Though there were certainly problems with the way the raid on the Waco compound was carried out, I have no really problem with the general thrust nor outcome of the operation. One ought not to bargain with hostage takers, and armed terrorists for anything of significance. One might supply food and water while withholding electrical power and the ability to communicate, if the besieged give up hostages. Often it is useful to buy time. However, the first evidence that violence is being taken all bets are off. In any assault there is a grave danger that some of the hostages, or innocent by-standers will die. Not to act is to accept the risk that the besieged will kill everyone. Assaulting a group of armed terrorists willing to kill all their hostages and die is not a risk free thing. Unlike television and the movies, bullets and bomb damage have a way of reducing the best laid plans to chaos. Leaders have to accept the risk and blood price that may result from decisive action. It is easy to sit comfortably in front of your color television and criticize an operation from a distance. It is much harder to actually carry out the operation, especially if you haven't got the sort of special operations personnel available to the US military, or large American urban police agencies.
Nails can not be driven without a hammer, no amount of talk or negotiation will do.
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.
Asherman, I believe you are trying to change the direction that this discussion is headed. As I said before, no one on this thread is saying that the terrorists were justified in taking those children hostage. The original question had to do with, what I believe was a misunderstanding about the Chechen separatists and their motivation. Were they acting to further Islamic causes or were there other factors?
Always a pleasure to read your opinions, Ash.
Asherman wrote: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.
Asherman, seriously - when you look at the last ten years of war and terrorism in and over Chechnya, what you see is "the radical Islamic movement attacking Russia" (and in fact, "the humanistic/materialistic values of Western Civilization")?
I mean, really? Is that really what you think it's been about?
Is that an opinion based on a general concept of Islamic terrorism and the clash of cultures globally, or on an actual reading about the events in Chechnya the past decade?
Swimpy and Nimh,
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. As time has passed, the the movement has become ever more radicalized. It seems that the Chechnyen movement is today a tool for Al Queda and other such radicals.
At first, I had some sympathy for the nationalist sentiments of Chechnya, but those are long gone and have been for a number of years. Similarily I have some sympathy for the Kurds who want their own State, though I think that it would be a mistake for them and for the region.
BTW, I have no desire to redirect the thread. My comments were, and are, only my opinion which is often different from those made by others. I strongly believe that while non-violence is an admirable goal, and even effective in some situations, it can also be a disasterous course. Unopposed force wielded by True Believers can not be bargained with, nor wished away. When a bandit points a gun at you, I strongly recommend shooting him before engaging in palaver and negotiations.
Well, what do you know.
A friend of one of the other posters here at A2K (and deputy editor in chief of Bolshoy Gorod, a Moscow weekly) wrote an article about the exact question we've been discussing here in Slate:
Chechnya - What drives the separatists to commit such terrible outrages?
Its a solid introduction, neatly summarising all the relevant contexts in a relative brief scope: nothing necessarily new but an effective primer for interested news readers.
In the last three paragraphs, she refers to the Islamic terrorism factor:
Quote:So, what does al-Qaida and international Islamic terrorism have to do with any of this? Probably very little. Chechens have plenty of reason to do what they do without outside inspiration. In addition, their tactics are very different from al-Qaida's. Osama Bin Laden's group generally aims for maximum casualties; the Chechens, at least when they have staged hostage-takings, have not seemed to have that goal. Al-Qaida explicitly targets Westerners; the Chechens, on the other hand, explicitly exclude Westerners from their list of targets; they target Russians and Russia-sympathizers. Finally, the Chechens' demands, when they have made them, have always focused on the war in Chechnya to the exclusion of any religious or international agenda. They have consistently demanded a the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya?-an unattainable goal in the current Russian political climate, but one that may look plausible to the Chechens because it worked after Budyonnovsk.
Russian intelligence has produced little or no evidence that al-Qaida is present in Chechnya. Russian officials claimed that there were Arabs among the hostage-takers, but this information has yet to be confirmed, and even if it is, it may mean only that foreign men have come to fight on the side of Chechens?-something that has happened before and something that happens in every conflict, whether or not a major international organization is involved. On the other hand, it would be surprising if al Qaida had no presence in Chechnya at all. Chechens are Muslims, and they are at war; representatives of virtually every Islamic organization have at one point or another sent missionaries and recruiters to the region. They have also sent money. Researchers of al-Qaida say that, in addition to its own organization, the terrorist network has a number of loose affiliates, essentially freelancers, who get occasional financial support. Most likely, some Chechen groups or individuals fall into that category.
