Posted on 11/13/2004 3:19:19 AM PST by Snapple
CHECHEN WARLORD WARNS OF NEW TERRORIST ATTACKS. Since masterminding the hostage-taking in the south Russian town of Budennovsk in the summer of 1995, radical Chechen field commander Shamil Basaev has claimed responsibility for a series of terrorist acts that have claimed hundreds of Russian lives. His ill-fated incursion into Daghestan in August 1999 in the wake of an unsuccessful attempt to sideline Chechen President Aslan Maskahdov served as the rationale for the Russian leadership to launch its second war against Chechnya in October of that year under the pretext of combating terrorism.
Yet although Basaev is routinely reviled by leading Russian politicians and has been designated an international terrorist by the U.S., the Russian military have for five years failed to apprehend him, despite offering a reward of 300 million (over $10 million) for information leading to his capture (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 9 September 2004). Basaev's seeming immunity has fuelled speculation in the Russian press that he may be acting at the behest of, and/or enjoy the protection of, the Federal Security Service.
On 31 October, chechenpress.info posted extensive replies by Basaev to questions submitted in mid-September by a Canadian journalist employed by the "Toronto Globe and Mail." When the paper subsequently requested proof of the authenticity of Basaev's responses, Basaev's website (http://www.kavkaz-center.com) said that if the paper failed to publish the interview within three days, it would forfeit the exclusive rights to it. The website then posted the entire text of the interview, which runs to some 7,500 words (The English version is available at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20041102/CHECHEN02/TPInternational/?query=basayev).
Basaev fielded questions on a range of issues, from the Beslan school hostage taking in early September and what he considers the international community's unpardonable complicity in war crimes committed by Russian forces in Chechnya, to episodes from his military activities over the past decade, including an ill-fated visit to Pakistan in the hope of learning from the experience of former Afghan mujahedin in shooting down Russian helicopters and ambushing Russian troops.
Basaev professed to have been "shaken" by Moscow's response to the seizure by Basaev's men of the roughly thousand hostages in Beslan in September, as he did not anticipate that Russian President Vladimir Putin would sacrifice the lives of children -- especially Ossetian children, given that Ossetia has always been a Russian ally in the North Caucasus. Basaev implied that he anticipated that Moscow would comply with the hostage-takers' demand for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya. "I thought I was doing the Russians a favor by showing them the way out of a blind alley," Basaev explained.
Basaev said that he regrets that "so many children died at the hands of the Russians" in Beslan, but that he does not regret the seizure of the school. Basaev then warned that as long as Russia continues to violate the Geneva Conventions, his fighters will do likewise. "It is the enemy who sets the limits to our actions, and we are free to resort to the methods and actions that the enemy first employed against us," including the use of chemical and biological weapons, Basaev argued. "We are ready, and want to wage war according to international law, it is even to our advantage to do so in terms of protecting the civilian population. But unlike President Maskhadov, we do not want to be the only side to espouse those tactics." Basaev further warned that his men may resort to terrorism against the citizens of states whose leaders support Putin's Chechen policy. (In footage screened by Al-Jazeera television in early July, however, Basaev said his men were not planning any attacks outside Russia.) Basaev said that if Putin had responded to his January appeal to abide by the Geneva Conventions, or if the international community had pressured Putin to make such a statement, then he would not have resorted either to the Beslan hostage taking or the Moscow metro bombing and the destruction of two Russian passenger aircraft in August.
Basaev said that he met in late July with Maskhadov, who has repeatedly insisted that the fighters under his command strictly observe the Geneva Conventions and refrain from targeting civilians, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to persuade Maskhadov to switch tactics. He added that he hopes that Maskhadov may now do so after Russian intelligence rounded up 50 of his relatives in retaliation for Maskhadov's imputed complicity in the Beslan hostage taking.
Basaev responded in some detail to his interviewer's observation that in video footage of the 21-22 June raid on Interior Ministry facilities in Ingushetia Basaev appeared healthy and had no apparent problems in moving freely despite having had one leg amputated in the aftermath of the Chechen retreat from Grozny in February 2000. Basaev boasted that in contrast to the months following that retreat, when he admitted having wept at his own weakness, he has fully recovered from his wounds, and is now capable of walking up to 50 kilometers a night. He said he treats his wounds with pure honey, which he said is also efficacious in cases of poisoning together with a caraway concoction (he claimed that he has survived eight attempts to poison him over the past five years), while he doses himself with tetracycline hydrochloride together with the medication "Doctor Mom" for chills and flu. He said he never resorts to painkillers as "thanks be to Allah, I have a very high pain threshold."
