Posted on 09/18/2008 7:30:16 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Grozny, which I last saw as an immense heap of rubble, is now a truly impressive sight, with fine modern apartment blocks and a beautiful Turkish-built mosque, modeled on the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, towering over the main square.
Grozny as it now stands is a vast improvement on the city as it stood before the war of 1994, when it was a dirty, run-down Soviet industrial city with grim, shabby architecture, very few amenities—and no visible mosques at all. ...
It may, however, have been a help in the reconstruction that the current population of 228,000 is less than half of that recorded in the last Soviet census. Most of the losses come from the fact that Grozny was historically a mainly Russian-inhabited city, and the great bulk of the Russian population had fled even before 1994, driven out by the collapse of law and order and the special vulnerability of Russians to Chechen criminal attack. On the other hand, looking at the gleaming new buildings, I could not help also reflecting that no-one will ever know how many former inhabitants of the city now lie buried beneath their foundations. ...
We drove out of Grozny to visit Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, in his compound in the hills to the east. ...Kadyrov ...stressed his desire for Chechens to return from abroad... The president also said that former separatist fighters—“misguided people”— had been pardoned and were now serving in his forces. ....he said that the death of terrorist leader Shamil Basayev had been “the happiest day of my life”, but that “I was also sorry, because I wanted to kill him myself.” Another was when he said that Chechens had gone to fight against Georgia in the latest war—“of course, because we are the best fighters.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
Interesting take on Chechnya which has been out of the spotlight since the wars of the nineties. I’d be interested to know how many Chechnyans are still behind an independence movement and how many are for alliances with Islamo-fascists.
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