A Step At A Time

An article by Paul Goble, from Wednesday's Postimees newspaper, Tallinn, Estonia. (via MAK)


NATO Can Defend Baltics But the Baltics Could Defeat Themselves

Paul A. Goble


Tartu, September 28 -- NATO could successfully repel any Russian military attack on the Baltic countries at any time during the next decade – unless Russian covert actions were able to destabilize the three Baltic societies and then Russian psychological operations in Western Europe were able to divide the Western alliance, according to a study conducted by a group of senior American defense analysts.

Their conclusions are contained in a paper entitled „Assuring Access in Key Strategic Regions” that was prepared for the U.S. Army by RAND, a leading American think tank that for more than 50 years has prepared studies for the American government on a wide variety of topics. This 187-page monography was posted in its entirety on the Internet at this link. It should become „must reading” for everyone concerned about the security of the Baltic countries.

In the study’s own words, its nine authors „developed scenarios
and conducted political-military games to determine what strategies, tactics and capabilities potential adversaries might use to complicate U.S. access to key areas and how effective the U.S. counters to these tactics are.” As is usually the case with such planning exercises and as anyone reading their conclusions must remember, they organized this game not because they or those who ordered the study expect particular conflicts but rather they are interested in doing what is necessary to preclude them.

This particular RAND study includes discussions of the results of games conducted about possible conflicts in Southwest Asia, the Pacific Theater, the European Theater, and Latvin America and the Caribbean. The European theater game concerned a Russian decision to invade Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in order to detach these three Baltic countries from NATO and the European Union and to project Russian power westward.

The scenario for European theater game, according to the RAND analysts, was „a deteriorating U.S.-Russian relationship,” one in which Russia felt increasingly vulnerable to encirclement and the U.S. increasingly angered by „continued Russian close ties with Iran.” Indeed, for the purposes of this game, Washington had reached the conclusion that Russia’s support for Iran’s nuclear program meant that Moscow was no longer an ally in the war against terrorism but rather an „enabler” of the terrorists and the governments supporting them. Because of these changes, ever fewer Russians were willing to view Baltic membership in NATO as irreversible, and ever more officials in NATO countries reached the conclusion that any Russian assertivenss must be countered quickly and effectively.

The „catalyst” for the crisis between Russia and the West over the Baltic countries that formed the basis of this strategic planning game was, in the words of the RAND document, „the failure of Estonia and Latvia to fully integrate their ethnic Russian populations.” That „failure,” the document says, led to increasing activism by ethnic Russians in both countries, and that activism in turn opened the way for „Russian intelligence services to exploit existing protests and unrest by providing financing and organizational expertise” to these groups. According to authors of this scenario, this dramatically expanded ethnic Russian unrest then prompted the governments there to „ a violent crackdown,” something that gave Moscow „an opportunity to pose as a protector of human rights,” a stance with the
potential to divide the NATO alliance.

In this game, Russia then threatened the Baltic countries, but NATO reacted by demanding that Moscow stop its „provocative” actions and by taking steps to defend the Baltic countries in the event of a Russian move. „Fearing that the loss of both international and domestic face will lead to a collapse of the government, the Russian leadership then ordered an invasion of the Baltic states.” Because of its continuing problems with organization and supply, the Russian Army commander tells its political masters that the military needs at least 30 days to prepare.

That delay made all the difference, the authors suggest, because it gave NATO the time the alliance needed to respond. And the study states that on the field of battle that would result from this, NATO could and would defeat or repulse any Russian military moves against the Baltic countries. That conclusion, the study says, is true now and will be true for at least the next decade.

For many in the Baltic countries, such a conclusion would seem to be the answer to their dreams, a guarantee against Russian theats for some time to come. But – and this is the most important aspect of this RAND study -- this silver cloud has a very dark lining. The study’s authors note that precisely because of „the chronic and difficult-to-reverse weaknesses of the Russian military” on the battlefield itself, Moscow will have to depend on covert intelligence activities and psychological operations as its „most effective” weapons to divide the Western alliance and to give Moscow a freer hand in dealing with the Baltic states.

What are these type of activities likely to involve? One part of the covert action has already been mentioned: Russian security services promoting ever more extreme activism by ethnic Russians in Estonia and Latvia and causing precisely the kind of crackdown by the two governments that the Russian authorities could invoke as justification for their demands. But another part of such covert action could, according to the authors of this scenario, include special operations to impede NATO operations both in the Baltic countries and in NATO countries in which the forces to be used against a Russian thrust into the Baltics would have to operate.

Moscow, according to the game’s scenario, would then launch its psychological operations -- including massive propaganda campaigns and increased diplomatic activity -- against the the major NATO countries in Europe in order to try to cause at least some of them to refuse to support an alliance effort in this area.

Despite their confidence that NATO could win on the Baltic battlefield if things ever reached such a pass, the RAND authors say that such Russian intelligence operations and psychological warfare could divide NATO countries on the question of how or even whether to respond and thus create a situation in which Moscow could gain the upper hand.

That conclusion is not something many in the Baltic countries will want to hear, in the first instance because it highlights not how well they are protected regardless of what they do but how what they themselves do will determine how well they are protected.

Indeed, the security of all three Baltic countries in the minds of the authors of this RAND study appears more likely to depend on how well the Baltic countries can integrate all those living on their territory and on how well Baltic governments and their diplomats can explain these efforts to their NATO partners -- rather than on their own membership in the Western alliance alone.

This RAND study thus provides a useful correction both to the euphoria many in the Baltic countries felt upon gaining NATO membership and to the pessimism many of the same people feel in the face of the recent changes in Moscow. And as such, this RAND document merits the widest possible discussion in all three Baltic countries, a treatment that few such papers ever receive or deserve.

From Lenta.ru, a long article which suggests that the focus of the investigation into the recent terrorist actions in Russia may be shifting away from Basayev. My quick translation:

Karachai Trace in Moscow Terrorist Acts


New information has appeared in the investigation into the bombings of the two aircraft and the one outside the “Rizhskaya” metro. A highly placed official has produced a version which states that these acts of sabotage were organized by members of the Karachai jamaat – a group calling itself “Muslim Association No. 3”. According to the investigation, the group is led by Achemez Gochiyayev – a terrorist who is directly connected with the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999. Thus, suspicion is being moved from Chechen terrorist No. 1 Shamil Basayev to bombers from Karachai. What lies behind this?

Moscow’s deputy public prosecutor Vladimir Yudin, appearing on television on 26 September 2004, declared that the terrorist Roza Nagayeva, who blew herself up outside the Rizhskaya metro station on 31 August 2004, had an accomplice – a resident of Karachai-Cherkesia named Nikolai Kitkeyev. According to the information presented by Yudin, Kitkeyev has two previous convictions: since 2001 he has been under investigation by the MVD of the Republic of Karachai-Cherkesia and Stavropol Region for his part in illegal armed formations, an attempt on the life of a militiaman, and possession of firearms.

The identity of the deceased Kitkeyev was discovered during the investigation. The body of one of the men who died outside the metro station, Nikolai Samygin, was not claimed by anyone. Having checked Samygin’s identity, the investigators established that Samygin and Kiteyev were the same person.

In the opinion of the investigators, Kitkeyev’s fate was to some extent accidental. He was a controller, whose function was to see that the terrorist act was carried out. But he became one of the victims of Nagayeva’s bomb.

The most interesting thing about this information is another factor: according to Yudin, Kitkeyev is a native of Karachai. And SMI reports have already given a version implicating Kitkeyev with the Karachai jamaat, the terrorist group calling itself “Muslim Association No. 3”. The head of the Association is Achemez Gochiyayev, According to the investigators, it is Gochiyayev who is behind a whole series of terrorist actions, including the apartment bombings on Kashirskoye Shosse and Ulitsa Guryanova in September 1999, the Moscow metro bombing of 6 February 2004, the bombing of two aircraft in August 2004, the bombings at the Kashirskoye Shosse bus stop and the terrorist act outside the “Rizhskaya” metro station.

The Karachai jamaat, which according to experts mainly specializes in sabotage and bombing, owes its origins the Wahhabite underground in Karachai-Cherkesia. The founder and leader of the jamaat is considered to be Ramazan Borlakov, the subject of a federal investigation. According to intelligence information, he is still in Chechnya. As the imam of one of the local mosques, in the mid-1990s Borlakov visited a number of Arab countries, where he found sponsors for the opening of a madras in the village of Uchkeken.

The teachers in this educational establishment were Arabs who preached to the local Muslim youth, instructing them in the correct interpretation of Islam, and also in correct observation of prayer and ritual. Parallel with the interpretation of Islam, Borlakov preached that Muslims in Russia were being oppressed, that it was necessary to live by Sharia law, not worldly law, that the Muslim spiritual authorities in Russia were a rotten and corrupt structure. Gradually this theoretical teaching began to move towards practical instruction.

With Borlakov’s help, new mosques began to be built in Karachai-Cherkesia, and Wahhabite ideology began to spread through the agency of the imams. The local youth, which had undergone ideological training, was sent for further training as fighters to training camps near Urus-Martan and Serzhen-Yurt. In the view of the FSB, it was from these fighters that the so-called ‘Karachai Battalion” was formed, which in August-September 1999 took part in military actions in the Tsumadin, Botlikh and Novolak regions of Dagestan, together with Basayev’s fighters. Moreover, Borlakov is considered to be Achemez Gochiyavev’s teacher and mentor.

Gochiyayev was first mentioned in the course of the investigation of the explosions in Moscow in 1999. According to information in the hands of the special services, in early 1999 the Jordanian Khattab allocated 2 million dollars to the Karachai jamaat, for the execution of terrorist acts in Russia. At the same time the Karachai jamaat saw the “lighting-up” of Gochiyayev’s associates Adam Dekkushev and Yusuf Krymshamkhalov. In Chechnya, a few months after the financial injection from Khattab, Dekkushev and Kryshamkhalov acquired several tons of explosive, packed in sugar sacks. Gochiyayev and his assistant Denis Saytakov took 6 tons of this explosive to Moscow. As a result of the two Moscow terrorist acts, 218 people were killed.

Dekkushev and Krymshamkhalov were not found at once. The first to be investigated were Muratbi Bayramukov, Aslan and Murat Bastanov, Muratbi Tuganbayev and Taykan Franzusov – this was in July 2001. The investigation was unable to prove their complicity in the apartment bombings. Charges were filed under other articles: participation in illegal armed formations, planning of terrorist acts, manufacture of explosives and carrying of firearms. They were all given lengthy prison sentences.

In Georgia in July 2002, in the village of Daba-Ureki, Adam Dekkushev was arrested by the local special services. Later he was transferred to the Russian law-enforcement agencies. In Georgia in December 2002 , in the Lagodekh region, Yusuf Krymshamkhalov was arrested. He was also transferred to Russia. .All the episodes of the terrorist activity of these two men have been proven. In January 2004 Adam Dekkushev amd Yusuf Krymshamkhalov were sentenced by Moscow City Court (Mosgorsud) to life imprisonment. As of this time, Achemez Gochiyayev has still not been caught and according to some sources is said to be hiding in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge region.

It should be noted, however, that Gochiyayev categorically denies his participation in the terrorist acts. In 2003 the Russian SMI pulished a letter from him (written in the spring of 2002), in which he asserts that he had nothing to do with the Moscow blasts, and that everything that had happened was a provocation of the FSB. The value of this statement is doubtful, especially since according to the most recent reports of the law enforcement agencies, Gochiyayev was indirectly involved in the seizure of the hostages at Beslan. The Russian special services say that the leaders and coordinators of the Beslan terrorist act were located outside the Russian Federation, and that one of them could very well be Gochiyayev.



The Origins of the Karachai Trace

What lies behind the Karachai version of the investigation? As usual, there are more questions than answers. Strictly speaking, investigative measures are conducted by the executive-investigative group of the public prosecutor’s office of the city of Moscow. Routine executive measures are conducted by officials of the FSB. It is for this reason, according to the SMI reports, that the FSB officials are not happy with the fact that the information about the Karachai trace came from the public prosecutor’s mouth – by openly endorsing the Karachai version, the public prosecutor’s office frightened off the clients of the terrorist act and confused the FSB’s executive plans in this regard.

If this is so, it means that the investigation of the series of terrorist acts in Moscow is suffering from lack of co-ordination. While the FSB is striving to keep the Karachai trace version a secret, a prominent figure in the public prosecutor’s hierarchy is trumpeting this version to the whole of Russia. Why did Yudin need to do this? To demonstrate that he was in the know, and reassure public opinion with information that the investigation was proceeding at full tilt and had already achieved definite results? To draw the attention of Russians to a new problem – that the “blame” for spreading terrorism lay not with Chechnya, but also with Karachai-Cherkesia?