Basaev denied that he personally receives much financial support from abroad, explaining that after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. "people are afraid" to give him donations and he is reluctant to ask for money. But he said other field commanders have their own sources of foreign funding, and that his men regularly seize funds destined for the pro-Moscow Chechen government. He repeated his earlier denials of any links with Osama bin Laden and also denied that his men include numerous foreign mercenaries. He claimed that "in my database I have extensive lists of people from all over the world who want to participate in the jihad in Chechnya, tens and hundreds of thousands of them, and not all Muslims." But, Basaev continued, he automatically rejects all such offers as "we have quite enough volunteers in Chechnya." He did not, however, shed any light on the claim by one young participant in the June raids in Ingushetia that hundreds of young Ingush, alienated by corruption and the routine kidnapping of young men by the FSB in Ingushetia, are flocking to fight under his banner.
Basaev praised the professionalism of his fighters, saying that they "are self-sufficient, fight independently [one detachment of another], every man in his place, you do not need to teach them anything." He said that he issues orders in writing, and does not need to confer personally with lower-level commanders more than once or twice a year. (In March 2003, Russian media quoted what were said to be excerpts from intercepted letters from Basaev to field commanders subordinate to him. Basaev personally convened a council of war on the eve of the raids on Ingushetia, according to kavkaz-center.com on 18 June.) He even claimed that he spent only two weeks in Chechnya during the whole of last year, but did not say where he spent the rest of the time.
Basaev categorically denied that his men have used Georgia's Pankisi Gorge as a base, explaining that "there are better conditions to relax in Chechnya than in impoverished Georgia, and if you need medical treatment it's better and cheaper in Russia."
Asked how he has managed to evade capture by the Russians for so long, Basaev explained that he has 20 secret hideaways in Chechnya, each furnished with enough provisions and supplies to last 20 men for two weeks. But the most important factor, he claimed, is the strong support he enjoys from the population of Chechnya and other North Caucasus republics. He claimed that last year when he was badly wounded a police colonel in Kabardino-Balkaria, "who was not even a practicing Muslim," sheltered him for one week. All Russian Muslims, Basaev added, have an obligation to acknowledge his leadership or that of Maskhadov and contribute materially to the jihad. But pro-Moscow Chechen State Council Chairman Taus Dzhabrailov rejected outright Basaev's claim to enjoy the support of the Chechen population. "I cannot speak on behalf of the population of other North Caucasus republics, but I can say on behalf of the Chechens: nobody will help Basaev because he is a bandit, criminal, and murderer and endangers the lives of innocent people," "Kommersant-Daily" quoted Dzhabrailov as saying on 1 November. Dzhabrailov declined, however, to comment on Basaev's other claims, saying only "today anything is possible. I can neither acknowledge or refute the information contained in this interview." (Liz Fuller)
Crush 'em. It's coming. Russian troops are not very nice. They don't care about collateral damage.
Alright that does it you are going on the list.
The trouble is that the Russian military is permeated by mafias that are selling weapons to the terrorists, letting terrorists past road blocks, selling narcotics, etc. There are powerful business interests that benefit from this war.
The police can't look in the military trucks or investigate what the army is doing. This makes them perfect for the mafias. They just use the army trucks, planes and so on.
The "Muslim" terrorist Basaev has worked with the Russians.
I will find a good article on that and post it.
The losers are the civilians--Russians, Ossetians, Inguish, Chechens.
By all means, put Basaev on the list. But who are his sponsors?
The soldiers have already crushed the population, but the terrorism didn't stop.
Shamil Basaev is an evil man who invited Arab terrorirsts in the Chechenya, attempting to apply government style like Afghanistan under Taliban. However, we should also not forget Russia Empire opposed Iraq War, helping Saddam Hussein to transport WMD to Syria. After we provide help for the Russian Empire to assassinate Basaev, we should allow Chehcen their land and teach them democracy, just like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Per "the list", isn't it interesting all names are Islamic (The Religion of Peace) with not one Billy Bob Jones or Jose Perez or Chin Yung.
