In a way I feel sorry for you and those like you. For 50 years or so you had a certanty in your lives - it was simple back then when the Soviets were in power. Nostolgic dementia I think the term is.
Putin's Other Chechen Campaign By CYNTHIA SCHARF
Ms. Scharf, a former Moscow-based journalist, now resides in London.
Days after Russia's worst-ever suicide bomb attack, which killed 80 people in the heart of Grozny, Russian President Vladimir Putin rang in the New Year with the cheery observation that his country was "meeting its future properly." His comments were not intended to be ironic.
Neither, for that matter, was the Russian daily Izvestia's headline in October proclaiming the Moscow hostage-taking crisis as Russia's "moment of truth." But three months after that lamentable event, truth about the blood-stained catastrophe that is Chechnya remains one of the last things the Russian public is likely to hear from its leaders -- or its media. Instead, Russian authorities have intensified their efforts to control what journalists report about the war.
Truth, of course, was one of the first casualties of the separatist conflict in the Caucasus. Three years of hideous carnage have been publicly whitewashed by Russian authorities that have at best ignored and at worst supported the acts of murder, torture, kidnapping and brutality inflicted upon Chechen civilians by Russian forces. While President Putin is undoubtedly aware of these egregious abuses, the Kremlin has done its utmost to pressure and intimidate journalists from reporting them. The result is a whitewashed portrayal of the Chechen conflict that has left Russian readers with little sense of the war's true costs -- in casualties, manpower, resources, military morale, and last but not least, national conscience.
Unfortunately, Mr. Putin has not used the October attack as an opportunity to learn from the wrongs of the past. Instead, he seems ever-more determined to add to them. To date, the Russian president has vilified and ostracized the moderate Chechen leadership (including elected president Aslan Maskhadov); forcibly evicted Chechen families from refugee camps in Ingushetia; stepped up zachistki or violent mopping-up operations against civilians in Chechnya; and clamped down still further on the Russian media. Taken together, these actions demonstrate that Russia's "moment of truth" has been hijacked by a president intent on perpetuating the Kremlin's lies about this war.
Given Chechnya's centrality to Mr. Putin's political future, coverage of the war is a matter of vital concern to the Russian president. Until recently, Russian authorities have shied away from legal means of controlling the media. Instead, they have employed a variety of carrots (selective favoritism and/or state funding) and sticks (financial pressure, management reshufflings, specious visits from the FSB, personal harassment) to exert the Kremlin's authority. Of course, there are also more overt means of pressure, including arrest, kidnapping, violence and death threats, which have been used against several Russian journalists -- including Anna Politkovskaya, Grigory Pasko and Andrei Babitsky.
Over the last three years, Russian security forces have made Chechnya -- and now its neighbor Ingushetia -- walled-off ghettos, sealed from the eyes and ears of all but a few score of journalists whose movements inside the province are controlled assiduously. Journalists are routinely denied entry to Chechnya if their reports are deemed critical of Russian forces. Countless bureaucratic restrictions (including mandatory military escorts) are imposed on the movements of those who manage to report from inside Chechnya.
Journalists, including foreign reporters, have been detained, interrogated, physically threatened and expelled from the area by security forces for refusing to comply with the Russian authorities' "see-no-evil, hear-no evil" guidelines. According to Andrei Babitsky, most Russian print journalists and nearly all of the broadcast media practice a "fairly rigorous degree of self-censorship."
But Mr. Putin is a shrewd politician, and he is under some international pressure -- albeit wincingly feeble and opportunistically applied -- to respond to accusations of Russian abuses in Chechnya. To maintain his carefully constructed image as a liberal in Western eyes, the Russian president knows he cannot appear too heavy-handed in stifling democratic institutions, including the press.
Mr. Putin's recent veto of amendments to Russia's law on the media is a clear example of his strategy to stifle criticism of the war effort while appearing publicly to be a defender of press freedom. These amendments, passed in near unanimous zeal by the parliament after the hostage crisis, banned any reporting that served as propaganda for extremist activities or provides justification for resisting antiterrorist operations.
Instead, the Russian president has proposed that lawmakers make another, less heavy-handed effort to amend the country's decade-old media law, this time with journalists' active assistance. It remains to be seen whether this calculated fifth-column strategy to co-opt journalists into emasculating their own independence will succeed.
Of course, those who have suffered most from the Kremlin's campaign to stifle the truth are the Chechen people themselves, whose suffering has been an unending nightmare of Dantian proportions. As Mr. Babitsky has noted, the Kremlin led campaign to silence reporting on Chechnya many times has enabled the Russian military operate in a climate of lawlessness, with no legal accountability for the ongoing crimes committed by its forces against civilians.