In addition, the official authorities have until now confidently named Shamil Basayev as the organizer of the recent terrorist acts. The representative of the executive staff in control of the counter-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus, Ilya Shabalkin, stated after the terrorist acts that the joint participation of Maskhadov and Basayev in the preparation of the explosions, the destruction of the aircraft and the attack on Beslan as a foregone conclusion simply because it was to both their advantage to carry out terrorist acts in Russia. Now it turns out that the authorities have a new version.

Why Karachayans, in particular? In whose interest is it to trumpet the Karachai version in the case of the recent terrorist acts? Until now, as a region, Karachai-Cherkesia has been perceived by the public consciousness as relatively stable compared to Chechnya. It turns out that events there are developing according to the well-known saying about still waters.

Yes, Basayev took responsibility for the terrorist acts. Nothing unusual there, really – Basayev, who long ago turned into a bogeyman, is ready to ascribe to himself practically every new terrorist act in Russia. In the last analysis, notoriety in the terrorist business can bring palpable dividends. But whether Basayev is really connected to the explosions at the metro station and in the air above Tula and Rostov, can only be ascertained if the leader of the fighters himself is seized, together with his archive. Meanwhile, Basayev has been sought since the days of the First Chechen War, and can still not be caught, even though Chechnya is literally stuffed with units and sub-units of the special forces.

Is Basayev connected to the Karachayans? To a certain extent, yes. Even before the Moscow explosions his name was sometimes mentioned together with that of Achemez Gochiyayev, and the two elite terrorists probably entered into communication with each other at some point or other. But it is impossible to prove or disprove a connection between the two fighters – the information that Basayev is Gochiyayev’s co-ordinator is now and then heard from the mouths of officials, but there is so far to confirmation of this. While reports from the other side of the case are riddled with contradictions.

In general, the involvement of Karachayans in various terrorist acts has manifested itself several times. In addition to the Moscow bombings of 1999, information in the hands of the special services shows that the Karachai Wahhabite communes were connected to the bombings in Karachai-Cherkesia itself in March 2001 and on the railway in the Kaminvod region in December 2003. But the roots of this bombing activity are in the Wahhabite underground that was created on the republic’s territory in the 1990s.

In 2001 the Procurator General of the Russian Federation Vladimir Ustinov, said in Cherkessk that his department had information about people who were making practical preparations for a revolt in Karachai-Cherkesia and Kabardino-Balkaria. At that time, the authorities in both republics both refuted this information. None the less, after a series of arrests, in Pyatigorsk in 2002 a trial took place ay which arrested conspirators were given varying terms of imprisonment.

It is worth noting that in Nalchik and Cherkessk officials continue to deny the presence of a Wahhabite underground in the republics. Meanwhile, according to the local inhabitants, the Wahhabites feel they have nothing to fear in Karachai-Cherkesia, while in Moscow no one even wants to give this any attention.
Now, with the emergence of the Karachai trace in a series of large-scale terrorist acts, there arises a conclusion that is not very pleasant for the authorities: it turns out that there is, working in Russia, a powerful underground organization the aim of which is to split the country, with terrorism as its principal method. It turns out that Chechen terrorists receive their support not from “Al Qaeda” or the world international of radical Islamists, but from a ramified underground network within Russia. And during recent last years this network has not been destroyed or weakened, and consequently the problem of terrorism has not only not been resolved, but has actually increased. If this is true, then it is not Chechnya and Ingushetia taken separately that must be considered the hotspot in the North Caucasus, but the entire region as a whole, and then it is appropriate to ask the authorities a question: how could such a thing have happened?

There is an old saying: “Victory has many fathers, but defeat is always an orphan.” For as long as victory over terrorism and victory over the fighters in Chechnya remain a distant prospect, the special services cannot expect to avoid numerous failures and blunders. It is possible that Yudin’s intervention was dictated by an urge to remove responsibility from himself by switching the attention of public opinion to something new. It cannot be excluded that the public prosecutor’s office really does have serious “gains” to make from Karachayan terrorists, and that the fact that it was the public prosecutor’s office, and not the FSB, that revealed the Karachai trace, is capable of lifting its “rating” with Russia’s law enforcement agencies. In that case the responsibility for the non-averted terrorist acts can be shifted on to colleagues and competitors, with the inference that Karachayans being involved in terrorist acts is the result of poor work by the FSB in the republic, as the law enforcement agencies were not able to expose the underground terrorist network in time.

And, lastly, there is one more curious detail – according to information received by the “Kommersant” newspaper, the suicide bomber who carried out the terrorist act in the Moscow metro in February 2004 was a male Karachayan named Izhayev. However, so far the terrorist’s name has never once been mentioned once anywhere, and neither has the nationality of the terrorist. In addition, the officially trumpeted version said that the explosive device was detonated by a woman. Neither the FSB nor the public prosecutor’s office have made any statements about the disclosure of the terrorist act at “Avtozavodskaya”. So where did the suicide bomber’s name come from, and how is known that he was a Karachayan?

So far there are no answers to these questions. But, to sum up the above, it is possible to make a couple of suppositions. One: the authorities were playing some new game in which a special place had been allotted to Karachai-Cherkesia. Here an impression is created that the republic, together with Chechnya, has been “ear-marked” as being responsible for terrorism. And two: so far the investigation has been unable to establish reliably what lies behind the terrorist acts, and the Karachai trace is one of the variants that are being thrown into the press for study by public opinion.

Sergei Karamayev

Today is the tenth anniversary of the sinking of the ferry "Estonia", in which 852 people lost their lives.

On September 9, 2004 Caucasus analyst Pavel K. Baev wrote:

Putin's counter-terrorist spin on the Beslan tragedy involves three specific points that, taken together, should explain away the lack of leadership and the inefficiency of the security services in handling the hostage situation.

First, it is considered essential to prove the international connections of the band of hostage takers. The news about ten dead Arabs broke on Friday afternoon, when the firefight was still underway and it was impossible to identify the bodies. Putin quickly recycled this factoid to the foreign journalists despite the contrary evidence given by the former hostages, GazetaRu reported on 7 September.

Second, every effort is being made to establish that the assault was neither ordered nor planned; the chaotic bloodshed broadcast live to the whole world provides strong evidence of that failure. However, the demonstrated lack of willingness to enter into any meaningful negotiations with the terrorists means that a forceful assault was the only available option, the question was just about the timing, Moskovsky komsomolets reported on 6 September.

Third, with every possible stretch of argument, the Beslan tragedy should be separated from the war in Chechnya, which was not mentioned once in Putin's address, according to Izvestiya on 6 September. Since it is impossible to hide the fiasco of the Kremlin's massive propaganda effort trumpeting "normalization" in Chechnya, the theme has to be closed. Any attempt at offering a political way out of the deadlocked war will now be rejected with righteous rage.

Now Dr Baev has pointed to Moscow's latest tactics in this strategy of "factoids and forgetting":

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was certainly in his element at the UN General Assembly last week, packing a full schedule of meetings and delivering a hard-hitting speech. Admittedly, he had little to say about the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur, the deepening gap between rich and poor nations, or about the uphill struggle against the AIDS pandemic. His unwavering focus was on the war against terrorism, where he was not so much recruiting new allies as seeking to establish that Russia, as a "frontline" state deserves more sympathy for its suffering and more support in its struggle than it actually receives because of the "double standards" adopted by Western governments and media (GazetaRu, September 24). Lavrov may be one of the few elite professionals in President Vladimir Putin's government, but his skill cannot eliminate or even hide the inconsistencies and logical contradictions in Moscow's anti-terrorist discourse.

Accepting war as a fact of political life after years of denial, President Putin is inevitably falling into many of the same traps that President George W. Bush discovered after his declaration of the same war. If terrorism is just an instrument (as Putin established in his first post-Beslan statement), then who is the enemy? Lavrov does not feel obliged to repeat Putin's hints about "those who want to tear from us a juicy piece of pie" and others who help these pie-lovers because they want to remove the threat represented by Russia as "one of the world's major nuclear powers." The anti-Western smack of these hints is unmistakable, as is the anti-Islamic context of the accusations against sponsors of terrorism, based on the eagerly spinned rumors about ten "Arabs" being among the terrorists killed in Beslan.

At the same time, the whole Russian political establishment has apparently forgotten the word "Chechnya" and insists vehemently that every attempt to establish a connection between terrorism and the deadlocked brutal war in that not-to-be-named place is nothing but "provocation" (Novaya gazeta, September 16). That leaves Lavrov with empty statements about "our whole civilization" that should stand united against terrorism and without any clue about how this war against a handful of "barbarians" could possibly be won.


The whole article can be read here.

-- So long as love is "blind", that is, so long as it does not see a whole being, it is not truly under the sway of the primary word of relation. Hate is by nature blind. Only a part of a being can be hated. He who sees a whole being and is compelled to reject it is no longer in the kingdom of hate, but is in that of human restriction of the power to say Thou. He finds himself unable to say the primary word to the other human being confronting him. This word consistently involves an affirmation of the being addressed. He is therefore compelled to reject either the other or himself. At this barrier the entering on a relation recognises its relativity, and only simultaneously with this will the barrier be raised.

Yet the man who straightforwardly hates is nearer to relation than the man without hate and love.

Martin Buber

Something that really struck me when reading Johann Hari's interview with Christopher Hitchens:

So that interest in the neocons re-emerged after September 11th. They were saying - we can't carry on with the approach to the Middle East we have had for the past fifty years. We cannot go on with this proxy rule racket, where we back tyranny in the region for the sake of stability. So we have to take the risk of uncorking it and hoping the more progressive side wins." He has replaced a belief in Marxist revolution with a belief in spreading the American revolution. Thomas Jefferson has displaced Karl Marx.

Having read LGF since March 2004 (I'm taking a break right now), I can confidently say - yes. But what does this mean? Marx = Jefferson? I think we should be told.

Among others, VOA News and AFP have reports on a recent statement by Cyprus's Justice Minister Doros Theodorou. AFP has him claiming that

"There are Chechens and other terrorist groups over there (north) being trained" ...

"But we are mainly talking about Chechens who are trained to hit predominantly Russian targets," he said.

Russian propaganda really is working.

It seems that nowadays it's de rigueur for government figures in Western countries who want to sharpen up their anti-terrorist credentials to claim that "Chechens" are responsible for terrorism there. And who or what might the non-Russian targets of the "Chechen terrorists" be?

It's not really a secret any more that the part of Cyprus Mr Theodorou hails from is the main repository for the goods, money and assets that have been looted from Russia - and Chechnya - by Russian government mafiosi.

Yevgenia Albats, writing in the Moscow Times,under the rubric Putin's Days Are Numbered:

In the midst of all the bad news coming out of Russia, last week offered some hope. A survey conducted by the pro-Kremlin Public Opinion Foundation revealed that despite a massive advertising campaign on state television, ordinary Russians do not support President Vladimir Putin's proposed reforms, including the appointment of regional leaders.

Sixty-one percent of respondents from across the country voiced their opposition to the proposal, which would for all intents and purposes allow the Kremlin to handpick regional leaders. The poll showed that an overwhelming majority of Russians also oppose Putin's proposal to scrap the election of State Duma deputies from single-mandate districts. Instead, the lower house is to be composed exclusively of candidates elected from party lists, effectively excluding the election of independent candidates. Only 9 percent of respondents supported this change. Meanwhile, 50 percent said they trust deputies elected from single-mandate districts.

Albats notes that

Despite all the lies, deception and repression, resistance to the rise of the omnipotent state is still alive in society, as recent poll results suggest. More evidence has come from television managers and journalists, often considered the most corrupt and obedient part of the country's elite. More than one-quarter of the members of the Academy of Russian Television signed an open letter last week acknowledging state censorship of the electronic media. Three programs pulled off the air recently -- NTV's "Svoboda Slova," "Krasnaya Strela" and "Namedni" -- received the academy's TEFI award Friday night. Meanwhile, television personalities who decided that loyalty to the state was more important than telling the truth to their viewers came up empty-handed. Millions of viewers witnessed the disgust with which they were greeted by their colleagues -- a telling sign of growing disillusionment among a sector of the elite heavily courted by the Putin administration with high salaries and exceptional access to information.

Things may get worse -- much worse -- before the Putin regime collapses. But one thing is now clear: To suppress the growing opposition to his rule, Putin would have to resort to Stalinesque measures. But Putin is no Stalin, and Russia in the 21st century differs fundamentally from Russia in the 1920s and 1930s, even if some Western analysts argue to the contrary. The clock is ticking for Putin's Kremlin, and there are more and more of us who intend to make sure the clock doesn't stop.

At Harry's Place, a post on how softheaded multiculturalists ended up apologising for the murder of black gay people.

