Am I the only person who, upon hearing that approximately 70 hostages of the approximately 700 being held died in the rescue, thought, “Wow! That’s even better than the FBI guys in Die Hard were predicting!”
What’s interesting to me is that if this situation had occured in the US, with the same results, there would be hearings and calls for the President’s impeachment and the families of the dead hostages would be sueing the government, etc.
From what I’ve read, the Russian Special Forces DO NOT fuck around.
I thought that this would be good for Dubya. Russia will want to beat the shit out of Chechnya for this. I can see Bush telling Putin “Look, if you support us in our war against Iraq, we will not bitch at all about what you decide to do in Chechnya.”
It says over 700 people made it out alive according to this report.
Also, they used the term “rebels” to describe the terrorists. That makes them sound like unreconstructed Southerners.
Are they not Muslim Chechens?
90 Captives Killed in Moscow Siege
Sat Oct 26,11:41 AM ET
MOSCOW (AP) - The number of hostages killed after being held hostage by Chechen rebels in a Moscow theater rose to 90, the Russian Health Ministry said Saturday, according to Russian news agencies.
They are, but Chechnya’s status is indeterminate. Eva Luna would no doubt be happy to give a more detailed exposition, but briefly, it was one of the breakaway provinces during the collapse of the Soviet Union and it the one Russia has been most reluctant to surrender ( and its decalaration of independance has mostly gone unrecognized by the west ). Russia has variously supported pro-Russian forces and intervened themselves, in 1994-1996 and most recently in 1999 taking advantage of a ready excuse in some apparent Chechen adventurism into neighboring Daghestan .
So the Russian authorities technically consider the Chechen militants Russian subjects. Hence ‘rebels’.
- Tamerlane
But whatever you do, do NOT call them terrorists.
I’ve got to admit, I was horrified when I saw the original bodycount of 67. That’s when I thought that there were 100-200 hostages in total. After I realised that there were ~860 and 50 or more terrorists, I was amazed that they Russians did such a good job.
Even with gas, 50 automatic weapons going off would do a lot of damage. Plus I’d have expected them to wire the hostages to explosives to cover just this eventuality.
How scary is that? The Government forces will not tell the doctors what they used or how to treat the hostages who are very ill from it. You would think they could at least have a quiet word and then imprison them later or something :eek:
They’re not terrorists. They’re just misunderstood.
I dunno about that. Based on what we’re hearing, it was a profoundly fucked up situation from the get-go, and it seems as if the Russians did about as well as they could have done under the circumstances.
“Hearings”? Sure. “Calls for the President’s impeachment”? These days, someone will call for the President’s impeachment if the Sun rises. That doesn’t mean the calls for impeachment would go anywhere or get much support.
I think many or most Americans would agree with the assessment that the authorities did they best they could in a really bad situation, and I think that most Americans would probably agree if anything similar happened over here.
The difference politically is that the other breakaway states were all Union Republics or full S.S.R.'s (Soviet Socialist Republics), direct members of the Soviet Union. Chechnya in the Soviet era was part of the Chechen-Ingushetian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. (After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Chechens and the closely related Ingush parted ways, and two republics within the Russian Federation were established, Chechnya and Ingushetia.) The Chechen-Ingushetian A.S.S.R. in turn was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which in turn was a member republic of the U.S.S.R. There were 15 Union Republics, including Russia, but there were something like twenty A.S.S.R.'s, all subordinate to one of the Union Republics (most but not all of them in the Russian S.F.S.R.), plus something like another dozen “Autonomous Regions”, plus, in Russia itself, things called “Nationality Districts”, which, from Union Republics down through A.S.S.R.'s to Autonomous Regions to Nationality Districts formed a sort of descending hierarchy of less important and theoretically less autonomous ethnically-based administrative units. (In practice, of course, during the Soviet era the autonomy of even the Union Republics was pretty much nil.) With the collapse of the U.S.S.R., all the Union Republics went their separate ways, but both the newly independent republics (including Russia) and the rest of the world felt it would be best if the whole process stopped there, especially since in Russia itself the governments of some of the ordinary non-ethnically based Regions and Territories began to get a little frisky.
I suppose it’s something of a historical crapshoot that, say, the Moldavians got their own Union Republic, while the Chechens were stuck with a mere A.S.S.R. There’s also no question that Russian policy in Chechnya has been both brutal and inept, obviously the worst combination imaginable. (Just and competant being the best, and whether you prefer nice but bumbling or ruthless but efficient is an argument in itself.) But I do think the basic notion that the old Soviet Union should not continue to disintegrate until every last clan or tribe is its own sovereign state is in principle a good one.
