Firstly, it didn’t create any wars in the USA.
Secondly, are you aware that Russia has a certain, ahem, ‘history’ in Afghanistan, and in dealing with fundamentalist Muslims in a less-than-successful way?
It’s the equivalent to the death toll in Iraq every two weeks since the war. That’s enormity.
(And yes, sadly, many people are actually more interested in Clinton’s medical matters than in deaths in far-off places.)
Why must you force me to parse? The wars were not in the US but the launching was.
That you’re quibbling about grammar suggests you’re not grasping either. Sit back and visualize for a second how this must sound and feel in Russia. Russians may be more politically resigned than most, but it doesn’t take much to launch a country into a bloody nationalist frenzy. What happened after 9/11 was (in part) a bloody nationalist frenzy.
Expand.
Smoking kills more than both of these combined. It’s not just the death toll. It’s the death toll *and * who was targeted - little children :eek:
Who the hell *targets * little children?
Think about what would happen in this country if muslims extremists, or al qaeda or whomever targetted and killed a few hundred children in a school. I’m not trying to be condescending, but this really requires visualization.
Apologies for assuming everyone was in the US. A little US-centric.
Why do you think it should be mentioned that they are Muslim? When school children are learning about the Nazis is it ever mentioned that they were Christian?
You gather from what capacitor wrote that the killings are okay with him?
When the non-Muslim Russians blow up buildings in Chechnya do you post on here asking why they’re not called terrorists?
I don’t know. I didn’t know what Bush was going to do either. Obviously the physical conditions and realities of war haven’t changed, but the psychology definitely has. And that makes all the difference.
These are big questions. That’s what I’d like to see on the news.
This is a conflict with a 200-year history. When you read about incidents like these, keep in mind that hundreds of thousands of Chechens and other North Caucasians were killed or forced to flee to surrounding countries during the 19th-century Russian conquest of the North Caucasus. Keep in mind that it took the army which Napoleon couldn’t conquer several decades to gain any sort of control over the North Caucasus.
Keep in mind that the Chechens were forcibly deported during WWII to Siberia and Kazakhstan and not allowed to return to their homeland for decades, and that anywhere from 25-50% of them died during that period; the Chechen deportations are often compared to the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Keep in mind that all RF ethnic minorities are Constitutionally guaranteed state support for the development and preservation of their language and culture, but that schools in Chechnya (the ones that are still standing and/or functional) lack even the most basic supplies, and that classes are not taught in Chechen past the second grade - and even that small fragment of instruction uses books with titles like "Russian for “Speakers of Caucasian Languages;” it’s entirely aimed at mainstreaming Chechen children into Russian-language instruction.
And please don’t make the mistake of assuming that because one side is primarily Muslim, and the other side primarily areligious or Christian, that the Chechen conflict is about religion. Chechnya is NOT a religious conflict; it may be turned into one by the Russians, however, in the sense that
a) given the current geopolitical fashion of painting all terrorists as Muslim fundamentalist wackos (and vice versa), it’s very convenient for Putin to paint the Chechens that way - it’s easier to demonize them and thereby to paint his Chechen campaigns as “antiterrorist” rather than as the ethnic cleansing that they are; and
b) as I posted during the Moscow theater siege and on several other occasions on this board, as the rest of the world has essentially proven that they don’t give a damn about Chechnya unless Chechens are blowing things up, the Chechens are borrowing tactics from some folks I think the rest of us would really rather they didn’t emulate.
Some of these folks do happen to be Muslim fundamentalists, and the probably inevitable consequence is that this small minority of religiously motivated violent nutjobs will reflect on the peaceful vast majority, who are just trying to live their lives without having the RF military round up and “disappear” their families and neighbors, rape their women, obliterate their entire culture and way of life, create hundreds of thousands of refugees, and bomb Chechen cities and villages back into the Stone Age.
For those of you who don’t know the long, long background of this conflict, please keep in mind that these recent acts of terrorism have not taken place in a vacuum. Chechnya never wanted to be part of Russia in the first place, and the Chechens have repeatedly had all sorts of legal promises made and broken by the Russian central government over many, many years. These are NOT isolated incidents, and the more fiercely Putin promises that the Russian military will subdue the Chechens, the more they will fight. There are some mighty long memories in the Caucasus.
