What do you think of the Chechens?

Great Debates
1

In fact, DO you think of the Chechens? They aren’t on the front page much these days, although the war is still very much in progress. (I have my own ideas about why this is the case, but we’ll save the conspiracy theories for another day.) There seem to be two main schools of thought about the Chechens:

a) They are a bunch of savage murdering terrorist wackos who don’t respect the rule of law; and
b) They are innocent victims of Russian imperialist conquest.

Among those who pay attention to the Chechens at all, there isn’t generally much of a middle ground. I’m curious about a) what you think of the Chechens and the current Russian Federation/Chechen conflict; and b) what sources you generally use to obtain your information about it, e.g. how you came to form that opinion.

2

Just type in Chechen. How can you not be sympathetic? Stalin threw them out of their homes and shipped them to Siberia. Now they are under seige. I have no idea if they were really responsible for the Moscow bombings.

As a US citizen, I find the radical “fundie” Muslims to be quite dangerous. This includes some Chechens. But I think most Chechens are like anyone else, they just want to live in peace.

The Russians are using some pretty rough tactics to root out the “terrorists.” If I were a male Chechen between the ages of 10-60 I would want out of there. I heard one Russian commander who actually seemed to be grousing about not being able to kill children, after all they grow up to be terrorists.

3

Or s"ie"ge. Your choice. I had no idea that the Chechen Republic had its own website. This relates to human rights abuses.

4

Beagle, unfortunately lots of people are not sympathetic. if you want my take on it, check out Amazon.com; there’s a book by Anne Nivat called Chienne de Guerre. The review by “A reader in Chicago” is mine. Dr. Nivat spoke in Chicago last year; I asked her what teh general Russian attitude on the Chechen people is, and she says that generally speaking, “Chechen” and “terrorist” are synonyms in the Russian Federation.

5

It really is a case of “future-shock” for someone that grew up in the 50’s, to see a situation where Russia is persecuting a group of people and our country sits back and pretends that it isn’t happening. Of course, there are always two sides of the story (at least in most cases), but the Chechens are getting their human rights violated and have no one to stick up for them. If they turn to the Muslims and thus terror groups can we really blame them?

6

I finally used eight years of French! I thought I would link that Amazon page for you.

A reader in Chicago from the Amazon.com link above:

Is this the one?

Je suis tres sympathique. Mais, le terrorism?

I guess there is evidence that some Chechens participated in blowing up those apartments in Moscow. Some reviewers claim there is. I wish I knew the Straight Dope[sup]TM[/sup] on those bombs. If they were set by Chechens - what a strategic blunder. That still does not make all Chechens culpable for the actions of a few. Were that the case, everyone would be a criminal.

7

Yep, that’s mine.

And I swore I’d leave out the conspiracy theories, but I have to mention one: I haven’t seen any hard evidence from a belieable source either way about the Moscow apartment bombings, but I’ve heard some quite credible rumors that the FSB set up the whole thing to make the Chechens look bad and give the Russian armed forces a good excuse to bomb the crap out of them again.

If anyone has the scoop on that, I’d love to hear it.

8

And Beagle, thanks for the link. One of these days, I’ll figure out how to do it myself.

9

My take on the situation is that there are three sides in this conflict: his side, their side, and the truth. I believe there are some terrorist elements in the Chechen population and the Russian army have a bunch of trigger happy psychopaths who feel the only good Chechen is a dead Chechen. I read the articles about the apartment bombings and I always had a bad feeling about them. I thought the timing was awfully convenient to blame on the Chechens. Evidence has surfaced suggesting that Russian officials may have had something to do with planting bombs to blame on the Chechens. I have no cites, just what I remember reading in the newspapers at the time.

10

I don’t suppose that there is anything particularily wrong with the Chechen people themselves, the Chechen rebels are pretty much scum, from what I have read.

They murder captured Russians, and videotape the act for added PR value. What sort of animals do that?

We are not dealing with some idealistic pro-democracy rebels here. They are by and large either muslim extremists, or old-fashioned bandits.

Either way, the people of Chechnya are probably better off under Russia. I have yet to hear of convincing evidence that modern Russia is mistreating the Chechans’ Conversely, I have read of dozens of accounts of Chechan rebel attrocities.