Jamaica is the worst place in the world to be gay. As Peter Tatchell - the great gay rights campaigner - explains, "For us, it's like being a woman under the Taliban." I've written a piece about Tatchell's heroic campaign to support gay Jamiacans and stigmatise the Jamiacan reggae music that incites the murder of gay people.

Hm. I think there's a danger inherent in possible responses to injustices like this one. The response can end up being as illiberal as the injustice itself. That's not the same as saying that "eloquent campaigners" shouldn't have the right to lobby and criticise and rally opinion - just that caution needs to be observed with the rhetoric, which can be used for purposes opposite to the aims that are being campaigned for. After all, the BNP don't care much for "soft-headed multiculturalists" either. As someone noted recently in a different but related context (the Turkish government's intention to criminalise adultery), it seems that the space between extremes is getting narrower and narrower in public debate these days.

From Jane's Weekly, perhaps the shrewdest assessment of Moscow's strategy in the aftermath of the Beslan atrocity:

Moscow’s claim that it is fighting the same war on terrorism as the United States is not taken seriously. The people who belong to Al-Qaeda and who struck at the US three years ago, rejected everything America stood for: its economic prowess, its technological advances and its notions of society. For Osama bin Laden, the war is an apocalyptic clash of civilisations, a global confrontation between religions.

The terrorism that faces Russia today is of a different variety. It was born out of a war for the liberation of one ethnic group. The militants who attacked the US were foreign; those who attacked Russia were, nominally, its own nationals. Furthermore, Al-Qaeda rejects the concept of the Western world, whereas the Chechens want to join this world, albeit as a separate nation.

The Chechens are not fighting in the name of Islam, although they happen to be Muslim. They fight for the nationalist aspiration of independence. Al-Qaeda and its allies cannot be negotiated with, even if they were to give up violence. But, at least in theory, there is an answer to the Chechen problem, namely that of granting independence to this Russian province.

And, the article concludes:

Ever since the end of the Soviet Union, the Russians have wanted to maintain control over the oil-rich and strategically important Caucasus region and especially over the neighbouring republic of Georgia... Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the Russians now hope to reimpose control over Georgia. It is rather convenient that they can do so by using the same justification that the Americans are using elsewhere in the world.

But, more importantly, Russia’s pre-emption doctrine represents a free-for-all for its secret agents. For years, the Russian government demanded the extradition of Chechen political leaders who sought asylum in other countries, claiming that they were terrorists. Without exception, courts in Western countries rejected these claims as unfounded. Well before the school massacre, however, the Russian security services adopted a new technique — that of simply assassinating such people. The former Chechen president was assassinated in the Gulf state of Qatar in February and further assassinations are sure to follow. Yet again, the Russian authorities will claim that they are doing nothing different from what the US Central Intelligence Agency has done. In practice, however, the Russians are targeting all those Chechens with whom a peaceful deal to the crisis can still be negotiated — far from eliminating terrorism, they are eliminating the chances for any political settlement.

Read the whole thing here.

From The Chechen Times:

News

24.09.2004
Situation in Chechnya and Ingushetia noticeably worsened

Over the past few days, the situation in Chechnya and Ingushetia has noticeably worsened. Federal Forces in Ingushetia are mobilizing personnel and hardware, with troops stationed along highways and on the borders of towns and villages. Along the Rostov-Baku federal highway, between the village of Yandare and the Chechen border, soldiers are digging trenches every 15-20 metres, and a large number of armored vehicles have been positioned on both sides of the road. In Yandare itself, Russian servicemen have taken up military positions near the Chechen refugee camp located on the grounds of the Nazranovsky Agricultural Technical College. Frightened camp residents are not permitted to go beyond the camp’s boundaries and are expecting a «zachistka." A feeling of panic is also noticeable among the people of Ingushetia, several of whom have left the republic. Troops are also gathering in the Sunzhensky District of Chechnya where a large-scale «zachistka» was carried out on 22 September.

SRChF

Posted 23rd September 2004:

Заявление президента ЧРИ А. Масхадова

В связи с заявлением Шамиля Басаева, в котором он принимает на себя ответственность за организацию террористического акта в г. Беслан Северной Осетии, ответственно заявляю, что руководство Чеченской Республики Ичкерии и находящиеся под моим командованием Вооруженные силы Чеченской Республики Ичкерии не имеют никакого отношения к данному террористическому акту.

Еще раз хочу отметить, что самым решительным образом отвергаю и осуждаю подобные методы ведения борьбы, от кого бы они ни исходили.

К сожалению, в условиях продолжения настоящей войны привлечь к ответственности виновных в совершении данного террористического акта практически невозможно. Однако ответственно заявляю, что после прекращения войны лица, виновные в совершении противоправных действий, будут преданы Суду, в том числе и Шамиль Басаев.

Призываю Международное сообщество учредить Международный трибунал по всестороннему расследованию всех преступлений, совершенных в ходе этой войны обеими сторонами конфликта.

Однако считаю необходимым отметить, что подобные акты являются следствием и реакцией на геноцидную войну российского руководства против Чеченского народа, в ходе которой российская армия убила 250 тыс. человек, в том числе 42 тыс. детей.

Продолжение этой войны может привести в конце концов к тому, что ситуация станет неуправляемой, следствием чего неизбежно явится нарастание количества и масштабов актов терроризма.

Общеизвестно, что причиной этого многовекового конфликта, который имеет четырехвековую историю, и в ходе которого чеченский народ неоднократно подвергался жесточайшим актам геноцида, является стремление российского колониализма подавить волю чеченского народа к осуществлению своего законного права на самоопределение.

Единственно возможным и правильным решением чеченско-российского конфликта является политическое решение, которое предусматривало бы международные гарантии прекращения и не возобновления геноцида чеченского народа со стороны российского колониализма.

Президент ЧРИ Аслан Масхадов, 23.09.04г.

Чеченпресс, Отдел правительственной информации, 24.09.04г.

Chechenpress

Statement by President of the ChRI A. Maskhadov

In connection with Shamil Basayev's statement, in which he took responsibility for the organization of the terrorist act in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia, I categorically declare that the government of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and the Armed Forces of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under my command have nothing to do with this terrorist act.

I want to say once more that I most decisively reject and condemn such methods of fighting, no matter who uses them.

Unfortunately, it is practically impossible under the conditions of the continuation of the present war, to call to account those who are guilty of this terrorist act. However, I categorically declare that after the end of the war, persons who are guilty of carrying out provocative acts will be taken to court, including Shamil' Basayev.

I call the international community to establish an international tribunal for the comprehensive investigation of all crimes committed during this war by both sides of the conflict.

However, I find it necessary to mention that such acts are a consequence of and reaction to the genocidal war of the Russian government against the Chechen nation, during which the Rusian army has killed 250,000 people, including 42,000 children.

The continuation of this war might finally lead to the situation becoming uncontrollable, and the result will inevitably be an increase in the number and scale of terrorist acts.

It is widely known that the reason for this conflict with a four-century-long history, during which the Chechen people has suffered extremely severe acts of genocide, is the striving of Russian colonialism to quell the will of the Chechen people to realize its vested right for self-determination.

The only possible and correct solution of the Chechen-Russian conflict is a political one, which would provide an international guarantee of the stop and the impossibility of a renewal of the genocide of the Chechen people by Russian colonialism.

President of the ChRI Aslan Maskhadov, 23.09.04

From a previously untranslated part of Basayev's 17 September statement (tr. by Marius L. at Chechnya-SL):

Mujahedin committed a fateful mistake, after allowing to approach to the building "mchs" [Emergency Situations Ministy] - FSB vehicle, not known why.

- MCHS men before the explosions shouted to the hostages -" run out [of the building]"; and the explosions occurred immediately after this.

- Shooting towards the school was conducted to cover the MCHS men; and after the explosion, two our mujahedin who came out to them to meet them, were immediately killed.

- Helicopters with the snipers had appeared immediately.

- It's a lie, that Alfa and Vympel were not ready, that "they even did not split [share] between themselves the scope of fire [target sector] and fire points". Although, politicians have converted them into executioners, they're nevertheless, respected as professionals.

- For the comparison: "The operational HQ reported that the terrorists themselves provoked the spetsnaz. A group of hostages attempted to get out from the hall, explosions and shots inside were heard and to the theatrical center the spetsnaz groups had been dispatched for the rescue of hostages... (they haven't come with
anything knew): Live reporting of the First Channel by correspondent Anna Raiva after the Nord-Ost".

- The General Attorney [Gore-Prokuror] of Rusnya - Ustinov - officially stated to Putin that the mujahedin were changing circuit [chain] and therefore an explosion has occured accidently. Even the last idiot will not be changing chain during the operation, and furthermore at the same moment, when the enemy's vehicle is approaching the building.

- On the walls of gymnasium there were practically no shrapnels, although in the mines there were more than 30 thousand shrapnels (8 pieces of regular army mines - so called "lyagushki" - 2700 shrapnels in each of one, 10 home-made, under "lyagushki" mines - 1000 shrapnels and two MON -1000, home-made of saltpeter - 1000 shrapnels in each).

- The basketball rings, in which there were large mines, intact.

- Self-explosion is excluded - then it would had explode simultaneously all 20 mines, connected into the one chain, and they showed four unexploded mines. One chain [constructed] of four garlands [wreaths], five mined in each, was locked independently of each other on two sides. From four sides of the garlands, small 9
volt batteries were connected, while from the opposite sides - 45 volt ones. I personally, for ten days had prepared this group in the forest near the village of Batako-Yurt, some 20 km from the town of Beslan, and several times had tested this system. There would explode either all of them, or not a one.

- Colonel Orstkhoyev was phoning to my deputy several times during the assault, and said that the Russians were shooting at the hall from a cannon on the panels (stands) [Rus.pult] and cut [broke] [electric] wire. After this, they went for break-through. For the last time he was connecting it was at two P.M. after saying his telephone was running low.

- We propose to the independent experts to verify shrapnels and nature of injuries.

Mujahedin did not shoot at the children, not there was a conflict among them and they did not run into the different directions, "covering themselves up with children" They in principle knew for what they were going and clearly were carrying out all my directives. I said to them " ... if the assault begins, or explosion
takes place in the gymnasium, then you all go forward attacking, for the break-through. You do not sit in the building, do not defend it. The Alfa troopers [Alfovtsy] are trained to attack and to finish [people] off, they are not trained to protect. You attack, break open into the city and try to inflict a maximum casualties on the enemy. Die with dignity and become an example for those, who will take your place after you".

See also the rest of Basayev's statement.

"War has been declared against us," Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced. Lapdog journalists adjusted his statement to read, "War has been declared against Russia." But what has Russia got to do with any of this? We're hostages. If you want your message to be taken seriously, blow up a plane.

In fact, Ivanov committed a very Freudian slip of the tongue. What we are observing is the dismantling of Putin's power by the same methods with which it was built. They say if you live by the sword you will die by the sword -- especially if the sword isn't yours.

Boris Kagarlitsky, writing in the Moscow Times.

Excerpt from The Jamestown Foundation
Wednesday, September 22 -- Volume 1, Issue 90
EURASIA DAILY MONITOR

RUSSIA AND STATE-SPONSORED TERRORISM IN UKRAINE (Part 1)

Leading opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko is the target of a range of dirty tricks intended to defeat his bid to succeed Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. As Russian political commentator Andrei Piontkovsky wrote in Ukrayinska pravda on September 10, "The basic strategy of the outside political image makers is aimed mostly at the Russian population of Ukraine, to portray Yushchenko as a Russophobe and Ukrainian nationalist and to provoke an ethnic split in Ukrainian society."

Russian "political technologists" (a combination of political lobbyists and dirty tricksters), with close links to Russian President Vladimir Putin, have been very active in Ukraine's presidential campaign. Many of the dirty tricks originated with Gleb Pavlovsky, Maraty Gelman, and their Effective Policy Foundation (EPF), which works on behalf of Presidential Administration chief Viktor Medvedchuk.

This month Pavlovsky opened a public front in Kyiv for his secret EPF activities, the Russian Club. Both the Russian ambassador to Ukraine, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych attended the club's opening.

Pavlovsky and Gelman's work on behalf of the Ukrainian Presidential Administration is based on long-standing ties with its head, Viktor Medvedchuk. Medvedchuk leads the Kyiv oligarch clan's Social Democratic United Party (SDPUo), which has worked closely with the EPF since the 1998 Ukrainian parliamentary elections.

The EPF has been hired to secure a Yanukovych victory by defeating his main rival, pro-Western reformer Viktor Yushchenko. Failing this, the election results could be annulled, with Yushchenko and Yanukovych barred from a repeat election. Kuchma could then stand for a third term, facing only weak left-wing opposition candidates (Ukrayinska pravda, August 30; Hrani Plus, August 30-September 5).