But Russia's terrorism problem is not international Islam. It's a war that Russia started and has continued. Because of terrorism, this war has spread to engulf the entire enormous country.
A quote from the Moscow Times (June 8, 2004, "Russia Must Be True to Its Words in Chechnya", Andrei Piontkovsky), as quoted in
Johnson's List
Quote:...
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.
Asherman wrote: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.
You believe the drive for secession in 1991 was motivated by religious fervour, the desire for an Islamic state? What do you base this belief on?
Religious zealots have definitely joined the fray by now, from abroad too. And the Chechen national struggle has always had strong religious overtones (in the last century as well). But the primary motivator? Chechen independence as "religious secession"? From whom? Their North Caucasian neighbours in the Russian Federation are all Muslim too.
The Chechens have some very specific national traumas to motivate them to fight the Russians - the genocidal deportation of their fathers / grandfathers, for one. Those would explain why the Chechens put up such a struggle from the moment it was possible, when communism collapsed, while the other North Caucasian peoples this time remained acquiescent.
The Muslim factor does not bring this explanatory value. After all, practically all the peoples of the Northern Caucasus are Muslim. Why would the Chechens from the start have been driven to secession and war by some Islamist religious fervour, when their fellow Muslims 100 kilometer down the road felt no noticeable similar urge?
Now if the idea of a North-Caucasian Federation, which was briefly championed during the Civil War after 1917, had resurfaced, the notion that its the goal of an Islamic state that drove the violence would have seemed more credible. But as it was, those trying to revive it in the Perestrojka era were quickly marginalised, since the Chechens had no desire to create a common state with others (in fact, the Chechen-Ingush ASSR split up in acrimony as Chechens and Ingush started fighting each other) -- and the other Muslim peoples of the Caucasus showed little desire to join the Chechens in their struggle.
So how do you superimpose a primary religious motivation/goal on this one North-Caucasian republic's road to violence, nevertheless?
Washington Post
Full story
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1256-2004Sep6.html?referrer=email
Hostage Takers in Russia Argued Before Explosion
Chechen Gave Orders by Phone, Investigators Say
By Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 7, 2004; Page A01
NAZRAN, Russia, Sept. 6 -- The guerrillas who took over a school in southern Russia last week argued heatedly with each other over whether to abandon the siege in the moments leading up to the firestorm of explosions and shooting that killed hundreds of children and adults, Russian officials said Monday.
Russian special services had a surveillance tape of the militants fighting about whether to stay or flee just before a bomb they had planted in the school gym went off, prompting Russian commandos to storm the building, a senior Kremlin official said. Investigators were exploring whether the bomb detonated by accident or as a result of the internal dispute.
As more details surfaced about the massacre at School No. 1 in the town of Beslan, a partial picture emerged of the guerrillas and the four men who led them into the school, where investigators say they took orders by phone from a Chechen commander, Shamil Basayev.
The leaders, they said, included a bodyguard of Basayev's and a former police officer who turned against authorities and led a bloody attack in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia last June.
All four leaders were killed in the battle at the school, authorities say. .......
Asherman wrote: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.
Asherman - I am just coming back to catch up on this thread - and others may have taken this up - but I am, as often, gob-smacked by what I see as your tendency to see interpret attempts to understand what is behind these sorts of terrible acts as excusing them.
I am also very unconvinced by your arguments that the radical Islamism is a cause, not result, of the current struggle.
Do you not see that ongoing conflict of the type between Chechyna and Russia promotes such radical religious and political extremism, as the atrocities and horrors build up on both sides?
Excerpt from Economist Com.
"Could the war in Chechnya be turning into a war outside it?
WHILE the Russian army practised in the east, showing its ability to respond to threats it no longer faces, Chechen rebels in the south demonstrated its inability to deal with threats that are its daily fare. In the biggest attack outside Chechnya since the 1999 incursion into Dagestan, which provoked Russia's second war in Chechnya, over 200 men attacked targets in Ingushetia, among them the interior ministry in Nazran. The raid left almost 100 dead, among them senior Ingush officials and a UN worker. The attacks came a few weeks after a bomb in Grozny had killed Chechnya's Kremlin-imposed president, Akhmad Kadyrov.