11

Brutus (and anyone else who might give a damn), if you wish, I will post for you a link to my successfully defended master’s thesis on the Russian Federation’s treatment of ethnic/linguistic minorities. I’d love for you to check out some of the items in the bibliography (unfortunately for you, since I’m guessing you don’t read Russian, you’re going to be out of luck in reading many items). However, much of the source material is available online, as in developing the core arguments, I relied on a number of pieces of Russian and international legislation. Feel free to post here if you don’t understand a particular term in phonetic Russian or something. But first, a couple of items:

  1. Define “modern Russia,” please. If you are talking about post-Soviet Russia, I would refer to you Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty online (www.rferl.org), an excellent English-language source for news on the former East Bloc, where you can read numerous reports of unfair treatment of Chechens by the Russian local and federal authorities. I also highly recommend to you Dr. Nivat’s aforementioned book. For a flavor of what life in the North Caucasus is like these days, check out Yo’av Karny’s Highlanders: maybe I’m a big geek, but I thought it was a page-turner. And for a Western view of the situation, you can read “Russian Federation: Ethnic Discrimination in Southern Russia,” Human Rights Watch, August 1998, at http://www.hrw.org/reports98/russia/

  2. If you are talking about, say, the past century, are you aware of the North Caucasian deportations that took place toward the end of WWII? That the Chechens, along with the Karachai, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, and Kalmyks, were deported by Stalin in May 1944 to Siberia and Kazakhstan, in the course of which possibly half of them died? (Estimates range anywhere from 25-50%.) This was because they had ostensibly cooperated with the Germans, although there is no historical evidence to suggest that more than a handful of them did anything of the sort. They were not allowed to return to their ancestral homelands for decades after the war (and when they got there, found that Stalin had resettled other ethnic groups in their homes), and during their period of exile were forbidden to leave the camps where they had been resettled and were deprived of all opportunity to learn their native language, be gainfully employed in most cases, and otherwise live a normal life. (See Aleksandr Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Tragic Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., NY, 1978).

  3. And if, by “modern Russia,” you are willing to go back 150 years or so, I refer you to Moshe Gammer’s 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.) It is a very detailed scholarly military history of the Russian conquest of the North Caucasus.

Don’t get me wrong; I am a big pacifist and have no respect for anyone who tortures and kills noncombatants, or who inflicts unnecessary levels of violence on combatants, in pursuit of even the loftiest goal. (And if you’re going to slam them, at least spell it right; in English, it’s Chechen, not Chechan.) I would ask you, though, to consider the source when drawing conclusions about the Chechen rebels; directly or indirectly, most information in English-language news outlets comes from the Russian news media or from Western reporters who don’t have access to primary sources, as journalists have been kept out of Chechnya almost entirely since the conflict began, or shepherded around by Russian officials.

I’m sure there are some real murdering scumbags on both sides of this conflict. However, I hope you will at least grant me that the Russian side is rather more experienced and adept at international P.R. and rather better equipped to handle inquiries from the news media in a manner which will shed favorable light on their side of the story. When is the last time you saw an official of the Chechen rebel government (as opposed to a rebel military leader) quoted in any mainstream media source? Not to mention that the Chechens don’t have a hell of a lot to offer potential allies in the political quid pro quo department.

And as for your contention that the Chechens are better off sticking with Russia, don’t you think they should be given half a chance to decide that for themselves, without the help of Russian tanks? What does “better off” mean, anyway? Are the Native Americans “better off” on reservations with rampant unemployment and alcoholism? Are they “better off” living cut off from their native culture and language in large cities? Or would they have been “better off” if their society had been left the hell alone to develop naturally?

Anyway, I promised you a link to my thesis (if I haven’t already turned you off with the above reading list). If you’re interested, just say the word, and I’ll find some way to post a link that doesn’t compromise my anonymity.

Yours truly,
Eva Luna
Self-appointed SDMB Defender of North Caucasian Autonomy

P.S. So much for letting people air their own opinions while I keep my virtual mouth shut…but by all means, please do carry on.

12

Strangely enough , Brutus, I read exactly the contrary : dozens of accounts of war crimes commited by the Russian army (the siege of the capital some years ago being one of them, on a large scale), and very few reports about Chechen crimes.
Like other previous posters, I would like to have some hints about this bombings. Immediatly after it, there already were suspicions that it could have been organized by the russian government itself…

13

PBS suggests the Chechens had nothing to gain. This agrees with me, so I liked it. I searched “Moscow apartment bomb.” I did not look at every hit, there were thousands. The FSB conspiracy theory Not vouching for this website - just found it. I have been burned before. Here the Guardian reports on the five patsi… I mean suspects who were tried.