You still haven't off'd Abu al-Walid, now feeding the worms!
Kavkaz Center: Abu al-Walid killed in air bomb explosion
The Chechen rebel website Kavkaz Center has published its version of Abu al-Walid's death. The leader of Arab mercenaries was offering a prayer at a mountain base of Mojaheds when a bomb blew up near him. Abu al-Walid received lethal missile wounds in the back. It happened on April 16. The information was obtained from one of the Chechen commanders.
The terrorist Basaev belonged to the Russian Military intelligence, the GRU: "Basaev got his start with Abkhazian separatists who were fighting against the Georgian authorities in the early 1990s with the backing of Russian military intelligence (GRU)."
Notice that the Russians were using Basaev to stir up Muslims against predominantly Christian Georgia. The Russians will use whomever serves their purposes to destabilize their enemies.
The author of this article below--Victor Vasmann--is a famous expert on the Soviet and Russians intelligence services.
http://www.rferl.org/reports/rpw/2004/10/38-011004.asp
BETWEEN TERROR AND CORRUPTION
By Victor Yasmann
President Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of the political climate following the tragic school hostage taking in Beslan in early September to accelerate his longstanding political course toward increased authoritarianism. Addressing the country on 13 September in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks that left more than 400 dead, Putin announced that Russia is now at war with international terrorism. He proposed a set of controversial political reforms, including abolishing the direct election of regional governors and the elimination of single-mandate-district representation in the State Duma. He also introduced measures to bolster the Kremlin's military-administrative control throughout the North Caucasus.
However, neither in this speech nor in other statements has Putin acknowledged a connection between Beslan and the long-running war in Chechnya. Instead, he has focused on "international terrorism" and terrorism's "supporters abroad" as the key to understanding the tragedy. However, practically no one outside Putin's administration doubts that the roots of Beslan lie in the Kremlin's policies and tactics in Chechnya. There are also few doubts that the Chechen war is consolidating international terrorism in Russia the same way that the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan activated international Muslim guerrillas.
Many analysts have argued that the continued unwillingness of the Putin administration to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the conflict with so-called moderates within the ranks of the Chechen resistance is bolstering their cause and stimulating destabilization throughout the North Caucasus. No matter who the real organizers of the latest terrorist acts in Russia were, they would certainly not be able to find so many volunteers willing to carry them out if it were not for the devastating war in Chechnya.
The military resistance in Chechnya shows no sign of abating despite the fact that federal forces have managed to eliminate several key field commanders in recent months, including Arbi Baraev, Ruslan Gelaev, Abu Valid, and Khattab. In all, some 20 field commanders have been killed in the past year, according to "Komsomolskaya pravda" on 13 September. About 400 people are currently serving time in Russian prisons for terrorism, while 2,000 others are being sought by the authorities, the paper reported. Many analysts have attributed the continued resistance to radical field commander Shamil Basaev, who has repeatedly slipped from the grip of Russia's special services since he committed his first terrorist act in 1991.
For years now, some voices have asserted that the secret services are not interested in capturing Basaev, who has taken responsibility for the most striking terrorist acts of recent years, including the 1995 seizure of a hospital in Budennovsk, the October 2002 takeover of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, and the Beslan school attack this month. Such skeptics argue that the officials in charge of the "antiterrorism operation" in Chechnya and, now, the "war against international terrorism" fear that such a victory would lead to a loss of their funding, influence, and prestige.
Others, including most recently Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, have recalled that Basaev got his start with Abkhazian separatists who were fighting against the Georgian authorities in the early 1990s with the backing of Russian military intelligence (GRU). "Basaev was the hero of the Abkhazian separatists in 1992-93," Saakashvili said on 16 September, responding to comments by Putin about separatism in the CIS, according to newsru.com on 17 September. "And the blood of Georgian citizens is on his hands. Such people are a threat to Georgia, Russia, and all mankind."
Over the last several years, terrorist activity in Russia has gained a new dimension that reflects a pattern similar to that seen on the international stage. Such practices as the use of female suicide bombers and the targeting of schools have been used by terrorists in India, Sri Lanka, and Israel. In May 1994, a group of Palestinian terrorists captured a school in Maalot, Israel, and held 115 schoolchildren and teachers hostage.