As usual, Russia blamed Aslan Maskhadov, Chechen rebel leader and one-time elected president. His aide, Akhmed Zakayev, in exile in London, denied it; but Mr Maskhadov had told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the rebels were changing tactics from ?acts of sabotage? to ?launching big attacks?. The day before the attack, Mr Zakayev confirmed to Kommersant, a newspaper, that such a decision had been adopted by field commanders on June 14th?among them Shamil Basayev, who had led the Dagestan raid. Russia's interior minister, Boris Gryzlov, said that the attack was ?a consequence of the work of the law-enforcement agencies?, a last shout by rebels of whom many ?have already been eliminated?. But the scale of the attacks suggests the opposite....."
Russia has always feared large scale revolt - and perhaps incursion(?) from its Islamic client states - one has to wonder whether attempts to deter it, will trigger it?
Nimh said:
" No, its just another example of Islamic True Believers, and thats all we need to know about it. We know the cookie-cutter solution to that."
Hear hear Nimh - the roots of this go back a LOOOOOOOOOONG way - exacerbated by things like the terrible Stalin forced exodus of so many Chechens as part of the terrible events of his bloody reign.
But no - Islamic badness is the new single pin-hole lens through which so many now stubbornly decide the world can be decoded.
Interesting paragraph from Nimh's MSN link:
"The second war in Chechnya began in September 1999, following a bizarre and brutal series of terrorist acts. Two apartment buildings in Moscow and one in the south of Russia exploded, killing more than 300 people. Another building, in the town of Ryazan, was de-mined in time. At the same time, a group of Chechen rebels staged an incursion into the neighboring republic of Dagestan, taking over several villages there for a few weeks. In the last five years, several critics of the Putin regime, including a former senior secret services officer, have produced a fair amount of evidence indicating that the Russian secret services may have instigated or even carried out some or all of these attacks. If this were the case, it wouldn't be the first time a country fighting a separatist movement tried to defeat it by funding a more radical terrorist wing in the hopes of undermining the more moderate separatists locally and discrediting them internationally. It also wouldn't be the first time such tactics had failed. Usually, the terrorist movements quickly take on a life of their own, and their federal masters and funders lose control."
(my translation, hence the crappy English:)
"There's no country in the world where four terrorist attacks take place in a week, and then of this scope", a furious commentator yesterday wrote in the Moskovski Komsomolets. The Russian President Putin has attempted to canalise the emotions of the Russians: the gruesome hostage-taking was said to have been the work of international terrorism. The killed 'Arabs' among the terrorists were supposed to serve as evidence.
The commentator of the Russian daily Kommersant knows why: "Because from that would follow that the children have not died, because they haven't been able to stop the war in Chechnya for ten years now, but because international terrorism is attacking Russia." After the interrogation of the only caught Chechen terrorist, however, doubts have emerged whether those "internationals" really exist.
(from Trouw)
Responding to the Masha Gessen article I posted above ("Chechnya: What drives separatists to commit such terrible outrages?"), Jack Brown expresses a valid critical counterpoint:
Quote: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.
Lots more reactions to the piece
here.
The response to Gessen's article has really surprised me, the vehemence of it. I guess we've stumbled upon another Atlantic divide here.
To European reporters and readers (and to some extent, politicians), it is mere commonplace to note Putin's totalitarian tendencies or to critically review the various botch-ups of the Russian army with Chechen terror attacks. Though here, too, the frontpages last week were of course dominated by heartwrenching pictures and tales of gruesomeness and condemnation, it is also mere commonplace to briefly summarise the history of the conflict in bullet points and note the brutalities of life in Chechnya the past ten years.
In America on the other hand, an article like Gessen's, which to a European mind seems merely to nicely summarise the obvious, is apparently seen as provocative, and not necessarily in a good way - it's practically considered collaborating with the enemy. Apologist for the terrorists!
I dont know why the difference. Perhaps its because most Americans hadnt followed the Chechen story before 9/11, while here of course we've had it cropping up ever so regularly on the front pages since at least '94. Its closer to home after all. Perhaps its because Bush looked Putin in his eyes and 'saw that he could trust him' - all they needed from each other was some strategical tit-for-tat, after all - and how that's set the political agenda for the US media as well. Whereas here EU, OSCE and Council of Europe have delicately struggled with fact-finding missions, human rights reports and diplomatic interventions in attempts to weave Russia into the European community without sacrificing its own standards on democracy, human rights, media. Perhaps its a combination of this lack of prior knowledge and interest and the overwhelming association / identification with 9/11 and those other terrorists, also Muslims. Perhaps its a paradoxical American tradition of distrusting the Russian state, but outright ignoring its dissidents - the NYT, for example, has shamefully failed in reporting dissident voices from the Soviet Union, and appears to do no better with Russia now. Perhaps US media simply has a stronger tendency to report the story from the center, or the top - "the government said".