Amnesty International on the human rights abuses in the Chechen Republic in 2000.

Eva I will pass on the knowledge someone on this board was nice enough to pass on to me. When I joined the board I thought a link involved chain. When you cut and paste a link you just have to surround it with the right stuff. You have to quote my post to see what I did. You can look at the above links. I provide an example below. The “link” is Beagle. The words (or smilie) you want as a link goes in the space with “text” and the confused smilie.

text:confused:

Basically it is two , one =, one"", one /, and two "url"s.

I hope I did not make that harder than it actually is. Once you do it a couple times it is easy.

14

Thanks for the tip, Beagle.

And Clairobscur, interesting to hear a different viewpoint from across the pond. Out of curiosity, what is generally your news source? Anne Nivat writes for Liberation; what ideological tilt does Liberation generally have?

15

Brutus, anybody home? What, no comments, after I went to all that trouble? I’m speechless! Or are you just too busy debating about the Palestinians?

16

a small apolitical comment:

My cousin who lived 6 years in Russia told me that the chechens he met despised Russia and were real bad*sses. They also invited him to drinks and told him to come to them if he had any problems but that is not the issue.

17

Eva, you are not forgotten. (You were, but that was then, and this is now!)

  1. I would define ‘Modern Russia’ as just that. post-Soviet Russia. And not to sound curt (it’s almost bedtime!), but alleged unfair treatment by Russian authorities, and I have no illusions that all Russians are saints, is not a good enough reason, imho, to justify a ‘rebellion’.

Russia is now a democracy, albiet a new one, learning the ropes. There are alternatives to armed insurrection.

  1. Again, not to sound cold hearted, but…European settlers to America did a fairly complete job of wiping out and treating badly the natives in much of America. But that does not mean that America as a whole would tolerate armed insurrection from the decendants of the then oppressed natives.

  2. Muslimonline.com, , among numerous other sources, would beg to differ regarding your spelling of ‘Chechan’. Like how it is spelled matters.

  3. When it comes to news sources, I would say that very little has been said about the Chechan war, from either side, in mainstream American media. So I trust my set of sources, Pravda, Strategypage, etc. I don’t exactly trust Amnesty International, Radio Liberty, etc. But what constitutes a trustworthy news source is the matter of a new OP.

  4. Again, a good topic for a new debate would be (and has been, I think) on whether or not native cultures would have been/are better off after the introduction of Western Civ. I think they are.

  5. To confirm that I indeed am a total hypocrite: I served for 2 years in the Croatian army during the war of liberation (Civil war, rebellion, all depends on what side you were on.). I would be mad as hell is someone suggested that we would have ‘been better off under the Serbs’. But there it is. I tend to be opposed (for what it matters) to rebellious parties in conflicts around the world. (Some exceptions, such as the SPLA, which gets my armchair-general support).

18

Human rights abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya are pretty well documented. However, the Chechen “freedom” movement seems to be composed of hard-line professional criminals and hard-line Islamic extremists, and their human rights abuses are also pretty well documented (examples here and here). To my mind, neither side is in the right, and consequently I support neither side.

19

Holy tamolie, Eva Luna, I realize you just landed one of the heaviest pieces of scholarship this year on the forum, but it was a little intimidating (even for someone with degrees in history). Where did you expect somebody to start answering?

Limiting myself to your point 2: Stalin killed millions of his own people of every description. He moved people around whenever he felt it necessary (and in WWII, probably many of the relocations were important to the war effort). I reject the notion that because some ethnic minority was moved a larger percentage of the time, that the event, now many decades past, gives them special rights. This kind of “vendetta argumentation” is what keeps hatred alive.

I thank American Indians for having more common sense and more common respect for humanity. In the U.S., there’s always been a certain willingness to listen to complaints about redressing the many wrongs that were done to them. And that’s because, most of the time, they tried to respond in faith, rather than violently.

The news reports from the Chechen campaign couldn’t be more different. I’m agreeing with Steve Wright that the violence there seems to be part and parcel of international extremists. The pageant of past crimes they claim to be acting on are the sort of flimsy justification that any terrorist force needs to convince themselves that breaking the central religious laws of their country are somehow justified. Their first need is to be violent. Their second is to hoodwink others that they aren’t insane.

