What I don’t understand is why in the hell Russia is so insistent upon hanging onto Chechnya for.
Schoolchildren being killed is horrible, but its pretty clear that orders of magnitude more Chechen children of the same age have died equally horrible deaths.
I see plenty of exclamations on this board about people being willing to kill in response to what the people who took over that school in Orseans (sp?) did, so I don’t find it entirely impossible that even seemingly reasonable individuals could be reduced to terrorism by this sort of stuff. Also, I sincerely doubt that the Chechens actually wanted to end up killing people in the same way that events transpired; rather they wanted prisoners released.
I don’t say this in any way to diminish the evil of what the people that were actually involved in taking that school did, nor the fact that they were still fully responsible for placing explosives in the way that they did in that school which led to so many deaths.
Terrorism and the wars waged against it are nasty, brutish things and I simply don’t understand why Russia feels compelled to maintain control on such a small break-away republic.