The EPF's objectives fall into three main categories. First they seek to undermine Yushchenko's credibility, by producing fake leaflets, critical books and pamphlets, and launching inflammatory television attacks. Second, they are using the Tax Police to investigate businessmen who support his campaign, thus undermining his financial support. Third, EPF has paid extreme nationalists to claim they support Yushchenko and use the same groups to carry out terrorist attacks that are then blamed on Yushchenko.


Read the rest here.

Zbigniew Brzezinski tells it like it is:

...the leeching and self-centered mindset of the Moscow political elite stifles political democratization. Mr. Putin's move is popular with the elite because it propitiates the basic interests of a power elite that still harbors nostalgia for great- power imperialist status, that identifies its own well-being with domination over all of Russia, and through Russia over at least the former states of the Soviet Union. To the power elite, the independence of Ukraine, or of Georgia, or of Uzbekistan is an historic offense. To it, the resistance of the Chechens to Russian domination is a "terrorist" crime. To it, autonomy for 20 million ethnically non-Russian citizens is a challenge to its own privileges.

----------------------

Mr. Putin's regime in many ways is similar to Mussolini's Fascism. Il Duce made "the trains run on time." He centralized political power in the name of chauvinism. He imposed political controls over the economy without nationalizing it or destroying the economic oligarchs and their mafias. The Fascist regime evoked national greatness, discipline, and exalted myths of an allegedly glorious past. Similarly, Mr. Putin is trying to blend the traditions of the Cheka (Lenin's Gestapo, where his own grandfather started his career), with Stalin's wartime leadership, with Russian Orthodoxy's claims to the status of the Third Rome, with Slavophile dreams of a single large Slavic state ruled from the Kremlin.

-------------------

That combination may be appealing for a while but ultimately -- probably within a decade or so -- it will fail. The younger and better educated and more open-minded Russian generation will slowly permeate the ruling elite. The upcoming generation will not be satisfied with life in a Fascist petro-state in which the Kremlin glitters (because of oil profits) while the rest of the country falls further and further behind not only Europe but also China. They are aware that decentralization of their huge country, which can unleash social initiative, is the key to modernization. That reality cannot be obscured forever by the slogans about "terrorism" that Mr. Putin used to justify the imposition of stifling political centralization.

Indeed, already today the neighboring Ukraine of nearly 50 million people (whom the Bush NSC has so studiously ignored while naïvely courting Mr. Putin) is beginning to provide a contrast in two major domains: its economic progress is more diversified and more evident in other cities than just in the national capital; and its politics (while still vulnerable to manipulation) have produced two genuinely contested presidential elections. As of today, no one can predict the outcome of the Ukrainian presidential elections scheduled for late October, a fact that stands in sharp contrast with the Russian "elections" in which Mr. Putin was the candidate.

And points to one major failing of the Bush foreign policy:

Unfortunately, over the last several years the White House has fostered a cult of Putin that has done great harm to the increasingly isolated Russian democrats. Their cause deserved support. There were Russians who bravely stood up and opposed the progressive silencing of Russia's free media. There were Russians who voiced concerns regarding the narrowing scope of Russia's democracy. There were Russians who protested against the inhuman and almost genocidal massacres of the Chechens. Never once did any of them hear any measure of support from the top leadership of the country that once held high the standard of human rights in opposition to communist tyranny.

"How can I comment on the fact that our government gave way before the Kremlin?" the well-known Lithuanian dissident, former deputy to the parliament Viktoras Petkus said to RZ. He admitted that lately the server on which the Kavkazcenter site was opened was located in his Vilnius apartment. "This server has been moved from apartment to apartment, because of pressure from the authorities. I've agreed to set it up at my place. I'm afraid of nothing. Fighting for independence of Lithuania I had spent 26 years in the Soviet prisons and camps of the Gulag. I had four convictions, under Stalin's government and in the later period. There can be no double standards in the fight for independence and self-determination of nations," Petkus added.

Agents of Lithuanian Security Department didn't enter his apartment. The website has been blocked by use of technical means.

Robert Mickiewicz in Vilnius

tr. Marius at C-SL (minor edits)

A comprehensive and thorough report on Chechnya’s Suicide Bombers: Desperate, Devout, or Deceived? by John Reuter, published by the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, concludes among other things that

Like pounding mercury with a hammer, top-heavy use of massive military force to counter Islamic terrorism only seems to generate more varied and insidious forms of terrorism and broaden support... Fareed Zakaria makes an apt comparison of the Turkish Kurd suicide attacks in the late 1990s and Chechen suicide terrorism. After being subjected to a devastating wave of suicide bombings in the 1990s, Turkey began to see fewer and fewer suicide bombings until they almost completely subsided. As Zakaria points out, this result was achieved by a systematic ‘hearts and minds’ campaign in which Turkey “worked very hard to win over the Kurds, creating stable governing structures for them, befriending them and putting forward social welfare programs…On a per capita basis, it has invested more in the Kurdish region than any other part of Turkey.” Zakaria notes the scorched earth policy of the Russian government in the first and second war, and concludes:

"There are many differences between the Kurds and the Chechens. But both are Muslim populations that have political grievances. In one case, the grievances and tactics grew more extreme and violent, culminating in suicide bombing. In the other, suicide bombing gave way to political negotiations and even coexistence."

There is a lesson here. If Russian leaders truly want to understand the source of suicide terrorism, then perhaps they should take a closer look at the human catastrophe they have wrought in Chechnya. Russia must recognize that ‘counter terrorism’ strategies, which employ abduction, torture, and lawless killing, can only create more terrorists. And if Russia wants to prevent another wave of suicide bombings, then it would be well served to seek peaceful reconciliation by constructively engaging those moderate voices that still exist in Chechnya.

In Sernovodsky Village in the Sunzhensky region, village management has put forward preparations for the accommodation of a hundred troops in addition to the 40 already there.

A large military contingent arrived on September 14th, near the village of Alhan-Jurt in the Urus-Martanovsky region. The troops are stationed in the northern part of village. According to local residents, there are tanks located every 50-100 meters with their barrels pointed at the village.


http://www.prima-news.ru/eng/news/news/2004/9/17/29420.html

http://chechenpress.com/news/2004/09/18/01.shtml

"Akhmed Zakayev comments on Shamil Basayev's statement"

The Chechenpress news agency has asked [Chechnya's rebel deputy premier] Akhmed Zakayev to comment on [field commander] Shamil Basayev's statement in which he claims responsibility for the terrorist act in Beslan. This is what Akhmed Zakayev said:

«Могу лишь вкратце повторить то, что сегодня завил по этому поводу представителям ведущих мировых информагентств.

Как известно, Путин неоднократно и в категорической форме утверждал, что он не будет вести переговоров с демократически избранным президентом ЧРИ Асланом Масхадовым. Но сегодня, после трагедии в Беслане, мы все стали свидетелями того, что Путин за спиной Масхадова вел переговоры с Шамилем Басаевым, не имеющим никакого отношения к легитимному чеченскому руководству. Факт этих переговоров подтверждают многие российские СМИ, депутаты Госдумы РФ и такой высокопоставленный кремлевский функционер как помощник президента РФ Асланбек Аслаханов. И мы также все стали свидетелями того, как очередной раунд переговоров между Путиным и Шамилем Басаевым закончился массовым убийством детей.

В связи с этим хотелось бы предупредить как российскую общественность, так и международное сообщество, что ни сейчас, ни впредь подобные закулисные переговоры Путина и Басаева абсолютно нелегитимны и их результаты для чеченского руководства не будут иметь никакого правового значения.»

"I can only briefly repeat what I told representatives of leading news agencies of the world today. "As is known, Putin has repeatedly and categorically claimed that he will not conduct any negotiations with the democratically-elected president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Aslan Maskhadov. But after the tragedy in Beslan, we all witnessed that Putin had been conducting negotiations behind Maskhadov's back with Shamil Basayev who has nothing to do with the legitimate Chechen leadership. The fact of these negotiations is confirmed by many Russian media, deputies of the Russian State Duma and by such a high-ranking Kremlin functionary as the aide to the Russian president, Aslanbek Aslakhanov. Also, we all witnessed that another round of the negotiations between Putin and Shamil Basayev ended in the mass carnage of children.

"In this connection, I would like to warn both the Russian public and the international community that such negotiations behind the scenes between Putin and Basayev are absolutely illegitimate and their results will be of no legal importance to the Chechen leadership.

"In turn, the Chechen leadership has repeatedly stated that the Russian-Chechen conflict has no military solution. We decisively condemn any forms of violence in solving political problems and are sure that the methods employed by Vladimir Putin and Shamil Basayev for achieving political aims are unacceptable. These methods will not yield the necessary results, but will only increase the number of pointless casualties. They will further the expansion of the war and deepen the abyss of alienation between the peoples of Chechnya and Russia. We are sure that we will not be able to achieve a lasting peace without intervention by the international community.

"It is worth emphasizing that Shamil Basayev, unlike Vladimir Putin, constantly appeals to international law. Shamil Basayev has repeatedly suggested that Putin observe the rules of war envisaged in Geneva conventions, and with the consent of the leader of the Russian Federation, he is ready to make a commitment to end any terrorist activities. Moreover, Shamil Basayev has repeatedly appealed to the leaders of the countries included in the antiterrorist coalition, calling on them to foil the terrorist activities in Chechnya of their ally Putin. However, neither the leadership of the coalition, nor Putin himself reacted to these calls by Shamil Basayev, which resulted in the Beslan tragedy.

"As for the president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Aslan Maskhadov, he has already made a number of statements in which he decisively condemned the terrorist act in Beslan and described as unacceptable and amoral all similar attempts to stop Putin's genocide in Chechnya. However, there are no doubts that as long as Putins define Russia's policy in the Caucasus, Basayevs will not disappear in Chechnya."

[Signed] Chechenpress Department of Government Information, 18 September 2004

Masha Gessen, writing in New Republic Online, has an inside view of what the future is likely to hold for the Russian Federation:


Countries, like people, do not cope well with fear. But countries, unlike people, cannot run away when they are frightened. So they act like people in other ways. They reach for totems they hope will protect them, such as the flag; they become withdrawn, barricading themselves with visas and security checks; they get aggressive; often, they panic. Frightened countries can be extremely dangerous to themselves and to others. Russia right now is a frightened country embarking on steps that gravely threaten its own people and, most likely, the people of other countries.

To be blunt, Russia is about to turn itself into a dictatorship. Using as a pretext the fear that has gripped his country, President Vladimir Putin has announced sweeping political reforms that will eliminate all direct elections except those for president, who, through a convoluted process, will effectively appoint members of parliament. With the state in control of all broadcast media and increasingly dominating print media, the presidential election will also be orchestrated by the Kremlin. Still, as the new political system takes shape, the person at the helm--the actual dictator--might not be Putin. The new leader could actually be a fascist head of an aggressive, nationalistic, war-mongering Russia.

The rest of her article, with its assertion that

fascism is what Russians want. They tell pollsters they are willing to sacrifice their freedoms. They say they want all Chechens to be evicted from Moscow and other large cities. They crave an extreme crackdown. "A totalitarian state cannot be blackmailed by the threat of death of civilians," said Mikhail Leontyev, one of Russia's most prominent pundits, in his nightly commentary on federal Channel One, the most-watched network. "Terrorism happens only in democracies." Leontyev's words express both the Kremlin's and the public's agenda: Polls show that a majority of Russians will readily cede their civil liberties to security services. The security services, in turn, are behaving accordingly. Last week, Moscow police beat up a Chechen man, famed cosmonaut Magomed Tolboyev. Human rights advocates say beatings of ordinary Chechens and other Muslims are now commonplace occurrences in Russia.

can be read here (free registration required).

From the Kavkaz-Tsentr website - a site heavily hacked by FSB - a declaration from Basayev claiming responsibility for Beslan:

www.kavkaz.org.uk/russ/article.php?id=25985

Update 18 September: the Kavkaz-Tsentr site has been temporarily closed down by the Lithuanian authorities, pending a judicial inquiry. The Lithuanian ambassador in Moscow was summoned to the Russian foreign ministry and told to stop the website's activities.

BBC reports: The Chechen rebel website is based on a server in the flat of well-known Soviet-era dissident and political prisoner Viktoras Petkus.

Mr Petkus told the Baltic News Service on Friday that the decision was "a shameful obsequiousness against another state's will".

Lithuanian authorities have been trying to shut down the site - hosted by Elneta service provider - since last year.

But the case has gone before the country's Supreme Court and a ruling is expected next year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3669624.stm


Reuters reported that Putin

said on Friday that the West's "patronising and indulgent attitude" to terrorism amounted to complicity, Itar-Tass news agency said.