Well, I dunno. The current death toll is 118 hostages. Most apparently died from suffocation after the gas that had first knocked them out induced vomiting. One doctor at a Moscow hospital who received several of the hostages that died shortly after arrival to the hospital, or on their way there noted that the main problem seemed to be that the hostages were not given appropriate care immediately on site, but rather loaded on buses and shipped off in an unconscious state to various hospitals. Although I agree that the Russian anti-terror squad probably did as well as they could in the light of the situation it would seem that someone jumbled the ground support, which caused a vast number of unnecessary deaths.
Sparc
I’m unimpressed. A couple of my Russian friends are having much more inappropriate thoughts, mostly along the lines of “I bet Putin set this all up so he could (A) clobber the Chechnyians, (B) swing public opinion in Chechnya on an upcoming referendum on seperatism, and © look good for the Russians.”
The proof of this theory is that so few civilians died, but virtually all of the rebels - so they couldn’t reveal their real role in this, of course. One friend says that the pictures of the theater show seated, dead rebels, who presumably were knocked out by the gas and then shot anyway. I wouldn’t know, I’m avoiding the media for a bit.
Just goes to show Americans aren’t the only ones who come up with conspiracy theories.
Although I do find the Russians’ refusal to say what kind of gas they used eerie, to say the least.
At least 118 of the hostages have died, which is a fairly large number, so I think that blows your theory into teeny tiny bits.
Yeah, I’d be happy to provide more explanation than anone here probably wants, but my 8th grade social studies teacher explained it best: it’s a rebellion until you win, upon which it retroactively becomes a revolution. So for the moment the Chechens are rebels.
And here’s a small snippet of my master’s thesis, which will perhaps provide a glimpse of understanding of the ways in which Russia has applied a divide-and-conquer policy in the North Caucasus. More upon request:
"In historical practice, however, many non-Russian nationalities, having been freed from the confines of Tsarist ethnic policy in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, were most reluctant to be brought into the socialist fold. The North Caucasian nationalities were certainly no exception to this tendency. The North Caucasus had become part of the Russian Empire in the early 19th century, over the violent objections of the local Moslem populations. A series of guerilla campaigns by the North Caucasian Sufi brotherhoods (tariqas) against the Tsar’s troops, led by Imam Shamil, dominated the middle portion of 19th-century North Caucasian history. This anti-Russian sentiment continued after the dissolution of the Empire; the North Caucasus, like other non-Russian areas far removed geographically and psychologically from Moscow, could not be brought even minimally under Soviet control until the early 1920’s. In fact, the local population continued to revolt sporadically against Russian central control throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s.
In order to complete the consolidation of Soviet power, Lenin had to calm the fears of non-Russian nationalities that they would be subject to linguistic and cultural Russification as a matter of Soviet government policy. To accomplish this, he instituted a program of korenizatsiya, in which local languages and culture were to be encouraged and local government institutions were to be staffed with personnel who spoke the languages of the people they served…
…As the 1920’s progressed, and even more so during the period following Lenin’s death, Soviet domestic policy became increasingly confused and contradictory. The power struggle which accompanied Stalin’s rise to leadership caused a fundamental shift in Soviet policy toward ethnolinguistic assimilation. By 1929, Soviet power was basically consolidated throughout the former Russian Empire; the policy of tolerance toward the distinctness of the Moslem peoples ended, and the onslaught against Islam in general and Moslem National Communists in particular began.
This period was also marked by a number of changes in the governmental structure and administrative control of the North Caucasus. The United Mountaineer Republic, which had been formed in 1918 in the aftermath of the Revolution and included the entire North Caucasus, was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1920. After a post-revolutionary name change to the Mountain Autonomous Republic, it was gradually dissolved during the early 1920’s as pieces were broken off to form new Autonomous Oblasts. Dagestan was split off in January 1921 to form the Dagestan ASSR. In September of that year the Kabardian Autonomous Oblast (hereafter AO) was formed, followed in January 1922 by the Karachay-Cherkess AO. Four days later the Balkar Okrug was attached to the Kabardian AO, forming the Kabardino-Balkar AO. In July the Adygey-Cherkess AO was established, leaving only the Ingush and Ossetians in the Mountain Autonomous Republic. With their division into the Ingush AO and the North Ossetian AO on July 7, 1924, the Mountain Autonomous Republic ceased to exist. Stalin, as People’s Commissar of Nationality Affairs, had successfully prevented the peoples of the North Caucasus from achieving any kind of administrative unity, or even cooperation. In so doing, he prevented a unified, conservative, anti-Russian state from forming."
So do you all have a splitting bureaucratic headache now, or does anyone want to know more? The main focus of the paper is on language policy, specifically bilingual education policy, but this naturally means it touches on many issues related to the self-determination of Soviet/Russian Federation ethnic minorities.
