9/11 onto the events and thinks that explains it, then. It certainly helps one understand better than just scanning the day's news in order to identify the good guy and the bad guy. NOT because there's any lack of the latter - but because projecting the former onto Putin will end *you* up the apologist for terror.
This is the irony. Those who explain that both Russian state terror and Chechen terrorists are guilty of the murder and mayhem that's reigned Chechnya for close to a decade now, are accused of being apologists for the latter. Upon which those who level the accusation, insisting on identifying a white as well as a black, move on to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the other party in the conflict, ready to excuse, rationalise and forget all the terror *it* perpetrated.