It quoted Putin as telling an international meeting of city mayors that Western calls to negotiate with Chechen separatist rebels amounted to the failed appeasement of Nazi Germany ahead of World War Two.

"We have long warned about the threat of terrorist attacks, but our voice has not been heard," he said. "Moreover, we faced double standards in the attitude towards terrorism.

"I urge you to remember the lessons of history, the amicable deal (with Adolf Hilter) in Munich in 1938 ... Of course,the scale of consequences is different ... But the situation is very similar."


And the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939?

The plot thickens, and the propaganda is warming up.

On Wednesday, the Guardian newspaper published Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem 'School In Beslan'.

A recent post to Chechnya-SL quotes a message from Donald Jensen, Russia specialist and director of RFE/RL's Newsline, in response to Ira Straus's criticism of RFE/RL. Part of the message reads:

First, Mr. Straus' appeal to logic is disingenuous unless you believe, as he seems to, that in the wake of the Dagestan invasion, Russia had to invade Chechnya and no choices were involved. Not so. Without getting into the motivations of Basayev going in, without getting into the evidence that a corridor was left for him to get OUT of Dagestan, without getting into the suspicious set of circumstances surrounding these events aired by individuals like Aleksey Arbatov (hardly a paranoid Russophobe) etc., that invasion was repulsed during August (www.russ.ru/politics/articles/99-09-21-moskov.html). After this, Russia had options and the choice made was not the only one. Others included attempting to seal the border around Chechnya, invading up to the Terek, crossing the Terek etc. However, the apartment bombings did take place in September, the government did blame the Chechens and used this, not the invasion of Dagestan, as the causus belli.

In short, Straus makes an appeal to chronology and then proceeds to violate chronology because it doesn't suit his purposes. In addition, despite what Mr Straus thinks, there's really no necessary contradiction between "the FSB did it" and "Boris Berezovskiy" when it comes to the apartment bombings. And it is entirely keeping with Berezovskiy's audacity to blame an institution -- elements of which may have been his accomplices -- as the sole perpetrator of the acts. I will not discuss further the evidence concerning the apartment bombings here, except to note that some colleagues are working with the evidence as I speak in an effort to see where it leads.

I will add a couple of additional points:

1) Anton Surikov, another inhabitant of the gray zone where Russian authorities regularly intersect with criminal interests, did note that the theory that the security services assisted Basayev in the invasion of Daghestan had a "right to exist, but only in part." A tad mysterious to be sure, but he knows Basayev and assisted him during the time Basayev fought WITH the Russians in Abkhazia. Lebed said the same.

2) Sergey Kovalev, hardly "anti-Russian," also raised about this in his commission's investigation of the apartment bombing.

3) Polling among Russians indicates that more than a third believes that the "authorities" may have had something to do with the bombings.

The fact is, there's a seamy underside to politics in Russia that we ignore at our peril. Note well what an active reserve officer said this week in Moskovskie Novosti (Igor Korolkov, "Russia After Beslan," MN #34, September 10, 2004): When they say that the Chechen boyeviky are financed from abroad, that's only part of the truth. Their main sources of income are from Russia, from Moscow. If any FSB investigator uncovers the business dealings the Chechens are involved in, he his quickly called off by customs, the procurator's office, their fellow FSB officers, MVD officers. It's absurd: the financing of the terrorists is aided by the very law enforcement organs that are battling them. He says he knows of FSB officers who help criminalized Chechen business types make money. Those same officers then go off to fight the Chechens, who are armed with weapons bought with that same money.

One of the interesting aspects of Western commentary on Beslan this week has been the outpouring of sympathy for Putin. He is now said to need help, just as 6 months ago he was acclaimed as being firmly in charge. I, for one, believe that, despite the unfortunate adulation of the west, Putin is in over his head, as will most likely become even more apparent in the coming months.

A poem by the Finnish poet Jarkko Laine, from his collection Paradise (Paratiisi, 1979)


News from Russia


News from Russia,
someone wants to exchange
their Pushkin for science fiction,
a moving gesture:
the lost paradise at both ends of the road,
the nigger on the chocolate bar wrapper,
the three-eyed Martian,
and not many people want to live today,
the laundrette’s display window,

news from Russia,
Lenin arrives at the station with German money in his briefcase,
everything must be changed so that there is nothing
except the name of the state,
the people’s state.
That Germany does not exist any more nor does that Lenin
who was shot so he would die, would never live again.

there is only politics,
negotiations,
another war scattered like manure on a field,
so that everything may flower, like art.
the child of war,

news from Russia,
the Russians don’t want war,
the Russians want to win,
they talk about peace, hard currency that does not exist,
the marks of Utopia, they are good for paying debts with,
they talk a lot, for a long time,

news from Russia,
the older the guidebook,
the easier it is to trust it,
the red star is not Baedeker’s,
that is the difference between the old one and the new one,

news from Russia,
Everyone wishes Mother Russia ill,
the American warmongers, the German warmongers, the Chinese warmongers,
the Finnish fascists, they all wish her ill,
have made a conspiracy to separate the lands of Russia from one another,
are going about in the border states speaking ill about Russia,
organizing non-Russian communism,
so low are they ready to go,
they would even buy Georgia with Stalin, that is their morality,
the new Varangians, peeping behind Moscow’s veil,

news from Russia,
it’s not a place at all,
it screams across the whole of Ivan’s square
as crazy as Vasily the Blessed was crazy,
speaking the truth is not enough for it,
it wants to be the truth itself,
distant and frothy like the Arctic Sea;
hanging gardens, a wonder of the world,
when its bells ring,
the corpses left on the gallows ring

news from Russia,
the chill-voiced woman on the radio in the middle of the night,
on every station,
in the pub the Finnish communist
talking in October about October,

news from Russia,
the past is irrevocable,
you go there if you go, as a ghost,
talking about it, sitting as if by nature,
sitting as a hostage to yourself until you are the past,
gone are those for whom a train was a samovar drawn by a team of horses,
gone are the corpses of the Streltsy, the Moscow Kremlin’s outermost fortification.
No longer do the ravens cover the gilt of the cupolas with their excrement,
no peacock is needed when there’s
a healthy cockerel in the back yard,
for five years that cockerel will crow, then they’ll bring a new cockerel;
and the snow will whirl: in Russia the snow will whirl,
we will watch it as on our television screens, we will wait for
news from Russia.

A new report from Médecins Sans Frontières presents

the findings of two quantitative surveys conducted by MSF among the displaced populations in Ingushetia and Chechnya to gain information on living conditions and health status. People interviewed had been displaced for at least five years. We found a population living in unacceptable conditions, traumatized by conflict, and in fear of their safety. Physical and mental health needs were significant, but access to appropriate services is at best problematic. The authorities are currently undertaking a policy of moving people, against their will, from Ingushetia to Chechnya, but conditions in both locations are unacceptable and this will do nothing to improve the plight of this vulnerable population. The authorities must ensure protection and appropriate living circumstances for this displaced population. This will require greater attention from the international community to this conflict that has been largely ignored for the last decade.

The report, in PDF format, can be downloaded here.

At the beginning I had only one attitude: again this 'scum' started something out of the ordinary. Blasts of apartment buildings, blasts in the subway, etc. are not enough for them. Of course I meant Chechen terrorists, you have to forgive me – for I have sinned.

Stanislav Kozin, writing from Russia.

The journalist and author Robert Skole, who has lived for many years in Sweden, has a grim report on the anti-Israel bias there, which even extends to anti-Semitic cartoons in the mainstream press (see the top of the linked page at Honest Reporting).

The profile of Jan Guillou, president of the Swedish Association of Journalists, on the same page, also makes troubling reading.


Via Andrew Sullivan and Harry's Place.

It won't have escaped the notice of anyone who reads this blog that my attention has been focused for the past couple of weeks on one issue alone: Chechnya. The siege of Beslan and its aftermath have given rise to events so potentially momentous both for Russia and for the rest of the world that it has seemed wrong to concentrate on anything else much.

And the recent comment of independent lawmaker Vladimir Ryzhkov, reported by several agencies, that

"I don't understand how one can use the blood of Beslan's victims to resolve political tasks, to protect one's political interests and strengthen one's power"

is food for sustained and not very comfortable thought.

It seems clear that Putin and his government are involved in what is turning out to be some very murky shadow-play indeed, and we in the West would do well to keep a watchful eye on what transpires within the framework of Russian Federation politics in the near future.

Reuters reports tonight that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has expressed concern about the sweeping political changes introduced by Vladimir Putin:

"In effect this is pulling back (on) some of the democratic reforms, as seen by the international community, that have occurred in the past," Powell told Reuters in an interview.

The report quotes Powell as saying:

"We understand the need to fight against terrorism ... but in an attempt to go after terrorists I think one has to strike a proper balance to make sure that you don't move in a direction that takes you away from the democratic reforms or the democratic process"

and adding that

Washington would raise the issue with Moscow "in the days ahead."

http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/kraj/1,34308,2283342.html

Chechens are fleeing to Poland

Jacek Brzuszkiewicz, Lublin 13-09-2004, last update 13-09-2004 20:44


The next group of 90 Chechens asked on Monday for refugee status after crossing the Polish-Belorussian border. After the attack of terrorists on the school in Beslan they are afraid of lynching and repressions for the side of authorities

All of them after crossing the border in Terespol have applied for refugee tatus. This is the second goup of Chechen escaping to Poland from the Russian Federation. On Saturday and Sunday the border in Terespol crossed 70 persons of Chechen nationality.

"All the Chechens who have applied for refugees status have been sent to the [refugee] center in Debak near Warsaw," says lieutenat-colonel Andrzej Wojcik, spokesman for the border unit - at the same time refuting Sunday's information from the Russian agency Interfax, which was alarming that the Poles are sending back from the border "hundreds of Chechens".

Among Chechens who in the last days applied for the refugee status in Poland are many families, often with small children. They are afraid of mob law from the side of Russians. "After Beslan we can't live there. It's dangerous to go on the street. They threaten that they do the same with Chechen children as the terrorists," as telling in Debak a resident of Grozny's suburb to an official of the Bureau of Repatriation and Foreigners. Other Chechens, more than their neighbours are afraid of repressions from the side of Russian authorities. "A Russian soldier on the street of Grozny was showing me that he was going to slash my throat" another said. They tell that they had been travelling to Poland for five days, because S.and N. Ossetia's borders were closed, they're travelled through Baku and Mineralniye Vody, by crowded trains and cheap private buses. For their trip, very often, their whole familes and neighbours were collecting money. The Chechens who came to Poland this last weekend tell about thousands of their countrymen who wait on any possibility to departure from Chechnya and other Caucasian republics.

Last week, every day, eight, nine Chechens had applied for refugee status. Since then, this number has been growing. - I'm afraid, that we can expect the real flood of Chechen refugees - says Jan Wegrzyn, the director general of Bureau of Repatriation and Foreigners.

At the disposal of 12 refugee centers there's 2300 individual places. After the last wave of escapes, only a few beds are left empty. Since the beginning of this year an application for the refugee status have filled 4500 persons in Poland, among them 3600 Chechens.

(tr. Marius at C-SL)

Akhmed Zakayev Appeals to the International Community to Help Resolve the Chechen Conflict

Opening remarks at the Press Conference at the House of Lords. London,14 September 2004

Ladies and Gentlemen,

First of all I want to emphasize that the democratically elected Chechen government can only express horror and abhorrence in the face of the terrorist act perpetrated against the North Ossetian school in Beslan on 1- 3 September. President Maskhadov has declared that there can be no justification for terrorism, and he has called on the Chechen people to mourn those who died in this tragedy.

I categorically refute all accusations by the Russian government that President Maskhadov had any involvement in the Beslan events. Moreover, President Putin's subsequent linking of Aslan Maskhadov, a democratically elected president, to Shamil Basayev, who has accepted responsibility for a number of terrorist acts in the past, is a deliberate attempt to confuse international public opinion as to the real issues in the Chechen conflict. The accusation, as well as the call for a reward for President's Maskhadov's head as if he were but a common criminal, is nothing more than deliberate disinformation, part of the propaganda war conducted along the best traditions of the Soviet KGB, with the sole aim of discrediting those in Russia and the rest of the world who insist on dialogue with President Maskhadov.

Before answering your questions I would like to make a few important remarks. Who carried out the terrorist act? I believe that those responsible for the hostage taking in the school belonged to a local radical group, unlinked to any political forces or actors in the North Caucasus, and that this group was able to recruit volunteers amongst a population imbued with a desire for personal revenge for the death of their close ones in the hands of the Russian military. Let me remind you that more than 200 000 people have lost their lives in the hands of the Russian military, including more than 35 000 children. This does not mean that I condone the acts of those who, out of grief and despair, have lost all reason. I simply want to underline the circumstances which have lead to such madness.