Over the last five months, Russia has experienced a range of terrorist attacks that includes political assassinations, mass guerrilla raids, the downing of civilian aircraft, suicide bombings, and the Beslan hostage taking. In none of these cases did Russia's security forces demonstrate preparedness or inspire confidence that they will be able to prevent similar acts in the future.
On the night of 21-22 June, a group of about 200 gunmen raided the Ingushetian capital of Nazran and took control of the city for about 12 hours. The raid left 92 dead, including 62 officials of the republican Interior Ministry and other security agencies. The raiders seized an Interior Ministry arsenal and captured 300 pistols, 322 submachine guns, and six machine guns. Duma Deputy and former Federal Security Service officer Gennadii Gudkov (Unified Russia) said the raid underscored "the failure, shame, and disgrace of the Russian secret services," gazeta.ru reported on 24 June. "How could army intelligence miss the deployment of so many Chechen fighters and how could electronic intelligence fail to intercept their communications?"
Communist Party leader Gennadii Zyuganov posted a similar statement on the party's website (http://www.kprf.ru) on 25 June. "Although we have a large military formation and special-services presence in the region, all of a sudden a gang of fighters appears and kills the leadership [of local law enforcement organs]," Zyuganov wrote. "This means that intelligence and the [security] services are working very badly."
Military journalist Vladislav Shurygin went a step further, telling "Komsomolskaya pravda" that such successes indicate that Chechen fighters have agents working within the Russian security services.
On 24 August, two civilian airliners exploded in mid-flight almost simultaneously, killing all 90 passengers and crew aboard. FSB investigators have determined that the disasters were caused by explosions on board the planes, possibly explosive devices set off by Chechen women aboard each plane, Transportation Minister Igor Levitan, the head of the state investigating commission, said.
Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov has said that both women bought their tickets for the flights immediately before departure with the help of a ticket scalper named Armen Artyunov, who allegedly paid a bribe to a Sibir Airline official in exchange for helping one of the women board her flight without being searched. Artyunov and the Sibir official have been arrested. Ustinov also said that both women arrived earlier the same day from Daghestan and were briefly detained by airport security as suspicious people. They were brought to Mikhail Artamonov, the Interior Ministry officer in charge of counterterrorism at the airport, but he released them without examining them. He has also been arrested.
The school hostage taking in Beslan on 1-3 September was the worst terrorist incident in modern Russian history, leaving at least 338 dead and more than 700 injured. In all this year, about 625 Russian citizens have been killed and more than 1,500 injured in terrorist incidents. Since the beginning of the counterterrorism operation in Chechnya in 1999, an estimated 9,000 federal troops have been killed there, "Komsomolskaya pravda" reported on 13 September.
If there is a single factor that determines the ineffectiveness of the Russian security services, it is corruption, military analyst Vladislav Shurygin wrote in "Zavtra," No. 37, this month. Shurygin argued that the main problem with Russia's secret services is that they too closely replicate Russia's corruption-riddled society. The FSB, he wrote, is clumsy, poorly managed, and servile, and pervasive corruption creates an ideal environment for terrorists. Moreover, Shurygin added, "it is not clear to Putin that the 'siloviki' are not the pillar of the state but rather are officials bogged down in intrigues and corruption who long ago forgot their duties."
The media have reported frequently on examples of how this corrupt society facilitated terrorist attacks, including traffic police who accepted bribes in exchange for not inspecting a convoy of vehicles, immigration-service officials taking money to issue travel documents to wanted criminals, corrupt military personnel who are prepared to sell modern weapons and explosives to criminals, or FSB officers who leak information about the work of their agency.
The Russian traffic police have long been identified as one of the most corrupt organizations in Russia, a problem that is particularly bad in the North Caucasus. Traffic-police veteran Batraz Takazov told Regnum on 15 September that a couple of years ago, residents in North Ossetia were so frustrated with systematic corruption by traffic police that they blocked the Transcaucasian Highway in protest. There are 20 checkpoints between Vladikavkaz and the Georgian border and motorists can be forced to pay bribes at each one. Those who pay particularly well can be assured of getting even a police escort that can take you all the way to the border without stopping.
