Brutal tactics belie Chechen cause (you couldn’t pick a worse enemy than Chechens)

Irish Independent ^ | 10/28/02 | Alan Philps

[dead]

OF all the enemies you could pick in the world, the Chechens would probably be your last choice. There is something about this people's toughness which demands respect - even fear.

Compared with the Chechens, the Palestinians are pussycats. The Chechens have the rare ability to plan and execute daring operations, and seem impermeable to attempts by the Russians to penetrate their organisation.

Between 1994 and 1998, I visited Chechnya several times to report on the first Chechen war and its bloody aftermath. I became convinced that they were a people not to be trifled with.

Ten years ago, there was little deeply Islamic about them. The high Caucasus mountains were converted to Islam only in the 16th century, and their law was that of the tribe and the clan, not of the Koran and the Sunna. No woman went veiled.

The Chechens were great drinkers and there was little in Chechen society with which the Wahhabi imams of Saudi Arabia would approve. If the Chechen male worried about drinking vodka it was only because he feared it would make him impotent. They attributed to the fiery liquid the drastic decline in the Russian birth rate - a luxury the Chechens cannot afford because their numbers have been brutally diminished by the Russians every two generations.

Under Stalin, the whole Chechen population was deported to Siberia and the steppes of Central Asia, where hundreds of thousands died.

The remnants of this ethnic cleansing were allowed back in the 1950s, only to face the wrath of the Russian army in the 1990s when they tried to declare independence. For the Chechens, the right to their own state goes without saying, but the Kremlin refuses to let them secede from the Russian Federation. Chechnya is a great oil-producing region, and Moscow wants control of its pipelines.

When the press descended on the republic's capital Grozny, the Chechens were hoping that the world would support them as the valiant underdog fighting the Russian bear. Times had moved on, though. The world was behind Boris Yeltsin, and the Russians had done a good job of presenting the Chechens as bandits and racketeers.

Everything about the Chechens seemed designed to send shivers down the spine. Their leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a retired Soviet air force general, dressed to shock. His pencil moustache marked him out as a villain; his long leather coat seemed to be a cast-off from the SS. The Chechen flag was a wolf baying at the moon. These unwholesome images outweighed the terrible crimes committed by the Russians in flattening Grozny - an industrial city - so that it looked like Dresden in 1945.

The Chechens' military campaign was run on a guerrilla basis. Fighters would go into battle for weeks at a time, shivering in trenches without proper coats or gloves, and then return to their villages to tend their frostbite and rest.

One snowy winter's day, a white-clad figure leaned into my car and snarled: "You are all spies. You will be shot. Get out of the car now."

I was speechless until I saw the smile on the face of the fighter. He turned out to be the owner of the last restaurant in Grozny - now shut down so that he could battle the Russians.

It was a joke, but it had a brutal edge of truth to it. As the Chechens lost any hope of help from the West, their society retreated to the most brutal clan rule.

Westerners became fair game for kidnapping. If their employers did not pay a fat ransom, the abductors would cut off their fingers before a video camera to show they meant business - and then their heads.

The Chechens turned to the Islamic fundamentalists and welcomed veterans of the Afghan struggle. Money from Gulf states spread a form of Wahhabi fundamentalism which the country had never seen before.

This has led to the scenes in the Moscow theatre - women in chadors with explosives strapped to their waists, like extras from a bin Laden extravaganza. I recognise the old urge to scare, but this time it has gone into overdrive.

However, I must lay some of the blame on the West for abandoning the Chechens to the mercy of the Russians.

They have sought help in the only place they could find it. It was a poisoned source, and the Chechens will pay the price for years to come. ( Daily Telegraph, London)

[Tuor]

And how 'bout that "sad plight" of them Kosovar Albanians? A real tragedy, huh?

You mean the Kosovar Serbs? It is *their* land, after all. Or perhaps you mean the result on Serbs and Albanians alike of the US bombing of the region, which probably killed more people than the Serb-Albanian tit-for-tat did?

Oh yeah, we were on the side of the Muslims on that one. But America right or wrong, eh?

Tuor

[monday]

"Read some history on the subject, then come back to me when you get a clue.

I am not talking historically. Right now the Russians would not even be there if the Chechens were not such murderous bandits and kidnappers. It is you who needs the clue.

[Ciexyz]

Chechnya became an outlaw Republic where there was no law and order. (Post #31)

That's the bottom line in understanding this dispute.

[chudogg]

You do know that the Chechen's have tortured and killed plenty of Americans. I want bother posting the link of a video of an American having his fingers cut off and then becoming beheaded.