The terrorist act of Beslan must also be placed in a particular context: that of the bloody conflict between the Ingush and the Ossetians, which started before the first Chechen war of 1994. In the autumn of 1992 hundreds of Ingush people were massacred in the Prigorodny region of North Ossetia. The scale of violence incurred then, in particular the massacre of children, far exceeded what we have just witnessed in Beslan. I am convinced that some of the participants in the attack on the Beslan school were also motivated by a desire for vengeance for the 1992 massacre, which explains the reported presence of many Ingush amongst the hostage takers.

Russian officials assert that persons of Arab, African and Korean origin were amongst the hostage takers. Following eyewitness accounts of surviving hostages, this has turned out to be not true. Russia also claims to have identified a number of individual Chechens amongst the dead hostage takers. These named Chechens are indeed real individuals, however they have been in prison in Russia for many years.

Faced with this barrage of lies from the Russian side, and in an effort to shed some truth on the events surrounding the attack on the school and the subsequent siege, President Maskhadov has ordered the head of the anti terrorist center of Chechnya to conduct an official enquiry into the Beslan events. He has also declared his willingness to cooperate with all interested parties in the investigation, and to share any information in his possession on individuals suspected of participating in this heinous crime.

International Terrorism and role of the international community Following the tragic events of 11 September 2001, the West realized that it needed Russian cooperation in the fight against international terrorism. In order to secure this cooperation, Western leaders have deliberately and consistently avoided the issue of the human rights abuses and war crimes in Chechnya, in their public and private dealings with President Putin. This line has been maintained in spite of the widely reported abuses of human rights perpetrated against the Chechen population, confirmed by the most respected and internationally recognized human rights organizations.

My question therefore to Prime Minister Blair, President Bush, Chancellor Schroeder, to name but a few, is "why are you not prepared to insist that your partner in the fight against terrorism espouses the standards of freedom, respect for human rights and civil liberties that you purport to defend?" Your silence has de facto given Putin carte blanche in his attempts to solve the Chechen conflict by force. This evidence of double standards by the West, which does not seem to hesitate to issue condemnation, or at times intervene, in other parts of the world that are suffering similar or even less extreme forms of state sponsored violence, is pushing many peaceful Chechens into carrying extremist acts out of desperation.

International terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism play only a minor role in the Chechen conflict and in Chechnya itself. However the Chechen tragedy is being hijacked by those who fuel the ideologies of both international terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, who see in the conflict further evidence of the oppression of Muslims at the hands of the so called great powers. The West's reluctance to denounce Putin's approach to the Chechen problem is partly responsible for the fact that the cause of our people is now being manipulated by radical extremists who are at war with the West.

I understand that most political leaders in democratic countries are very sensitive to public opinion, and realistically I do not expect any changes in attitudes in the West until the public begins to exert pressure on governments to change. Yet without objective reporting on the situation in Chechnya, Western public opinion will continue to be inadequately informed on the real situation in the Republic. I therefore welcome and join the call by Reporters sans Frontiers in their open address to President Putin, to allow free movement for all journalists in Chechnya. Unless Western leaders are prepared to support this initiative, I fear that President Putin will be allowed to continue his disinformation campaign on Chechnya unimpeded.

Proposals for a peaceful resolution Putin's policy has not only not stabilized Chechnya, but has brought about a worsening of the situation. If Putin's policy towards Chechnya continues in the same vein, the Caucasus will radicalize even further, and I am gravely concerned that more Beslans will be inevitable. Therefore I call on Western governments to reconsider their strategy towards Russia, and make peace talks between Russia and the democratically elected government of Chechnya, under the auspices of international mediators, a non negotiable condition of Russia's continued status as a privileged interlocutor of the West, in both trade and political forums.

Aslan Maskhadov and his representatives once again declare their readiness to come to the negotiating table. In 2001 Putin stated that for Russia "Chechnya's status was not the most important issue. The most important issue was for Chechnya not to become a platform from which violence and aggression is directed against Russia". For our part, we declare that for us independence is not our main goal. It is simply one possible guarantee for the safety of the Chechen people. With good will and flexibility on both sides, the political aims of both parties should be achievable. However, following all that has happened, I fear that we can no longer find a solution without the participation of the international community, and guarantees that the interests of both parties will be acknowledged and respected.

Today, Aslan Maskhadov remains the only democratically elected leader in Chechnya, and the only one who can guarantee peace in the Caucasus if the war ends. As his official representative I confirm that we are ready to take this responsibility. But we cannot wage a war on two fronts: with the Russian army on one side and with international terrorism on the other. We need help from the international community.

If the world continues to ignore the Chechen problem, the responsibility for the ensuing Caucasus catastrophe will fall at the feet of Vladimir Putin and his Western apologists.

> Did anyone actually read the original text of this
ominous statement by
> Basayev? I tried to find it in the web but I didn't
succeed...

Lenta.ru couldn't specify the link either. Their report on
2nd September merely says:

Drugoy lider chechenskikh separatistov - Shamil' Basayev -
takzhe zayavil o svoey neprichastnosti k organizatsii
zakhvata shkoly v Beslane [...] na odnom iz saytov
chechenskikh separatistov.

(Another leader of Chechen separatists - Shamil Basayev - also declared his non-involvement in the organization of the seizure of the school in Beslan [...] on one of the Chechen separatist sites.)

(from Chechnya-SL)

http://lenta.ru/terror/2004/09/02/zakayev/

This is what the revived Empire of Evil needs: a unanimous approval of its actions without attempts to find the truth and punish the culprits. It rejects any honest investigation of the terrorist acts and the true reasons for the beginning of the two wars in Chechnya. Russian propaganda demands the existence of “the Chechen trace” in every terrorist act. Public is suggested to take everything for granted. The investigation into Basayev’s raid to Dagestan – an official reason for the beginning of the new genocide in Chechnya – has never been conducted. As well as we see no honest investigation of the apartment blasts in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buinaksk, the hostage-taking in Nord-Ost, the killing of school children in Beslan is unlikely to be investigated too.

Why are these events marked out? Because in all other cases (a missile attack in the center of Grozny, bombing refugee columns, etc.) there are enough reliable proofs and evidence against the Kremlin. In all these cases it was impossible to hide the truth – too many witnesses. However, in all other cases – it was more or less easy to do, although few doubt Russian secret services were behind these events. We mean not only indirect proofs – there are many direct signs and evidence. The Chechen side has repeatedly stated it will support any initiative able to help an open and honest investigation into the Dagestan raid, the apartment blasts, and in all other cases. Paradoxically enough: “terrorists” have demanded investigation and trial, but in vain!

And what do we have as a result? De-facto all Chechens are declared the nation of criminals. The whole nation is tacitly declared criminal worldwide. Just think it over: THE WHOLE NATION! Not only men, but also women, children, the elderly! And all that happens not under Russian and Bolshevist czars. It happens today. The recent increase of activity coincided with the moment when the first Chechen files have finally reached the international court in Strasbourg! Lawyers have no doubts regarding their outcomes – Russia is likely to face serious charges. But who will hear them now when the entire world seems to accept that all the Chechens are criminals and potential “live bombs”?

We shall not think that all became possible as a result of non-professionalism of terrorism experts. That was a quite understandable and politically necessary decision. A psychological bribe to Putin for gas, oil and consumer markets. It is much easier to forget about Chechens and believe the Kremlin than to prove in practice one’s adherence to democratic principles, the fundamentals of the Western Civilization. The history simply repeats.

The emigrant of the first wave Sergei Melgunov, who published a book about the Bolshevist terror in Russia in early 20’s, has never been heard. Solzhenitsyn was heard in the height of the cold war. Today’s human rights reports about what is going on in Chechnya are covered with a cloak of silence. The reasons of such criminal inconsistency – an immediate political necessity. No one thinks about the consequences. Democracy is reduced to similar slogans of election campaigns. But the history proves – such dream of the mind gives birth to monsters. And today, after Russia’s decision “to bomb worldwide” have found understanding and approval, we can say with certainty – the beast has licked blood and liked it, and not only the beast liked it – but also public which watches what is going on with an “anxious” indifference from the western tribune of the circus.


Это именно то, что необходимо возродившейся Империи Зла: единогласное одобрение ее действий, без стремления докопаться до истины, а затем найти и наказать виновных. Она противится любому честному расследованию терактов и реальных причин двух войн Чечне. Присутствие «чеченского следа» в каждом теракте требует российская пропаганда. Общественности в этом случае предлагают верить на слово. А расследования похода Басаева на Дагестан - официальной причины начала нового геноцида в Чечне - как не было, так и нет. Как нет и честного расследования по фактам взрывов домов в Москве, Волгодонске и Буйнакске, нет расследования по факту захвата заложников в "Норд-Ост", не предвидится и расследования убийства школьников в Беслане.

Почему выделены именно эти события? Потому что во всех других случаях (ракетный удар по центру Грозного, расстрелы колон беженцев и многое другое) доказательная база, однозначно обвиняющая Кремль, не вызывает никаких сомнений. В этих случаях утаить правду не удалось - слишком уж много свидетелей. Во всех остальных - сделать это оказалось более или менее просто, хотя и теперь причастность российских спецслужб ко всем перечисленным выше событиям не вызывает сомнений. А ведь это не только косвенные доказательства - есть и много прямых улик. Чеченская сторона уже неоднократно говорила о том, что она поддержит любые инициативы, способные помочь открытому и честному следствию и по дагестанскому походу, и по взрывам домов, и во всех остальных случаях. Складывается парадоксальная ситуация: «террористы» безуспешно добиваются суда и следствия!

Что же в результате? Де-факто чеченцы объявлены нацией преступников. Во всем мире вся нация негласно объявлена преступной. Вдумайтесь в эти слова: ВСЯ НАЦИЯ! Не только мужчины, но и женщины, и дети, и старики! А ведь это происходит не во времена русских и большевистских царей. Это происходит сегодня. Нынешний всплеск активности произошел именно в том момент, когда первые чеченские досье с огромным трудом дошли до международного суда в Страсбурге! Юристы не сомневаются в их итоге - Россию ждут доказанные обвинения. Но кто услышит их теперь, после того, как, кажется, весь мир согласился с тем, что все чеченцы преступники и потенциальные «живые бомбы»?

Не стоит думать, что подобное стало возможным в результате непрофессионализма экспертов по вопросам терроризма. Это было вполне объяснимое и политически необходимое решение. Своего рода психологическая взятка Путину, за нефть, газ и рынки сбыта. Легче забыть о чеченцах и поверить Кремлю, чем доказать на деле свою приверженность демократическим принципам, основам Западной Цивилизации. История просто повторяется.

Эмигрант первой волны Сергей Мельгунов, опубликовавший еще в начале 20-х годов прошлого века книгу о большевистском терроре в России, не был услышан. В разгар холодной войны услышали Солженицина. Сегодняшние доклады правозащитников о происходящем в Чечне снова окружены стеной молчания. Причина подобной преступной непоследовательности - сиюминутная политическая необходимость. О последствиях не думает никто. Демократия свелась к однотипным лозунгам предвыборных кампаний. Но история доказывает - подобный сон разума рождает чудовищ. И сегодня, после того как решение России «бомбить по всему миру» нашло понимание и одобрение, можно уже с уверенность сказать - зверь лизнул крови и это понравилось не только ему, но и публике, взирающей c "беспокойным" безразличием за происходящим с западной трибуны цирка.



Read the whole article here (English)

and here (Russian)

On the evidence of the following, the Kremlin propaganda machine has started to grind in earnest now:

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:


Speaking at an expanded cabinet meeting including the heads of the 89 subjects of the Russian Federation and the heads of practically all federal institutions, President Vladimir Putin announced on 13 September radical changes in the organization of the political system in Russia, Russian news agencies reported. First, he proposed that the leaders of federation subjects, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, no longer be elected by direct ballot, but by the regional legislators endorsing candidates recommended by the president. Second, Putin suggested abolishing the single-mandate-district election system for the Duma, which constitutes half of the mandates in the lower chamber, and electing all deputies by the proportional, party-list system. The Central Election Commission has long been advocating this reform. Third, Putin proposed that before bills are submitted to the parliament, they must pass through a special new body to be called the public chamber. Putin also announced the creation of a special Federal Commission on the North Caucasus, headed by former presidential-administration head Dmitrii Kozak. Putin also appointed Kozak as his new envoy to the Southern Federal District, while the previous envoy, Vladimir Yakovlev, is to become minister of a reinstituted Nationalities Ministry. Putin also announced a decision to ban extremist organizations, which are the "breeding ground for terrorism," and stressed Russia's determination to fight terrorism anywhere in the world.