"Komsomolskaya pravda" wrote on 13 September that terrorists are now using increasingly sophisticated weapons and explosives. A few years ago, they used mainly ordnance retrieved from unexploded shells and bombs, while now they use industrial explosives that are normally employed by the special services. The terrorists who attacked Beslan were equipped with the best sniper rifles and even the state-of-the-art Shmel flamethrower, the daily wrote. Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov told TV-Tsentr on 7 September that security officials must be held accountable for Beslan. "We must ask them why the terrorists in Beslan had the best Russian weapons," Luzhkov said.
"Vremya novostei" and "Novye izvestiya" reported on 21 September that police the previous day arrested an FSB border-service warrant officer and two other men who are accused of helping wanted criminals to flee the country. One of the men allegedly roamed Moscow looking for clients, while another, a Palestinian who owns a small tourism company, provided them with false passports and other documents. The FSB officer then allegedly helped the clients to pass through the airport-security checkpoint where he worked. Reportedly, the group took $1,500 for each border crossing. During the arrest, investigators seized 10 blank Russian passports, airplane tickets, and more than 60 stamps of various organizations, including those of FSB border-service checkpoints. Investigators are still trying to determine how many criminals' escapes were abetted by this group.
The situation clearly demonstrates more than simply that Russia's security services are incapable of fighting modern terrorism; it suggests that their ineptitude and corruption are actually stimulating terrorism. As a special-forces officer in the popular new television series "Anti-Killer" said when asked why the terrorists are winning: "Because we are in business, and they are at war."
The media here in America has been very careful to avoid connecting Islam with the hell we all face.
Basaev worked for the Soviet Military Intelligence--the GRU. He was an officer in the Soviet Military. I am not convinced that Basaev's religion is what motivates him. He was, and may still be an operative of the Russian government. It is hard to know. In any case, the Soviet GRU Basaev served is not a Muslim organization.
Basaev fought alongside Moscow-backed Abkhaz separatists (ie Russian-sponsored Muslims) in the early 1990s against Georgia, which is mostly Christian.
The Soviet way was to get the religioons fighting each other: divide and rule.
A lot of the religious antagonisms were stirred up by the government so people would fight each other instead of confronting the government.
Thank you for enlightening me and the education re this complex issue. You are correct: the civilians are the losers. I really appreciate when Freepers can be rational with each other, especially since you know more about this subject than me.
Those who ignore the Muslim threat will rue the day I suspect.
Suggest you read the just released thread regarding Muslim ranking religious leaders blessing the use of atomic weapons against Americans.
We are asleep!
A few years ago there were apartment buildings bombed in Russian cities, supposedly by Chechen terrorists. However, it may have been the Russian secret police who did these bombings. Some Russian secret police were arrested by local police as they were putting a bomb in a building. The secret police claimed they were practicing anti-terrorism techniques but this was a real bomb in a real apeartment building. Maybe they were doing this to get more money for their anti-terrorism activities. I don't know, but this did happen. The secret police were setting bombs and the Checens were blamed. Here is an informative article about terrorism in Russia. I find the www.rferl.org site very informative about terrorism in Russia.
http://www.rferl.org/reports/ucs/2004/10/16-051004.asp
SEEKING PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY FOR BESLAN... Some 2,000 Russian citizens have been killed in terrorist attacks in recent years, many by bungled rescue attempts during hostage dramas. A poll made by the Levada Center on 7-8 September in Moscow of 500 people found that 33 percent blamed the terrorists for the recent hostage crisis in a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, 34 percent blamed security services who cannot protect civilians, and 29 percent blamed the Russian leadership for continuing the war in nearby Chechnya. Inadvertently or not, the Russian government has sent a terrible message to the Russian people: "We can't protect you from terrorists. And when you do become the victim of a terrorist attack, you have a 20-30 percent chance or worse of being killed by one of our own forces during the rescue."
In concentrating on eliminating terrorists during attacks, authorities have failed to protect civilians. In 1995, when Chechen militants seized some 1,200 people in a hospital in Budennovsk, more than 100 were killed in the rescue attempt. During the Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002, 130 out of 700 hostages died of gas poisoning. In Beslan, at least 335 have been declared dead out of some 1,000, with 600 injured, and more than 100 still missing.
