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What underlies the bestial carnage of the Caucasus?

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  • What underlies the bestial carnage of the Caucasus?

    What underlies the bestial carnage of the Caucasus?

    Mmegi, Botswana
    Sept 10 2004

    QUESTION TIME
    PATRICK VAN RENSBURG

    "DON'T these people have children, too", Beslan residents asked each
    other last week when Chechen rebels took a thousand of them hostage,
    mostly Ossetians, and half of them children, resulting in the death
    of several hundreds, and injury to many more.


    What is it all about?

    Towards the end of the 1914-1918 World War, when Lenin's Bolsheviks
    seized control from the Tsars of the Russian Empire that covered most
    of Central and Eastern Europe and North Asia, it became the Soviet
    Union based on semi-autonomous Republics that the colonies were
    turned into.

    Historically, the Caucasus, which separates the Caspian Sea and the
    Black Sea, was a battleground of Chechens, Armenians, Georgians,
    Azeris, Ingushis and Ossetians, in which the Tsars waged brutal wars.


    Religious differences, Christian versus Muslim, often masked material
    reasons for conflicts like access to land and other natural
    resources. Sometimes, the ethnic differences were a more direct spark
    of conflict.

    The Russians, it seems, were especially contemptuous of the "swarthy"
    Chechens, particularly those to the south of Chechnya, who were
    Muslim. The Third Imam of Chechnya and Dagesta on the Caspian Sea,
    Imam Shamil, had introduced Sharia Law and strengthened the hold of
    Islam over his people in the mid 1800s.

    Even after Imperial Russia conquered Chechnya, its brutality
    continued, with burning of villages, hounding of Muslim clerics and
    forced emigration to the Ottoman Empire, to the south, of many
    defeated opponents.

    A journalist of Southern African origins, Vanora Bennett, in her book
    'The Return of War to Chechnya', written in the early 1990s, claims
    that "what the Russians remembered with great bitterness" over the
    years of their imperial occupation of Chechnya, were "dramatic
    mountain kidnappings" by Chechen guerillas "of highly placed Russian
    officers and their relentless bargaining over the price of the
    release of their hostages".

    Even under Soviet rule, especially under Stalin, the Georgian, the
    Chechens reportedly had bitter experiences. In her book, Vanora
    Bennett records that Stalin had ordered that on 23 February 1944,
    Chechens and Ingushis should collect on their village squares to
    celebrate Red Army Day. Throughout their territories, she writes,
    600,000 were rounded up by soldiers and packed off in cattle trucks
    into exile in the Soviet interior in Central Asia.

    The reason, reportedly, was that Stalin accused them of having
    collaborated with Nazi Germany. Apparently, a decade after Stalin's
    death, many deported Ingushis and Chechnyans "crept home".

    In 1991, the Soviet Union began to collapse. As a semi-autonomous
    Soviet Republic, Chechnya declared its independence.

    It was a country divided between its north and south, between
    Christians and Muslims. In 1993, its leader, Dudayev, is reported to
    have dissolved the Chechen Parliament, and to have ordered the
    execution of many opponents. By the end of 1993, opposition to
    Dudayev had developed into a small-scale civil war, as a result of
    which Northern Chechens called for Russian support.

    Russian military intervention was questionable in international law,
    critics argue, even if Chechnya was part of the CIS - Commonwealth of
    Independent States. It would have been wiser for Russia to have
    internationalised intervention and set aside historical prejudice and
    national self-interest.

    Chechens claim that 300,000 Russian soldiers presently "inflict a
    regime of terror" in Chechnya, whose population has been reduced from
    two million, 10 years ago, to 800,000 now. Thirty five thousand
    children have been killed, they claim, and another 42,000 injured.

    For all that, hostage taking, suicide bombings, planting bombs in
    passenger aircraft and calculated, direct harm to children are
    criminal acts, that must become punishable by life imprisonment,
    anywhere, under international law.

    The Russians are attracting some criticism for seeking to identify
    Chechen nationalism with international terrorism. Separatist Chechens
    see this, and Russian refusal to promote negotiations, as attempts to
    undermine the legitimacy of their claims to national independence.
    They accuse President Putin of personal antagonism towards legitimate
    Chechen independence aspirations.

    Are Chechnyan rebels, who now specialise in the evils of
    hostage-taking, knowingly following ancestors who kidnapped Tsarist
    generals in the Caucasian mountains 150 years ago, or is it but a
    curious coincidence?

    The truth is that today's enemies are numb to the horrors of the most
    extreme brutalities against each other, or between their respective
    allies. The Beslan hostage taking shows that Chechen rebels no longer
    kill only purebred Russians.

    What they seek is the widest publicity, hoping that it will draw
    attention to the oppression they suffer. The media are not without
    blame for turning their reading and viewing public into spectators of
    massive televised death. Maybe, through repetition viewers are being
    made immune to its horrors.

    I write this week's column in Galway, less than 100 km from Northern
    Ireland, which has also been the scene of great violence over a far
    longer time, but that for some time, now has experienced calm. The
    violence here wasn't between people of different faiths, but between
    Catholicism and Protestantism, which - as in the former Soviet Union
    - has masked material differences of a political and economic nature
    between the leaderships, here, of two conflicting Christian factions.


    President Putin has inherited the outcomes of mistakes of his
    predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in respect of Chechnya. Russia has little
    materially to gain from the war-torn region.

    Putin would gain immensely in international stature if he were to
    invite the UN to involve itself in making and keeping peace in the
    Caucasus.
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