In an interview with NTV on 12 September, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said that although Russia has been at war with terrorism for a long time, the string of recent terrorist attacks, including the Beslan hostage taking, shows that this war is taking on "a systemic character," ntv.ru reported. Russia faces "very serious forces," who are well-organized, well-directed, and supported by "very large financial resources," he said. To fight this war, Russia needs more than military force, all of society must be involved. He also confirmed the Kremlin decision to reserve the right to carry out preemptive strikes against international terrorists (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 10 September 2004). Ivanov said that "we are not going to tell anyone in advance how we are going to deliver a preemptive strike. Neither are we going to warn anyone in advance." He also said that because terrorism is an international threat, no country, however strong it is, can cope with it alone. He added that he has spoken with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently and that the U.S. and Russian positions on this are much closer to each other than either is to that of Europe.


Speaking to TV-Tsentr on 10 September, Sergei Karaganov, the president of the influential Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, said that in its own interests Russia should curtail anti-Western rhetoric in reaction to Western criticism of Russian failures during the Beslan school siege. Some media and lower-level politicians in the West continue to relate to Russia with suspicion and misunderstanding as they are "hostages of Cold War thinking and we can do nothing with them," he added. "But I must assure you that none of the Western leaders today shares such sentiments toward Russia," he stressed. As for Russia itself, it must understand that terrorism is the weapon of the weak, a product of 1960s decolonization when there emerged too many failed states that are unable to control their territory and population. It is up to Russia to determine whether it will also fall into this category and became an object of terrorism or together with West it will became an active fighter of it. If Russia manages to turn its army into modern combat force and get rid of its dependence on oil exports, it will join the West; if not, it will go into the category of failed states.


RFE/RL

Chechenpress, London

A. Litvinenko: "The identities of the terrorists prove 100% the participation of the FSB in the seizure of the school in Beslan"


In connection with the extremely intricate and incomprehensible situation with the personalities of the people who participated in the hostage-taking in Beslan, the correspondent of the "Chechenpress" agency turned to a specialist for an explanation. The questions are answered by former Lieutenant Colonel of the FSB, Aleksandr Litvinenko.

Question: Aleksandr, could you please explain to our readers how it could happen that the persons who seized the hostages had previously been in the hands of the FSB, and how all of them managed to be freed simultaneously and to organize and conduct such an action?

Answer: According to the internal orders which regulate the operational secret service activity of the organs of the FSB of the Russian Federation, for persons who have been arrested on suspicion of their participation in illegal armed units, organized criminal associations which repeatedly used dangerous forms of violence and terrorism, a file of operative work progress is opened (a so-called file of operational control or development, and if more than two people are suspected of criminal activity, a file is opened for the group). During the work on the mentioned case, measures are taken for the operational tracking of the criminal cases, and secret measures are taken with regard to the prisoners. I.e., they are being followed, and in this connection they are constantly under the control of the special services.

If the persons involved in these cases are sentenced, the cases are transferred to be dealt with by the subdivisions of the FSB in whose area the object is serving his sentence in the form of prison. The operational files are continued during his stay in the prison colony, and after he has finished the prison period and is released, they are sent to the FSB organs at his place of residence. When the object is released and reliable, and checked information has been acquired that he has completely stopped carrying out criminal activity, the operational file is reassessed into a file of operational observation, and continued for about five years, as a rule.

If the criminal case is abandoned because there is no criminal issue, or it cannot be proved, as well as on other rehabilitation grounds (though this is extremely rare), the operative subdivision, as a rule, continues for some time with the control or observation of the object while he is free, and it isn't stopped until confirmation is obtained that he has completely ended his criminal activity.

Additionally, there are frequent cases when people who are arrested for insignificant crimes are controlled or dealt with like persons suspected of more serious crimes. The operational measures of the FSB with respect to the objects are stopped in the following cases: no confirmation that the person has been engaged in criminal activity; the person foregoes criminal activity; death; reaching the age of 70 for men and 65 for women, and also in connection with their recruiting into the secret service apparatus of the RF FSB (then agency files are opened on them).

If we examine the case of those who have been tracked down in the hostage-taking in Beslan town, and the fact that they proved to have been free after their arrest by FSB organs and that they committed the hostage-taking after that, then I am absolutely sure that they couldn't have left their prisons under any circumstances, without having come into the view of the FSB. Especially if we consider the fact that they were categorized in their criminal cases as active participants in bandit formations, persons who were close to the leaders of the Resistance, terrorists. I don't have any doubts that after their detention and arrest, in the places where they were kept under guard by the FSB organs, active operational measures were conducted with regard to them, and first of all, measures directed at turning them to secret collaboration with the FSB. And only after they had been recruited, after all the operational information known to them about people the FSB
is interested in had been obtained, and an additional check as newly recruited FSB agents, they were released in order to fulfill assignments for the special services.

This is the only possible way to explain the fact that these people who had previously been sitting in prisons under active surveillance by the FSB, suddenly all together turned out to be free and then under one command planned and carried out this action. Moreover, none of them allegedly reported the planned hostage-taking to the FSB. It is possible that some of them might have kept the FSB "in the dark", and when it became known, they were already in the school building. But it's 100% sure that Chechens who are arrested for terrorism and participation in bandit formations don't have other ways to freedom than to flee or to be recruited. And most likely, Khodov, who was wanted for terrorism, wasn't arrested by the militia organs at his homeplace, because he was a secret agent of the FSB, and he wasn't removed from the arrest warrant in order not to reveal him to his operational environment, just as they did back in the old days at the Moscow UFSB with their known agent, the terrorist Maksim Lozovsky, nicknamed "The Colonel".

Aleksandr Litvinenko, London, for Chechenpress, 08.09.04 (tr. N.S., my minor edits)

A letter in today's Observer newspaper, from the linguist Amorey Gethin, in Cambridge:

Is there no limit to the hypocrisy and double standards of the West? We cannot get accurate figures concerning Chechnya, since the Russian government restricts the movement of journalists there, but we know that Grozny was effectively destroyed. The number of children and their parents blown to pieces or mutilated by Russian 'security' forces on the orders of Putin must therefore have been several times greater than those who suffered the same fate in Beslan. Yet there has been no comparable public outpouring of sympathy for the Chechen children or expression of horror at the 'evil' Putin.

Akhmed Zakayev's figures, given on September 7, are probably on the conservative side, and include:

35,000 children killed
- 40,000 children seriously injured
- 32,000 children partially orphaned
- 6,000 children totally orphaned

To this we would need to add a figure of 100% of children who have been seriously traumatized by 10 years of Russian atrocities.


(via Chechna-SL)

On the same day (September 10) that Russian nationalists demonstrated near the US embassy, demanding the extradition of Ilyas Akhmadov from the United States, according to the Interfax news agency

a rally demanding the extradition of Akhmed Zakayev was also held near the British Embassy in Moscow... Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky said at that rally: "Bring all the bandits from the British Isles to the Russian criminal justice system!" The rally had some 600 participants plus members of the LDPR Moscow office. The people, mainly young people and pensioners, were holding slogans reading "LDPR demands Zakayev's extradition!" "Blair! Don't provoke terrorism, it comes back to you!" "Blair, prove that you are against terrorism! Extradite Zakayev!"

It's clear that Putin's fascist "fringe" is moving closer to the centres of power and authority in Russia.

Another rally was scheduled for 3pm today.

Russian Journalist: FSB Wanted to Kill Me
Created: 10.09.2004 20:17 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 20:17 MSK, 23 hours 11 minutes ago

MosNews

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who got seriously sick while trying to get to Beslan on a day of the school siege suspects the agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB) of having poisoned her.

Speaking to the RTL Radio France on Friday, she told she asked a cup of tea and fainted soon after having drunk. “In the hospital, a physician told me of a serious poisoning with an unidentified toxic agent. I suspect three FSB officials who were on the same plane in the business class of involvement in this vile act. One of them asked the air hostess a question, the other put a pill into the cup. It dissolves in a moment, and it is a miracle that I survived. I am sure: they wanted to kill me,” Politkovskaya said.

She added she did not make any secret that she planned to start negotiations with terrorists in the South Russian town of Beslan. But she could not believe the special services could act like this. At the same time, she was sure her colleague Yuri Shchekochikhin who died last July was also poisoned. However, the reasons of his death are still unclear.

The rest of the article is here.

Perhaps the most poignant part of it is right at the end, with Politkovskaya's own words:

“We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial — whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit,” Politkovskaya wrote.

From Olivier Dupuis:

Chechnya in the heart of Europe

Diritto e Libertà, July-September 2004

A cloak of silence covers the "Chechen question": the tens of thousands of deaths ignored, the widespread use of torture, the role of the Russian state and of its "services" in the mysterious and bloody explosions and in numerous kidnappings, the denial of justice to victims who are juridically citizens of a member state of the Council of Europe; the Russian media commandeered by the state, and the Western media (with rare exceptions) that spread the news of Mr Putin's so-called "anti-terrorist crusade".

There is another silence, however, which is even stranger: the silence about the role of Europe, of its institutions and its citizens, about what it could and should do within frontiers that it tries hard to hide. For the extermination of the Chechen people, the slow genocide of this small population, the endless string of war crimes and crimes against humanity is taking place here, in Europe. In this geographical and historical Europe, in this political and juridical Europe that should be embodied in the Council of Europe and in the European Court for Human Rights, in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and in the Partnership and Cooperation agreement that ties the Russian Federation to the European Union.

Can this Europe, which aims to be political, allow a genocide to take place within its borders? Can it allow a small population of less than one million people to continue to be the victim of the imperial nostalgia of one side, the ambitions and calculations of the other side, of laisser-faire and spiraling horror?

Can this Europe return - does it want to return - to the head-in-the-sand policy it adopted towards post-Tito Yugoslavia? A policy that led to over 250,000 deaths, an endless list of war crimes and crimes against humanity, destruction unprecedented in Europe since the end of the Second World War, huge financial costs for the international community (and the end is still nowhere in sight) and, last but not least, a lasting return to the worst nationalist sentiments in wide sectors of these convalescent societies.

Would it not be better for Europe to look to the example of the recent enlargement of the European Union to eight countries from Central and Eastern Europe? For this is a policy, no more and no less: who, in fact, could rule out the possibility that without the clear prospect of membership of the European Union - with precise duties and a precise timetable - one or other of these countries would have yielded, along the lines of the Belarus of the sinister Lukachenko, to the sirens of authoritarianism? This successful policy is a policy of the European Union, even though the European Union sometimes gives the impression that it wants to justify or minimize its importance.

In the light of these two experiences, the Yugoslavian catastrophe and the success of enlargement, the European Union should immediately set up negotiations with countries that are still not members. As well as the enlargement to Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia scheduled for 2007 or 2009, it is absolutely necessary to extend the process, without further delay, to the other Balkan countries - Serbia-Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia and Kosovo - the countries of the Caucasus, Georgia (which is about to present a formal application for membership), Azerbaijan and Armenia, Turkey - if only to confirm the universality of the values underlying the European project - Israel - so that a democracy under threat can flourish again in a climate of security and so that those Palestinians who dream of a democratic Palestine can finally govern their own country - and also Ukraine and Moldavia, two countries we seem to want to condemn to an endless struggle against the internal and external demons of the return to the past, and Belarus (without Lukachenko).

We can already imagine the outcry: this new enlargement would end up digging the grave of the political Europe. It is a well-known refrain, sung every time the Union has been enlarged. And belied every time by the facts. Because what has actually happened is the exact opposite. The six-member Europe was more or less immobile. It was the prospect of the membership of Great Britain that kick-started it (the European Monetary System, the first direct election of the European Parliament). As for Spain, Greece and Portugal, their membership not only confirmed their return to democracy but was also accompanied by the relaunch of the European construction (the Single Act: the launch of the single market of people, goods, services and capital), while the enlargement from 12 to 15 members with the arrival of Sweden, Finland and Austria served to give direction to the Treaty of Maastricht (the launch of the single currency, the first steps towards common internal and juridical policy, the first outline of a common foreign policy). With respect to the countries of Central Europe, there is no doubt that the prospect of membership was a decisive factor in their return to democracy and in the forthcoming deepening of the Union (the Constitution). It is not difficult, moreover, to imagine that the contribution of the Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Baltic peoples will be far from marginal with regard to one of the central questions for the future of the Union, that of its relations with its great neighbour to the East: the Russian Federation.

In truth, each enlargement of the Union has been accompanied by its deepening. At the cost of new contradictions, true, and often of awkward compromises. But the true demons against which it has found itself having to struggle have lain not so much in one or other of the new members, the so-called Trojan horses of dissolution, as in the old internal demons of the imperial nostalgia or the grandeur of "old" member states.