These grim figures are causing some independent media and public groups to demand more answers about how such horrors as the attack in Beslan can be prevented. It is Russia's most heart-wrenching tragedy in decades. Half of those killed were children, and the death toll could grow higher with those missing and presumed dead. The public has been forced to switch their attention from the fault of the terrorists for creating dangerous situations in the first place, to the strategies the government has adopted for coping with these terror-induced crises.
While special forces have learned from the string of hostage dramas and changed some tactics, in Beslan the losses were even more devastating, with hostages killed by terrorists, vigilantes, and federal agents in the chaos that evidently ensued after an explosion went off on the terrorists' side. Public anger hinges on the perception that people were kept in the dark; in a survey of 1,600 people on 10-13 September, 56 percent said they believed officials only told them part of the truth about the Beslan attack, levada.ru reported (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 23 September 2004).
At first, President Vladimir Putin refused calls for a public inquiry into Beslan. He brushed aside claims by some independent commentators that in fact federal troops had intended to storm the school where children and adults were being held, in the same fashion they stormed the theater during the play "Nord-Ost" in December 2002, where 130 were killed. While Putin called for "an organized and united civil society" to confront terrorism, this is the same civil society that Putin had so successfully sidelined over the past four years, along with reining in free media, "The Moscow Times" commented on 8 September. What Putin may mean by "civil society" is a citizenry that can produce noncorrupt policemen and raise people not to resort to terrorism. He is not interested in people who will dare to challenge how terrorist crises are handled or question the official corruption that contributes to terrorism.
Fearful relatives now worry about a storming more than anything during a hostage crisis, because they know they have terrible odds for seeing their loved ones emerge alive. The fear of the consequences of storming, and possibly the reluctance to continue negotiating with terrorists, prompted vigilantes to take up arms and try to deal with the attack themselves in Beslan. Their very presence on the scene and possible triggering of a worse tragedy is in part about the prevalence of weapons and blood feuds in the Caucasus, as some commentators have pointed out, but it is also about the failure of security services to do their jobs, and the kind of desperation that people reach when a government cannot protect them. They take matters into their own hands, with deadly consequences.
After some pressure abroad and at home, where figures such as former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev called for a parliamentary investigation into the events, Putin reversed himself and authorized an inquiry into Beslan, to be performed by the parliament, now made docile since the last elections put parties supporting the Kremlin in the majority. The government was interested in receiving a "complete, objective picture of the tragic events," Putin was quoted as saying on 9 September by Russian and foreign media. Yet with most of the parliamentarians on the commission from the ruling Unified Russia party, there is little chance of getting a critical review (see http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/9/3248599A-E8EA-42AA-ACFB-C05426D4FEB5.html).
Independent deputies, as well as the opposition Communist Party, have criticized the recently formed Beslan commission. Communist Duma Deputy Viktor Ilyukhin refused to join the panel, saying it would not work. He told gazeta.ru on 22 September, "All the commission will do is check who fulfilled or failed to fulfill their functions or the decrees from their superiors. But this is not what needs to be checked today. It is necessary to look into the roots of terrorism, to examine the socioeconomic situation in the Caucasus, the structure of the state." Ilyukhin wanted the commission to address issues of state corruption and the need to redistribute power. "Moreover, the true goal behind the move [to create the commission] is not to find the problems but to cover up what happened.... What needs to be discussed is that the president has usurped control over 16 ministries and government agencies and fails to run them properly," he said.
Past inquiries related to Chechnya, such as one by former Justice Minister Pavel Krashenninikov into human rights violations, stayed clear of controversy and hewed to the government line, and had no subpoena power in any event. There is also the ghost of the votes in the Duma on creating a parliamentary commission to investigate the series of apartment explosions in Moscow and other cities in 1999 that killed over 300 people. The motion failed twice, blocked by pro-Kremlin forces. Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, a staunch opponent of Putin who personally pushed for an investigation of the bombings, was assassinated in April 2003. In an interview published on 6 September 2002, Yushenkov told RFE/RL that while evidence was inadequate to draw conclusions, he believed that a sufficient amount of evidence existed to claim that the Federal Security Service (FSB) knew enough before the blasts to be able to prevent them, and that those who carried out the bombings had some connections to security forces.