Mr. Putin knows all too well that without public information, without witnesses, there is no possibility of accountability, and no end in sight to the bloodshed. In perpetuating the mixture of denials and lies that feed this war, Mr. Putin is leading his country up a blind alley. Moreover, he is jeopardizing the security of all its citizens -- Russians and Chechens alike.
In the end, there are no victors in this war, for the crimes committed in Chechnya serve to dehumanize both societies. In confronting Chechnya, Russia is looking into a mirror, darkly, for it is battling with itself and the legacy wrought by its terror and brutality. Mr. Putin wishes to deny the consequences of this truth. In so doing, he is compromising not only his country security, but also its conscience.
Let's ask the Christian Science Monitor that question...I'm sure they're delusional also:
Putin battles political fallout of Chechnya fight Suicide attacks against the pro-Russian government of Chechnya claimed a total of 75 lives this week.
By Fred Weir | Special to The Christian Science Monitor, 16 May 2003
MOSCOW - Resurgent violence in Russia's breakaway region of Chechnya, which has seen two devastating suicide bombings this week, is likely to cast a cloud over President Vladimir Putin's annual State of the Nation report to parliament Friday.
For Mr. Putin, who hopes to win full control of parliament and his own reelection in polls due within a year, limiting the political fallout from the 3-1/2-year-old conflict may be crucial.
Experts predict that his hour-long speech will stress his achievements in creating modest economic growth and his ambitious plans to overhaul Russia's bloated state bureaucracy. His brief statements on Chechnya, they say, will be upbeat and cast Russia's military campaign in the breakaway region as part of the global war against terrorism.
"Formally, there are some achievements for Putin to talk about," says Nikolai Petrov, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow. "He will say that the military phase of the conflict is over and that the peace phase has begun. Unfortunately, recent events and the general situation in Chechnya do not provide supporting evidence for these achievements."
The Kremlin plan involves granting Chechnya limited self-government and turning over most combat operations against the rebels to a recently recruited 11,000-man Chechen paramilitary militia. The first step was a March referendum, in which Chechens overwhelmingly adopted a constitution that ties the mainly Muslim republic permanently to Russia.
Though many experts question the Soviet-style 96 percent vote in favor of the plan, even some critics of the Kremlin say it reflects the Chechens' exhaustion and powerful desire for peace after more than a decade of war, anarchy, and terror. "The voting process is highly suspect, but the result is probably real: Chechens desperately want peace, even if they must remain part of Russia," says Sergei Khaikin, a sociologist with the Validata public opinion agency who specializes in Chechnya. "But the wish for peace is not enough as long as conflict remains the real state of affairs."
Despite repeated Kremlin promises of military withdrawal, some 80,000 Russian troops continue to handle most security and counterinsurgency operations in the republic. About a dozen Russian personnel die weekly in combat with the rebels. Over the past year, rebel fighters have adopted suicide tactics seldom seen in Chechnya before, directing their attacks as much against local pro-Moscow Chechens as against the Russians.
On Monday a suicide squad detonated a huge truck bomb inside a government compound in Znamenskoye, northern Chechnya, killing 59 people, mainly pro-Moscow Chechens working for the local administration and the FSB security service. Two days later two female bombers struck a religious festival organized by the pro-Kremlin Unity Party in a village near Grozny.
Sixteen people died in that attack but the intended target, Chechnya's Kremlin-appointed leader Akhmad Kadyrov, escaped unharmed. Russian officials say the Chechen nationalist movement, which led the victorious 1994-96 war for independence from Russia, has been taken over in recent years by Muslim extremist groups from abroad, such as Al Qaeda, who have brought with them ruthless terrorist tactics that mainly target innocent civilians. President Putin was quick to charge that a terrorist attack against foreigners in Saudi Arabia this week, which killed 34 people, bore "exactly the same signature" as Monday's truck bombing in Chechnya.
That message, frequently repeated by the Kremlin since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, may have helped to mute Western criticism of alleged Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya. But some Russian experts say the connection between Chechen rebels and outside terror groups is tenuous and mainly for foreign consumption. "The Chechen resistance is not an Al Qaeda import, and never was," says Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent security expert. "Some Chechen groups may have accepted help from outside, but the resistance is based internally, by a big part of the Chechen population who continue to support the rebels."
Human rights groups also charge that Russian security forces have employed terror tactics to compel Chechens to accept Kremlin-authored terms of peace, including the use of death squads to remove even moderate Chechen oppositionists. "All our information gives us grounds to say that within the federal forces there is a special group whose task is to kidnap, torture, and then kill Chechens," says Oleg Orlov, chairman of Memorial, the only Russian human rights group to maintain a permanent presence in Chechnya.
Salambek Maigov, a representative of rebel Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, told the liberal daily Kommersant that the suicide bombings are probably the work not of international terrorists, but of embittered relatives of people murdered by death squads. "Violence begets violence," he said. "What do you expect in a situation where more than 150 Chechens disappear every month."