(Text primarily cross-posted from another Chechnya thread at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=5234385#post5234385)
For more background on the Chechen conflict, you might want to look at the following:
the granddaddy of North Caucasian bibliographies can be found on Amjad Jaimoukha’s website at:
http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/Enterprises/2493/circbibliog.html (including link to an outdated, non-final verion of my M.A. thesis - I should really bug him about that one of these days)
Some specific suggestions on the Chechen situation, both current and historical:
Allen, W.E.D., and Muratoff, Paul. Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828-1921. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, 1953.
Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Wimbush, S. Enders. Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1979. (or anything else by Alexandre Bennigsen - he also wrote quite a bit in French)
Broxup, Marie Bennigsen (ed.) The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World. Hurst & Company: London, 1992.
Gammer, Moshe. Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Dagestan. Frank Cass c/o International Specialized Book Services, Inc.: Portland, Oregon, 1994.
Wixman, Ronald. Language Aspects of Ethnic Patterns and Processes in the North Caucasus. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1980.
Nekrich, Alexander M. The Punished Peoples: The deportation and tragic fate of Soviet minorities at the end of the Second World War. W.W. Norton & Co., 1978.
Nivat, Anne. Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya. PublicAffairs, 2001.
Karny, Yoav. Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory. 2000, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[QUOTE=x-ray vision]
Why do you think it should be mentioned that they are Muslim? When school children are learning about the Nazis is it ever mentioned that they were Christian?
[QUOTE]
Nazis weren’t Christians. They oppressed religion pretty ruthlessly.
Question for Eva Luna.: How come you know so much about people of the Caucusus? I’m asking because I’m Adighe. Pardon me for the hi-jack but Eva Luna’ e-mail address isn’t visible.
It’s a long story involving a study abroad program in Leningrad, a failed romance, and a master’s thesis. I’ll e-mail you more, if you’re genuinely curious; I just like to have some semblance of control over who has access to my e-mail address.
I would love to hear more, thanks.
I quote the comedian Will Durst. He did a routine on this topic…
[Durst]*News reports said that two men of middle eastern appearance were seen running from the bombing.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t, like, EVERYBODY running from the bombing?!?
And what constitutes ‘middle-eastern appearance’ in OC??? "I tell you, officer, they was tan on both arms; they had curly hair; and neither one was wearin’ ball caps. It was scary!!" [/Durst]
*There was also a Bob-Newhart-derivative one-sided phone conversation that I don’t feel like regurgitating right now. The punchline was “Rednecks?? Damn!!”
There’s a number of foreign fighters who joined the Chechen rebels over the years (like it happened in Afghanistan, for instance) . Muslim extremism and wahabism gained more and more influence in Chechnya since the beginning of the second Chechnya war. So, I don’t find surprising that arabs could have been found amongst the killed hostage takers.
It seems to me that the Chechens have been vastly enough punished, given all the war crimes, tortures, destructions,executions, rapes, etc…that have been commited in Chechnya by the russian army. How many Chechen children have been killed during the siege of Grozny, that has been essentially razed, for instance? Putin, who ordered this, and couldn’t care less about the other crimes commited every day there, is at least as much a criminal as the hostage takers.
Or perhaps he just isn’t aware of what’s going on. After all, a famous journalist who enquired about russian war crimes in Chechnya died poisoned yesterday. So, maybe there isn’t anybody left alive in Russia to inform the president.
I don’t know what reasons the Russians give for not granting Chechens their freedom. I hope that they are granted the freedom they seek.
But I do not excuse the slaughter of innocents. Not in Japan in WWII. Not in Vietnam in 1970. Not in NYC in 2001. Not in Iraq every day. Not in a school in Russia even by people who may well deserve freedom.
Aldebaran, we see these things on television too and are dragged into it with our hearts, if not politically.
This thread has wandered a bit, including some people dangerously close to justifying Chechnian terrorists because of past history.But the quote above touches closer to my intent in making the original post.
I bolded the last 5 words–because I just don’t get it–what is “difficult” about this?