20

Well, well, I’m glad I’ve been able to re-stimulate a little interest in the ethnic minorities of the Russian Federation. OK, Brutus et. al., for the moment I will stick to post-Soviet Russia. (To get one detail out of the way, the Chechen language self-appellation is transcribed into English as Nokhchi, I think, but I will have to check my Chechen-English dictionary when I get home.)

There is way more detail than you probably ever would want in my thesis, but basically, I don’t think in this case it is possible to remove history from the list of causes for the current Chechen conflict. (As, indeed, it would be equally difficult to remove the influence of history from the Serb/Croat mess. My best friend is half-Croat, half-Bosnian, and a historian, so believe me, I’ve heard lots about it.)

Even if you accept the hypothesis that the Chechens are better off under Russian control than they would be either as an independent nation or under the control of one of their other neighbors, the Russian government has repeatedly promised things to the Chechens that they have failed to deliver. These things, such as local autonomy, and the ability to maintain and develop their language and culture with state support, are constitutionally guaranteed and always have been since the beginning of the Soviet period, but in practice these constitutional guarantees are almost entirely ignored.

OK, you may say, the same was promised to all ethnic minorities in the RF, and is also rarely delivered. However, here is where historical legacy plays in: not only has the Russian government failed to provide the means for the Chechens to maintain and develop their culture, they came damn close to exterminating the Chechens as a people. OK, my bias is that as an American Jew of various Eastern European origins, I generally root for the underdog, but I can’t say that I blame the Chechens for a) being pissed off, and b) acting on it. (I do, of course, take issue with the means the rebels have used, but even if I disagree with them, I can understand why they’ve done it.)

Russia is more democratic than it was ten years ago, but its version of democracy is still quite problematic at best. I hope this will change with time, but the road will definitely be long and bumpy. So in the meantime, what would you suggest the Chechens do to defend the rights which even Russian legislation (not to mention international legislation to which Russia is signatory) guarantees them? Should we send over Jesse Jackson to teach them how to make a fuss in the media? And another one of the main points that I’m trying to make is that one should be very, very careful about confusing the Chechen people as a whole with the rebel forces. The former deserves to have their rights as RF citizens, and as human beings, respected; the latter deserves to have its relative innocence or guilt evaluated fairly in a court of law, and then treated accordingly.

And partly_warmer, et al., please start answering wherever you feel comfortable; I certainly didn’t mean to intimidate anyone (and was actually quite amused that you felt that way!), but was simply hearing the cries of “Cite!” in advance.

However, I disagree that minorities that have historically persecuted should not be given differential treatment; at the very least, they deserve an official apology, and they deserve to receive restitution for property they have lost, and they deserve some kind of real government assurances that promises made to them now and in the future will be kept. If you consider that unfair and differential treatment, so be it. The difference here between the Chechen and Native American situations is that there are no longer any remaining survivors of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, whereas there are plenty of survivors remaining from the Chechen deportations (or the U.S. internments of Japanese-Americans in WWII, not that the treatment was analogous). I agree that restitution can be a very slippery slope, but the Chechens are just asking for what they have been promised in legislative form, and have the Russians ever thought that maybe if they kept their own promises, they could have avoided this whole godawful mess?

Anyway, I promised a link to my thesis for anyone who’s interested (even if you just want to check out the extensive bibliography). I couldn’t figure out how to link to a specific document in my Yahoo! Briefcase, so I humbly request that you respect my privacy and only read the last document in my folder (which has been purged only of my name and the name of my university; the content is intact. The others are pretty much just previous versions and such anyway). I realize that it’s quite simple for you to poke around and find out who I am; I’m making the plea for privacy not because I don’t stand by my arguments on North Caucasian issues, but because I’ve posted rather a lot of information on other topics on the SDMB which I would prefer to keep separate from my identity IRL. Maybe you think I’m paranoid, but so be it. Anyway, here’s the URL; let me know if you have problems getting in.

http://briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/eve_rachel/lst?&.dir=/My+Folder&.src=bc&.begin=9999&.view=l&.order=&.done=http%3A//briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/eve_rachel/lst%3F%26.dir=/My%2BFolder%26.src=bc%26.view=l
Happy reading!