And yeah, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Putin manipulated this to his political advantage and used it as an excuse to clobber the last bits of remaining crap out of the Chechens. Believe me, Americans have nothing on Russians when it comes to conspiracy theories. I just wish they weren’t accurate such a large proportion of the time.
I had really mixed feelings about this, especially after learning that only two of the hostages died of gunshot wounds. However, given that there were enough bombs to blow up the building, I guess I have to admit that saving 90% is certainly better than none.
Eva Luna: If your thesis is published somewhere, I’d like to take a gander. Got it lying around :)?
- Tamerlane
**Tamerlane, ** it’s not officially published anywhere, except a0 on file at my alma mater in the department library, and b) as a broken link on a Web site in Jordan. Come to think of it, maybe you should check it out in general; the site is a 4,000+ online bibliography of all things North Caucasian. I’d post a link, except that my IE is misbehaving at the moment. Do a Google search on the name “Amjad Jaimoukha;” the site is his labor of love. He’s a member of the Circassian diaspora living in Jordan; we’ve corresponded a bit via e-mail, but not recently.
I’m happy to e-mail it to you, though, or to anyone else who’s curious, as long as you have your e-mail posted in your profile. What with all the white supremacists hanging around on this board (plus at least one of my ex-boyfriends), I’m not crazy about the idea of having my contact info floating around, but am happy to correspond with people individually if I can be of any use to them…
i found it enlightening, thanks, Eva Luna.
The BBC brought in a Professor of Biology at the Open University on last night’s news… he reckoned the symptoms of the gas used are consistent with something called BZ gas, originally developed by the US during the Cold War (prior to the chemical weapons treaties) and copied by the Soviet military. The official Russian line, as of my last hearing, is that the gas was “similar to the general anaesthetic used in hospitals”, but no further details are forthcoming.
I don’t think this turn of events comes as much of a surprise… Putin depends on his reputation as a hard-liner, and he’s definitely not the type to let negotiations drag on. It seemed to me that the most likely thing for him to do was to go in hard and take an “acceptable” level of casualties among the hostages. The gas thing, though, looks like it could backfire on him rather severely… somebody (possibly Putin himself, given his background) obviously had inflated ideas about how “non-lethal but incapacitating” the stuff was.
I’ve gotten a little cranky about the media treatment of this situation.
First of all, about shooting the rebels/criminals/terrorists/whatever… imagine you are Mr. Special Forces Man. You are entering a building that you know is rigged to explode. Inside are people who have already killed a couple of your fellow citizens. These people are also rigged to blow up, heavily armed, and also carry grenades. While the building has been pumped full of some sort of knock-out gas, the authorities obviously can’t control the exact dose everyone has been given, so some folks are OD’d and some probably nearly concious. You see a row of these Dangerous People sitting in the main theatre (or other location). Part of what you are there for is to rescue the hostages, but these Dangerous People are still rigged up with things that go >boom!<, surrounded by Dangerous Things, and you have no way to know if they’re out for an hour, a day… or maybe just two more minutes. Also, keep in mind these people had already declared themselves willing and eager to die. That makes them extremely dangerous. You have to go rescue the hostages, but to do so means you walk past the Dangerous People and they will be behind you.
Yeah, shooting them in the head so you KNOW they won’t wake up and hurt you does start to look like a logical, even reasonable, solution. Maybe next time someone will come up with something different and better.
That knock-out gas. So far as I know, it’s the first time it’s ever been used for crowd control (maybe it’s been used before, but not given publicity). If it is the first time, I’m not surprised mistakes were made. The Special Forces Guys are not docs or EMT’s - they probably thought getting people to the hospital as quick as possible was the best choice, and unless they had appropriate first aid training it likely was the best choice.
Why is the Russian government so closed-mouth about it? Probably it was developed as a military weapon. Do we publish blueprints to the stealth bomber? Publish the ingredients to the gas and maybe next time Bad Guys will use it for crowd control themselves. Uh, yeah, real smart media guys - like when you spent weeks discussing how easy it would be to use anthrax for terrorism then acted so surprised when the envelopes full of spores arrived addressed to you.
I am truly sorry ANY civilian hostage died in this incident. However, as soon as the Bad Guys broke the hands of a woman, shot her in the chest, and threw her body out the window the chances for a “peaceful resolution” went out the window, too. And that was early on in this mess.
About all those conflicting accounts - you know, in situations like these eyewitness accounts ALWAYS conflict. In that theatre you had over 700 individual viewpoints. Add some terror, and a gas that disorients/renders unconcious, and possibly could even cause hallucinations, and no two stories are going to match.