It's unnerving, though.
Meanwhile, with the below I imply no moral equivalence in whatever way. OK? Just seems an odd strategy, thats all:
Quote: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.
Dales, after linking to Gessen's piece in apparent disgust, posted a thread noting this to his critics:
Dales wrote: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.
This is what I responded:
nimh wrote:"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.
Comment by nimh ?- 9/6/2004 @ 7:36 am
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.
Comment by nimh ?- 9/6/2004 @ 7:46 am
From todays L.A. Times:
September 7, 2004
During School Siege, Russia Took Captives in Chechnya
Soldiers entered homes of rebel leaders' relatives and seized 40 people, including children.
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer
ZNAMENSKOYE, Russia ?- It was 6 a.m. when Russian soldiers hoisted themselves over the wall, crashed through the window and broke down the front door. Their quarries were still asleep.
Shouting, shoving and kicking, the soldiers pushed 67-year-old Khavazh Semiyev and his wife into a truck waiting outside, then went back for the others ?- his two sons and two nephews, his son's wife, his 52-year-old sister. Then ?- and Semiyev couldn't believe his eyes ?- they went back for his grandchildren: Mansur, 11 years old. Malkhazni, 9. And Mamed, 7.
They were driven in their nightclothes and socks through the empty early morning streets of Chechnya to the Russian army's command center at Khankala. There, the men were forced onto their knees with their heads on the ground. Sacks were pulled over their heads, and their hands were tied behind their backs. For the next 24 hours, anyone who moved from that position got kicked.
One day into the seizure of more than 1,000 hostages by suspected Chechen separatists in the town of Beslan, Russia now had its own hostages. Altogether, an estimated 40 family members of senior Chechen rebel leaders were assembled at Khankala from Thursday, a day after the hostage seizure in Beslan, until Saturday, the day after it ended.
Semiyev's daughter, Kusama, is the wife of Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov. Around Semiyev were suddenly assembled the entire extended families of Maskhadov, the former Chechen president, and of Chechen warlords Shamil Basayev and Doku Umarov. Maskhadov's brother was in the tent where the men were kept, and his elderly sister was in a nearby building with the women and children. A 5-month-old baby proved to be a distant relative of one of the rebel leaders.
"We figured they wanted to exchange us for the hostages in Beslan," Semiyev said in an interview at his home in this small town in northern Chechnya.
"They were trying to make the people of Chechnya feel as bad as the people in Beslan," said Liza Akhmadkhanova, a neighbor of Maskhadov's brother, Lyoma. "They just hate Chechens. Whenever they have a chance to get back at us, they do."
Officially, the Russian government says the seizures were meant to protect the families. A statement from operations headquarters in the northern Caucasus said Russian forces obtained intelligence that rebel leaders planned to kill several of their own relatives and then accuse Russian law enforcement bodies of murdering them.
The headquarters staff also said there was evidence that "spontaneous groups" were being formed in various areas of Chechnya to "vent their anger" at relatives of the rebel leaders, presumably over the events in Beslan.
"There was a colonel who spoke very eloquently, and everybody was afraid of him. He said we should thank fate and God for them having taken us away on time because Maskhadov and Basayev supposedly issued an order to have us taken into the building [at Beslan] and executed with the hostages," Semiyev said.
The family laughs wryly at this. "If this was what he thought, he must be a total imbecile," said Aslanbek Semiyev, Khavazh's nephew, who was one of the detainees.
Maskhadov's spokesman in London, Akhmed Zakayev, said Russian authorities were trying to inspire terror in the terrorists ?- though Maskhadov had vigorously denied involvement and condemned the hostage-taking.
"They were following the standard practice developed almost a century ago by the Bolsheviks and carried on by Stalin, who believed that every single act of terror should be responded to by an even bigger, more horrendous, more terrifying terrorist act," Zakayev said. "According to this practice, it is necessary to shock terrorists, and let them know that under no condition will you agree to negotiate with them."
Maskhadov's family members said they met many members of Basayev's family for the first time. "There was a big elderly man I was talking to there," Semiyev said. "We were trying to track down his relationship to Basayev. It turned out Basayev's aunt was married to him or something. We got lost in the family tree. But it was interesting after all this time to get to know them. We even hugged each other when we left."
