Would you be able to keep your mental stability under these conditions? Or might you consider retribution against those who you saw as being responsible for your dire situation?
“In a study of displaced people in Chechnya published last month, the international aid group Doctors Without Borders [found that] 9 out of 10 people here had lost someone close to them during Chechnya’s war and that one in six had witnessed the death of a close relative. Some 7 percent of the population had lost a family member in just the previous two months, it said.”
Or do you agree with Ruslan Aushev, the former President of Ingushetia, that violence begets violence? He believes that after the traditional 40-day mourning period, the North Caucasus will erupt in violence again, this time with Ossetians taking vengeance on the Chechens and Ingush:
I’ve often wanted to say this, a private e-mail may be more appropriate but I do not have your address. So here it is:
Thank you so much for your persistent efforts to educate us about Chechnya. I for one know very little about the history and the issues and I really, really appreciate your passion for speaking out on behalf of those who don’t have access to these boards. I continue to be inspired by your persistence, eloquence and clarity.
In response to your question: I am very fortunate in that I cannot imagine how it must feel to be in such a situation. It is a true tragedy, in part because no path towards a solution is evident.
All I can add are the words of a Rwandan woman who had somehow managed to survive a series of unspeakable atrocities during the war: "Justice? Don’t talk to me about Justice.’
What I want to know is why activists in America haven’t taken up the cause of Chechnya like they have the cause of “Palestinians.” You see anti-war and political activist groups CONSTANTLY hammering on about Israel; I regularly read their publications and living as I do on a college campus it’s hard not to come across them. I never hear anything about the self-determination and righteous cause of the Chechnyan people.
PaulFitzroy, I wish I knew for sure, especially since in the Chechen case, unlike the Palestinian case, nobody can reasonably dispute who was there first, or who conquered/drove out whom. A couple of hypotheses:
–The Chechens are fewer in number
–There are very few Chechens living in the West, or in fact anywhere except the Russian Federation and a few nearby countries, ones which generally have much larger numbers of Palestinians living there than Chechens
–The Russian government has done a rather effective job of painting the Chechen people at large as a bunch of savages and/or terrorists
Sad, but true. And something I hope will change one of these days.
Seizing a school full of children hostage and shooting them/blowing them up (or a theater full of civilians or a few planes or subway cars full of people, et cetera) is certainly a interesting way to try gain the support of your average American. Personally, I wouldn’t have thought that such a plan would work, but I have been proven wrong before.
Well, also remember that the Chechen cause has really only come to attention in the past decade with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while the Palestinian thing has been going on for decades. So there’s a bit of an inertia there.
But, I’m sure that Fitzroy was trying to insinuate anti-Jewish feelings somewhere in there, so it’s a question he never really wanted an answer to.
I would add “come to the attention of people outside the former Soviet Union.”
I doubt the Chechen issue was discussed freely inside the Soviet Union in the pre-perestroika era, but the Chechens’ neighbors, both in the North Caucasus and during the period of their forced resettlement to Siberia and Kazakhstan from 1944 onward, certainly knew something was going on. Especially the non-Chechens who were resettled on lands that had once been Chechen-inhabited. And Caucasians have been singled out for special scrutiny of their residence permits in large Russian cities for a long time.
Did I ever say this plan had anything to do with gaining the support of average Americans? The average American wouldn’t know where Chechnya was if it fell on his head. The average American barely knows where Israel is, and that’s only because in the U.S. we get daily news coverage of Israel.
I didn’t say violence would work, for that matter, either. I’m trying to get people to imagine what it’s like to walk in someone else’s moccasins for a moment, that’s all. If anything, I’d like to get people thinking about what brings people to commit acts of violence, because how can you stop violence if you don’t understand what causes it?
Indeed. Furthermore it’s absurd to judge the legitimate goals of a people based on the actions of murderous whackjobs on the extreme ends of the political spectrum.
I am largely unfamiliar with how many Chechens there are, but I don’t think numbers make a difference in being known to the outside world or not.
There are also not that much of Palestinians living in Western nations, so that is also not a reason.
Your third point is correct, but I don’t think it has much effect when it comes to paint them as terrorists to people in Europe. (Europe is familiar with what moves in the former Sovjet Union.)
Idem for the tactics of Putin who jumped on the wagon of the Bush rethoric “War on Terror” but as far as I can tell can’t sell that very efficiently to EU’ers. (There is regularly attention for the situation in Chechnya in the media, showing the devastating politics and tactics of both sides).
What I ask myself is how Chechnya could ever survive economically should it ever become independent.
Salaam. A
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an independence movement where this was even close to a primary consideration amongst a people which perceived itself as occupied.
Brutus Do you somehow think the USA is the Sun and its citizens the Sun Gods and that the world evolves around the US sun and the citizens of the world kneel before the Sun Gods and begg their attention, or what is exactly behind your reasoning?
Aldebaran, according to the 1989 Soviet before the war, there were about 1.2 million Chechens in the Soviet Union. By contrast, according to this source, there are nearly 9 million Palestinians, including a couple hundred thousand in the Americas alone:
or 236,000 in the U.S. alone as of 2003, according to this source:
I’ve met quite a few Palestinians in my career, particularly in Immigration Court, but never (knowingly) met a Chechen in the U.S. (I can’t even find any population statistics for the number of Chechens in the U.S., but I’d be willing to bet it’s miniscule – if it’s more than a few hundred, I’d be shocked.) And while there are probably very few Americans or Europeans with relatives in Chechnya, there are quite a few with relatives in the Middle East.
Whether Chechnya could survive as an independent nation is a separate issue – surely there is some middle ground between total independence and ethnic cleansing.
Since you don’t post your location, I don’t know where you live, but you must hang out with some exceptionally stupid and ill-informed people. The Americans I know are pretty well-versed in what’s going on in Israel and Chechnya.
I live in Chicago. My immediate circle of friends and colleagues has a general idea of what’s going on in Chechnya, but then these are the people with whom I choose to surround myself (that, and well, I work at an immigration law firm, so my co-workers are more up on international affairs and such than most people). I suspect that the people reading this thread, or the people who hang out in GD, are a pretty self-selecting bunch, as are most of the people they hang out with.
However, if you walked onto a street corner, even in a major U.S. city, and randomly stopped people and asked them to describe the major points of the Chechen conflict and place Chechnya on a map, you’d be shocked.
The other thing is that Chechnya has been part of Russia for a lot longer than the West Bank and Gaza has been part of Israel, and is more fundimentally integrated. Russia formally annexed Chechnya in 1859. That’s longer than the US has owned Hawaii. The West Bank and Gaza, on the other hand, have been occupied by Israel since the 1960s. Further, Israel has never claimed ownership of the West Bank or Gaza, and the world community has never accepted the West Bank and Gaza as part of Israel…it’s just “occupied” land. Chechnya, on the other hand, has been considered, by both Russia and the world, as Russian territory. So, the situation in the Occupied Territories is a “liberation movement”, against foreign occupiers, while the situation in Chechnya is a “secession movement”.