It’s cold-blooded murder and terror., (using the definition in the same article10 lines above “victims chosen randomly in order to create terror in the minds of the public”
So why cant the newsmen say it out loud?
Honestly - what the Chechens have been through is totally irrelevant. How many people can say they don’t come from some group that has been horribly oppressed at some point in history. But because you’re a victim does not give you a moral blank check. Didn’t Gandhi show us that there were moral ways of resisting oppression - and if that’s so then it must be that some ways are evil. Actually I even question whether terrorism is even about resisting oppression. I think it’s just about hate.
Terrorists are not noble victims. They’re full of uneducated thugs, sociopaths, and ideologues with the same mentality as our lunatic rednecks who shout for the US to kill all Muslims on hate radio. That mentality has nothing to do with oppression. You see it all the time in the US, the land of the free and in all classes. And who were the 9/11 hijackers mostly? Educated middle class Saudis. Not the oppressed.
The mentality comes from human evil. It comes because we love to hate, we love our own righteousness, and we love to dehumanize others. We nurse our grievances to justify our viciousness, our racism, and our self-righteousness. The Chechen grievances you keep pointing too? Well I’m sure there are aggrieved Chechens, but for these people they were just rationalizations. They told themselves it was tit for tat but all it was was evil. Don’t encourage them.
It was pinheaded racist nationalism that let them target children in the first place without conscience interfering. They didn’t think of them as human. They were Russian, the oppressor, Christians, whatever.
And I’ll be damned if I’ll let the death of children make me look kindly on the cause of their murderers. I’d much rather worry about the people in that village.
Except that nobody justified anything or gave anyone a ‘blank check.’ I didn’t know that much about the conflict, and now I do. I can’t stand it when people treat attempts to educate like a defense of terrorism.
As has been said a number of times, the newscasters are attempting to avoid politically loaded terms because using them makes for crappy journalism. Saying ‘terrorist’ in this case is less descriptive than other terms like ‘hostage-taker’ anyway.
Nobody here can say with absolute certainty that if they were Chechen, having been through what that country and that people have suffered, there is no possibiliity that they would resort to terrorism. Until you’re in the situation, none of us can be sure of how we would react.
That’s not justification, nor claiming a moral victory for Chechen terrorism. But it’s the truth.
The “nickname” given to the female Chechen terrorists who were involved in various terrorist attacks in Russia is “black widows”. Try to guess where the “widow” part comes from, when you’re mentionning mere rationalizations.
And did you looked kindly on the Chechen cause and worry about them when their children were murdered?
Don’t you think these children deserve your pity too? Or these ones?
Here’s the list of victims in a single Chechen village (including children). Does this village deserve your worry too?
Do you think memories of events like this or this one will be soon “rationnalized”?
You’re thinking about the grief of mothers? Here what the Chenchen mothers have to say about their 40 000 children killed during the war.
Concerning Chechnya, maybe you shouldn’t limit your outrage to the particular event that happened yesterday.
Ahhh… but that’s the rub, isn’t it? The 1995 Chechen War was one of Boris Yeltsen’s greatest regrets - primarily because he let the media cover it TOO openly. The 1999-2004 Chechen War is the world’s least famous conflict. For one simple reason - this time around, absolutely ZERO journalists or TV cameras have been allowed in. It’s the forgotten war… the invisible war… and by extension, all of the ugliness, and barbarity, and amputations, and gruisome deaths to children these past 5 years never happened - because so many of us in the West never saw it on TV.
It’s a sad reflection on the state of affairs we live in nowadays I rather think - namely, perception is everything - regardless of the truth.
Yes, the Beslan School Massacre is a tragedy. Yes, the people who did it are terrorists by definition. So what? The real question that counts is WHY did they do it? One thing’s for sure… they didn’t do it coz they were bored.
It seems to me that the Russians have learnt nothing from Afghanistan. Nothing from the Stalin years. Bottom line? When a small province wants it’s independance? Fucking let it. Just let it have it.
To read some of the posts hear would suggest that the terrorists have reached new heights by targeting children. I submit that that this action is commensurate to the school bus bombings in Israel.
While it is true that the Chechen conflict is a political one, I believe horrendous actions like this do not ignite except for the fact that there most definitely is influence and participation from radical Islamic elements.