Across Chechnya, the reaction to the events in Beslan, where 335 hostages were killed and 700 injured, has been mixed. There has been pain on behalf of the victims, most of whom were children, and quiet resentment that the victims of Chechnya's two wars in 10 years with Russia have fewer mourners.
"Of course we feel sorry for the hostages in Beslan, but this is a situation that happens in Chechnya every day," said Buchu Abdul-Kadyrova, Maskhadov's sister, who was one of those detained last week.
Tabarik Gagayeva, who sells sunflower seeds in a market outside the Chechen capital, Grozny, said, "I was sitting watching it on TV, and I was going out of my mind. I was thinking, what kind of people could do that? What kind of people could treat children like that?"
Gagayeva's husband disappeared in 1995, though his car was discovered demolished in an area where there had been a Russian military operation. Her two brothers and one brother's sister-in-law died the same year after troops in a Russian armored vehicle pulled over and asked about her brother's arm wound, which he had sustained from shrapnel during a bombing.
"They said, 'Oh, you must be a fighter, because you're wounded,' " witnesses to the arrest told her. After that, she said, "they killed them. They tortured them first. They cut off their legs at the knee and their arms. The girl they literally ripped from throat to bottom.
"So you can see that when I'm watching what happened in Beslan on TV, I remember what great pain happened in my own family. I remember this with great trepidation, and I cry."
"It was a wrong thing to do. We don't approve of this at all," said Islam Islamov, a 27-year-old resident of the Chechen town of Turbino. "The hostage-takers were talking about withdrawing Russian troops from Chechnya, but I don't think it would be a good idea at all to withdraw the troops. If that happens, this [republic's] really going to be a mess."
But the arrest of the rebel leaders' families also drew a negative reaction, especially since at least two family members suffered broken bones and several others severe bruises from being beaten and kicked.
"They just nabbed some elderly grannies. What did they have to do with either the field commanders here or the hostages in Beslan?" Magomed Akhmadov, 27, said. "I think they did it out of hatred. I think they wanted to demonstrate that they were strong."
Abdul-Kadyrova, 67, said Russian interrogators roughly asked her about her contacts with her brother, with whom she said she had not spoken since he was ousted from the presidency in 1999 and disappeared into the mountains to lead the rebels.
"There were people making very frightening comments about us [the family detainees] like, 'They should be turned into ashtrays.' I don't know what turning a person into an ashtray means, but it sounds very menacing," Abdul-Kadyrova said.
"Whenever there's a terrorist act, they say, 'Oh, there's Maskhadov's hand in this, there's a Chechen trail in it.' They know these lines so well they could recite them if you woke them up in the middle of the night," she said.
Most of the detainees said the Russians were seeking information about the possible perpetrators of the Beslan hostage-taking, but all said it was also clear that the arrests were a message to the rebel commanders: We know where your families are.
"There were people there 4 years old, babies, toddlers ?- they simply wanted to keep us prisoners," Abdul-Kadyrova said. "People were saying, 'Remember how [Russian President Vladimir V.] Putin gassed his own people in Moscow [during the rescue of hundreds of hostages at the Dubrovka Theater in 2002], that's what they're going to do to us now.'
"People were afraid. You know, the Russians can do anything."
Abdul-Kadyrova said she was sure her brother would never have ordered the seizure of children as hostages.
At the same time, she said, she was sure that imprisoning his family would not affect his decisions on behalf of the separatist movement.
"My brother is fighting for Chechnya's independence. He wants the Chechen people to be free, he doesn't want them to be subordinate to Russia," she said. "My brother will never give up his cause, and if he does, he cannot be considered a man anymore
.
"My brother would rather kill all of us than give us over to the Russians."
Hmmmm - there DOES seem to be a desire for a simple black/white for a lot of Americans.
What is fascinating to me here is that, in this manichean view, we have the "old" black (Russia) now transformed to "white", because of it battle with the "new" black (Islamism) - though Russia switches back to black briefly again in, say, Asherman's analysis, as soon as it dares to contradict the ALWAYS "white" US - ie the Russians switch back to black briefly as Ash discusses how he hopes this event may stop Putin et al from any future criticism of US actions which the US deems to be against terrorists (like the war in Iraq.)
For its adherents this black/white view does, indeed, appear to include the notion of any questioning of it, or indeed attempt to understand the context and history, placing one immediately in the black corner.