The history of attempts by both nongovernmental and parliamentary forces to get real inquiries is a cautionary tale for any would-be independent investigators today, and most independent commentators do not expect much from the officially sanctioned commission made up largely of the Kremlin-controlled Federation Council.
...AS RIGHTS GROUPS CALL FOR TRANSPARENCY, PICKETERS CALL FOR RESIGNATIONS. Expressing concern about the mishandling of the Beslan hostage crisis, eight Russian and international human rights groups including Memorial Society and Human Rights Watch said in a statement on 8 September, "We are seriously concerned that the authorities have been covering up the extent of the crisis, including by providing misleading data on the number of hostages, and urge the authorities to ensure that the investigation into the full circumstances of the school hostage-taking incident encompasses an investigation into the way in which the authorities released information both to the public and the families of the hostages." They also called for the findings of the investigation to be made fully public.
Human rights groups themselves are unlikely to have the capacity to carry out their own investigation, and will face serious intimidation if they do. Journalists and civic groups that attempted to question the apartment bombings suffered intimidation, beatings, and confiscations of film and books. For now, civic organizations like the Moscow Helsinki Group are simply trying to record the aftermath of the terrorism, and raise the alarm about the consequences of both official ethnic profiling and the incitement of further ethnic tensions.
Out of a population of 30,000 with many extended families, every person has a personal loss, and the town is like "an open grave," the Moscow Helsinki Group says in a recent photo report on hro.org. The group warns that when the traditional 40-day period of grieving ends on 13 October, more unrest and violence could occur if people act on long-standing grievances between the Ingush and the Chechens and also face continued difficulties in finding the missing, identifying remains, and recovering from the trauma.
The tragedy is likely to force an accountability that goes beyond a parliamentary investigation of the immediate events, as both Russians and the international community are probing the deeper reasons for the ongoing Chechen conflict. Andrew Kuchins, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center said in an essay for "Nezavisimaya gazeta" on 7 September, "These terrible events have demonstrated, unfortunately, that Russia's security and intelligence services are incapable of handling this problem [of terrorism]."
Public accountability often takes the form of demands for the resignations of officials associated with a tragedy, although officialdom sometimes reacts by protecting those in uniform. President Putin himself set the tone after the Moscow theater hostage taking in 2002, praising special forces and characterizing the rescue as a success. With Beslan, he has personally taken a sharper tone, saying corruption in the police was a contributing factor to terrorism, presumably because some guards at checkpoints accept bribes, or because information is leaked and facilities where explosives are manufactured are not secure. Putin has been vague about what this means, but "The Moscow Times" put it explicitly on 10 September: "Corruption and the outright recruitment of police officers by militants in the North Caucasus have emerged as a major security threat, with crooked or ideologically driven officers being linked to almost every terrorist attack from the 1999 apartment bombings and Dubrovka [theater in Moscow] to the Beslan school tragedy." The people of the North Caucasus endure numerous checkpoints in their region, and find it difficult to understand how terrorists slip through when they are inconvenienced. As a Beslan resident told AP on 11 September, "How could they [the terrorists] bring these weapons here if they [police] check tomatoes 20 times?"
Putin will hardly seek the resignation of the highest officials, polit.ru commented; FSB head Nikolai Patrushev has been in his post for five years, since he replaced Putin himself, and newly appointed Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev does not appear to be singled out for the tragedy.
Public opinion does not appear to be lined up against these top figures, but in Beslan and elsewhere in North Ossetia, people have been very clear about calling for the dismissal of their local leaders. Faced with a crowd of thousands chanting "resign!", North Ossetian President Aleksandr Dzasokhov said he and his government would resign, and that an officer and a gentleman, he could not in good conscience remain in his position. Yet later, speaking on NTV, he was evasive about leaving, saying he had urgent tasks to solve and "must take into account the opinions of those people who did not take part in the demonstration," russiajournal.com reported on 9 September. Dzasokhov dismissed his government, but remained himself. He also claimed that he could not fire local security chiefs, who report to Moscow, jamestown.org reported on 14 September, thereby deflecting attention back to Moscow. "The heads of the Russian security forces must answer for their Beslan blunder," one of his loyal supporters, a famed Ossetian wrestler was quoted as saying by gazeta.ru on 9 September. On 11 September, Putin sacked North Ossetian Interior Minister Kazbek Dzantiev and local FSB chief Valerii Andreev, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting reported on 15 September.
The calls for heads to roll take place against a larger backdrop of varying confidence in security forces, however. Special forces have a certain amount of respect, in part because of the propagandistic portrayal of their training and accomplishments on television. A Levada Center poll on 7-8 September in Moscow found that 77 percent of respondents did not think the security forces could protect civilians and prevent attacks like Beslan, and 19 percent thought they could. This attitude could vary outside the capital. The St. Petersburg-based Independent Analytical Center said only 12 percent of respondents to a survey believe that authorities are not doing enough to fight terrorism, Chechen war researcher Emma Gilligan wrote in the "Chicago Tribune" on 5 September. In this poll, 54 percent of respondents said the police were corrupt and 23 percent said they did not know how to do their job properly. According to another survey by the Levada Center in Moscow, 52 percent of those surveyed were satisfied with the actions of the Interior Ministry and the FSB and 59 percent were happy with Putin, polit.ru reported on 13 September, although they contrasted with a similar poll taken after the Moscow theater tragedy, when 82 percent of those polled supported the security forces. Overall, Levada found that Putin's monthly approval rating fell to 66 percent, the lowest in the past four years, newsru.com reported on 22 September (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 23 September 2004).
In a bizarre twist, the terrorists themselves are calling for a public investigation into the very events they themselves instigated. Radical Chechen commander Shamil Basaev, who claimed responsibility for Beslan, called on the UN and European Union to conduct a public investigation of the attack, claiming that criticism of the terrorists has been "one-sided." Yet Basaev admitted that he and his followers had no intention of releasing the hostages unless the Kremlin withdrew troops from Chechnya, and Putin resigned as president, and he also indicated that attacks would continue. No one disputes that the terrorists themselves bear full blame for the deaths and injuries of children and adults. What's at issue in fueling public mistrust appear to be that police and security forces are intertwined with terrorists.
"The Russian government has been confronted with the necessity of internationalizing the increasingly tangled problem of Chechnya," Kuchins of the Carnegie Moscow Center wrote in "Nezavisimaya gazeta" on 7 September. Certainly, the Chechen problem has grown from an isolated one in the North Caucasus to a Russia-wide crisis. About 500,000 Chechen refugees have left Chechnya and settled elsewhere in the Russian Federation or in Europe, Gilligan reported the "Chicago Tribune." The UN has said that 20,000 still remain in Ingushetia and many thousands are still displaced and without permanent homes in Chechnya itself.
While Russia has been keen to internationalize the problem in terms of linking Chechen rebels to Al-Qaeda, it has been adamant about not internationalizing Chechnya in other directions, involving increased access to the region by international humanitarian organizations and multilateral institutions such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the United Nations. In June, months before the three latest terrorist attacks in Russia, a group of nongovernmental human rights activists called in vain on the Council of Europe to try to use its good offices to arrange peace talks to end the conflict in Chechnya, saying that the Chechen resistance was radicalizing. They said the global terrorist network exploited the Chechen conflict, but that Russian armed forces also benefited politically and financial from the Caucasian wars. "The many years of war in Chechnya, which has virtually taken on the form of genocide, the impunity of war crimes, the monstrous acts of various virtually privatized special services, massive kidnappings, murders, torture, and mistreatment has naturally led to the appearance of a rapid ultraradical tendency in the [Chechen] fighters," they said.
Since the last three attacks culminating in Beslan, however, the EU's request to Russia to provide some kind of accounting was met with a vehement response from Russian leaders, as has any kind of private or public call to internationalize the human rights and humanitarian aspects of the conflicts in the North Caucasus, as well as the security and military aspects.
Thanx.
I want to highlight what many Russians think according to the article above: "No one disputes that the terrorists themselves bear full blame for the deaths and injuries of children and adults. What's at issue in fueling public mistrust appear to be that police and security forces are intertwined with terrorists."
Some posters on this forum think that I made this idea up and that I am against Russians. This quote shows that I am showing you what RUSSIANS BESIDES PUTIN SAY, not what I made up.
The posters who say I am against Russians only want you to read what Putin says.
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