As for the argument about the so-called critical mass beyond which the Union would inevitably implode or become diluted in a vast, formless single market, it is worth recalling that the 25-member Union has 450 million inhabitants, while with 40 or 42 members the total would be only slightly over 600 million. Not exactly a radical change. All the more so since the process would have to unfold by stages: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2024 . What, then, are we to say about India, a democratic continent-country faced with problems far more serious than our own! This country, which has just given us another great lesson in democracy, has a total of no less than 1.1 billion inhabitants. Almost twice as many as a European Union enlarged to the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Moldavia and Israel!

Should we be afraid of these 150 million extra European citizens, or of those economists who almost unanimously warn of a serious lack of manpower in the near future, the worst nightmare for those in charge of pension funds, for many European businesses and institutions. Is the aim of the European Union to encourage illegal immigration, with the consequent increase in crime, or to forecast and manage the changes in our societies?

Finally, should we perhaps plan for the membership of the Russian Federation? The reply lies first of all with Russia, undoubtedly the only European country with a critical mass sufficient to make this choice an option rather than a necessity. But there is nothing against it in principle. Except the Russia we know today: full of imperial nostalgia, incapable of closing the chapter of colonialism except by returning to the old methods of cooption-corruption of the elites, destabilization or, as in Chechnya, weapons, fire, blood and destruction.

Russia is clearly a fundamental question for the European Union. It is its great neighbour. It has long been a pillar of European culture and history. It is still a military power. It is a potential market of 145 million consumers for European businesses. It is one of the Union's most important suppliers of gas and oil. But this market, this gas and this oil are not only positive factors. Because of them, and despite its rhetoric, the Union turns a blind eye to serious issues such as the Kremlin's control over the media and the judicial system, the physical elimination or imprisonment of awkward personalities - human rights campaigners, environmentalists, journalists, businessmen, political rivals, etc. - and the extermination of the Chechen people. While as a result of the so-called strategic partnership with Russia in the sphere of oil and gas supply, the European Union convinces itself that it has solved the problem of diversification of its energy supply, postponing indefinitely the energy revolution that the finite nature of hydrocarbon resources, and in the meantime their spiraling prices and their devastating effects on the environment, should impose as a major priority.

The questions of the extermination of the Chechen people and of the authoritarian tendencies present in Russia alone should suffice to demonstrate the fact that the European Union should immediately establish a very different kind of strategic partnership with the Russian Federation. A partnership based on generosity and intransigence. As far as generosity is concerned, with the opening of the Union's frontiers to all Russian citizens (and an end to the interminable bureaucratic procedures whose only effect is to favour the mafias and to line the wallets of corrupt European officials); the rapid creation of a EU-Russia customs union; and support for investments by European businesses in Russia. From the point of view of intransigence: the demand for a speedy reform of the judicial system and of the Russian media, and - by far the main priority - the opening, under the aegis of the United Nations, of political negotiations with the Chechen resistance.

Because, as the Russian authorities declare, and as Mr Putin has stated to The Financial Times, it is not the final status of Chechnya that matters. How could it be otherwise? Chechnya represents less than 1% of the Russian population, and its territory covers less than 0.1% of the territory of the Russian Federation. Its oil constitutes less than 1% of Russian oil. And as for the risk of a "domino effect", it has been no more than a product of fantasy ever since the Tatars of Tatarstan, who together with the Chechens had the strongest claims to independence, came to an agreement with the Russian government.

According to Mr Putin, the Chechen question is above all a problem of internal security, that is the need to neutralize any possibility of the emergence of hotbeds of instability on the Russian borders, a sanctuary from which terrorist groups could launch operations against Russia; if this is the case, then there is only one question to resolve: to create the conditions in Chechnya that would allow democracy, the rule of law and freedom to flourish.

Exactly what the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov proposes when he calls for the establishment of an interim United Nations administration in Chechnya. A plan which has been backed by hundreds of parliamentarians, numerous international personalities, and around 30,000 citizens from over 100 countries.

The establishment of an international administration as a stage in the transition towards Chechnya's membership of the European Union could and should form the avante-poste of the indispensable struggle for a new Europe, wider and deeper, of a Europe that sees itself in a new process of enlargement and also of deepening, as well as and better than the draft Constitution drawn up by the Convention.

For it is clearly not the membership of Turkey, or of the Ukraine, or of all the other European countries, forcibly held back at the gates of the Union, let alone the membership of a country of 1,000,000 people and 10,000 square kilometers like Chechnya, that would threaten the deepening of the European Union. On the contrary. As always, the threat comes from those states that are incapable of adapting to the times, still beset by illusions of empire or of grandeur, which project their fading dreams onto the European Union, who see the Union as a surrogate of their lost "power". It is also, though we hear much less about it, the special interest of the approximately 100,000 people who populate the Foreign Ministries of the 25 member countries. A corporation whose current power derives largely precisely from the process of European integration, thanks to which it has managed, as competences were gradually transferred from the member states to the community institutions, to secure competences in almost all the fields of political, social and economic life.

The membership of all these countries is not, it must be understood, a panacea to solve a multitude of very different and very serious problems. It is, however, an absolute necessity to guarantee the development of democracy in these countries, their security, in other words their survival, and the development of democracy in Russia, and also to ensure that the European Union embodies the values and the interests it claims to defend and that the member states of the Union finally decide to throw away the vain frills of a sovereignty that now has no object, thus laying the foundations for the creation of a common foreign policy.

Europe, yet again, is at a crossroads. Without the force of the pictures of the Berlin Wall as it was finally collapsing, without the joy and the hope that this historic event inspired in those who were freed and in those who had too often left them to their own destiny, we will have to find the strength and the means for a great mobilization to ensure that these new partnerships become the imposing new "building site" of a European Union in which enlargement and deepening can once again complete and reinforce each other.

Who was politically irresponsible in the past? Jacques Delors who, as Slovenia was declaring its independence, continued to state before the European Parliament that the disintegration of Yugoslavia would not be allowed, or Marco Pannella and the Radicals, who had been calling from as early as 1983 for Yugoslavia to join the European Community?

Who is politically irresponsible now? Those who, on the subject of Chechnya, confuse integrality and territorial integrity, who spew out the ready-to-use formulas they had already used at the time of the war in Yugoslavia, including the particularly abject appeal to the territorial integrity of Russia, when the integrity of Russia and of the Chechen people, of the individual members of this people, of its culture, its history, and its territory, have been violated every day for over ten years now? Or those who want to make the Union and its enlargement to Chechnya the means and the objective to save a people, to save thousands of lives, and to safeguard the soul of Russia and that of the European Union?



=====
Olivier Dupuis
Tel. +32-476-21.55.72

On Wednesday (8 September) the Guardian newspaper published an article by John Laughland, a "trustee" of something that calls itself "the British Helsinki Human Rights Group". The article, entitled "The Chechens' American Friends", purports to show the existence of an international American-inspired conspiracy, compounded of such diverse figures as the Democrat Zbygniew Brzezinski, the Republican "Neocons", Boris Berezovsky,and Akhmed Zakayev, all the way to Boris Nemtsov and Nikolai Ryzhkov, dedicated to advancing the cause of the Chechen resistance and fomenting hostility towards President Putin and his government. The title "British Helsinki Human Rights Group" makes the author's home organization sound as though it has something to do with the International Helsinki Federation, which is mildly critical of Putin. However, if one goes to the BHHRG website, at www.oscewatch.org, one discovers that this is a site almost wholly devoted to supporting the line of the Russian government on a whole host of international issues, many of which are centred on Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. For example, we learn that while "Estonia has been hailed as a bastion of democracy", "there is another, darker side to the story", whereupon a litany of traditional Russian government anti-Estonian propaganda is trotted out, from alleged human rights abuses against Russian-speakers to stories about "child-trafficking". If we turn to the organization's files on Kosova (they call it Kosovo, of course) and Macedonia, these show the kind of historical falsifications only found in Chetnik and Russian nationalist publications. The single listed example of human rights abuses in Russia itself turns out to be evil Eurobosses threatening the people of Kaliningrad. And so on, and so on. A classical counter-intelligence website.

James Lileks, writing in JWR:

Nuke Chechnya, some shout. Sure, that'll work. In a sense, it would — "no man, no problem," as a glinty-eyed nasty Georgian once put it. But if anything, Russia's war against terrorism shows the limit of force. Neither world or domestic opinion has heretofore kept Russia from flattening Chechnya into a mist of atomized concrete and pulverized bone.

Americans build bombs that take down government buildings and leave the hospital down the block intact. Russians level the entire block and the next and the next for good measure. The Before and After pictures of Grozny look like the difference between an aerial photo of a thriving city and a snapshot of the Moon from an orbiting Apollo. What else can Vladimir Putin do?

Whatever he does, it won't be pretty. Paranoids on the left and right accuse George W. Bush of using Sept. 11 as a pretext to suspend civil liberties — but if they want to see the real thing, look at Putin.

Watch Russia. Watch as the rest of the Russian Federation gets more tightly bound to the man in the Kremlin; the courts, the media, and the corporations will continue their consolidation into a tightly controlled state. Civility at the core, brutality in the outlands. Fascism without the shouting or silly symbols, but the real thing nonetheless.

The terrorists have been called Arabs, Chechens, Ingush, Saudis, Lebanese, Kazakhs and Blacks.

But who were they?

This appeared in the Estonian (Tallinn) newspaper Päevaleht on September 8, 2004:

Window on Eurasia

It is Not the Terrorists Who Are Strong

Paul A. Goble

After every terrorist incident, especially after one as awful and bloody as at Beslan in the Russian Federation, both those in the country that has been attacked and those around the world who fear that their country might be next – including Estonians -- inevitably ask themselves what might have been done to prevent the attack and what they themselves should do to prevent any future repetition. In virtually every case, those asking these questions first try to identify their own specific weaknesses and the peculiar strengths of their opponents.

Thus, on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin argued that what had happened in Beslan was a reflection of the fact that Russians today „live in conditions that have arisen after the collapse of an enormous and great state” but unfortunately a state that lacked the ability to survive in „a rapidly changing world.”

As a result of this collapse, he said, Russians had „ceased to devote sufficient attention to questions of defense and security and had allowed corruption to undermine the judicial and law enforcement spheres.” Because of this weakness, the Russian president continued, the terrorists had concluded that „they are stronger than we are.” And to counter them, Putin pledged to take a variety of steps that will lead to „the strengthening of the unity of the country.”

Both Putin’s analysis of the situation and his pledge to do what he can to prevent any repetition run parallel to those of the leaders of other countries hit by terrorism and are clearly intended to to reassure the population. But in his case and theirs, both the analysis and pledge often appear to reflect a misunderstanding of terrorism and a misunderstanding of the ability of any country to be both a free society and one that will never be the victim of a terrorist attack.

On the one hand, terrorism has never been the weapon of the strong. Instead, it is precisely and preeminently the weapon of the weak, of those who are excluded from the the normal discourse of power, who do not have a role in society and who do not control either territory or the kind of resources against which existing states can easily act. But precisely these fundamental weaknesses can make terrorism appear strong.

Those who feel they have nothing to lose and everything to gain are prepared for apocalyptic violence. Those who can take actions that existing political institutions cannot prevent inevitably appear stronger than those they attack. And those who can force existing systems to change, even to change in a more authoritarian direction intended to prevent terrorism, often appear to have won.

On the other hand, democracies with their freedoms rather than
authoritarian states with their police are not only as President Putin says more dynamic and vital. They are also better positioned to defend themselves and the world against terrorism over the long haul even if their very openness on occasion allows for the terrorists to act in the short term. That is a hard lesson, especially for those who have just suffered violence, but it is nonetheless a necessary one.

Democratic societies do provide openings for terrorists – no free society can ever guarantee that there will be no acts against it -- but much more important, they inevitably undermine the ability of terrorists to carry out their attacks both ideologically and practically. Because they provide a place for a discussion of all issues, these societies take away from the terrorists the arguments they use to recruit people to engage in terrorism. And because a free and open society can act with confidence, its people are less likely to become a sea in which terrorists can swim.

Authoritarian countries, in contrast, may ward off this or that attack – indeed, their police powers are designed to do precisely that -- but they do so only at the cost of creating new breeding grounds for terrorists not only by precluding any discussion of the ideas behind those who use terror but also by providing a ready-made justification for violence: If the state engages in violence against its own people or against others, the terrorists can plausibly claim, why should the terrorists not do the same?

Almost a century ago, the great Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad wrote what many believe to be the best book ever written about terrorists and their calculations, „The Secret Agent.” In this novel, Conrad describes how a terrorist operating in England could only win if that country’s democratic government was forced to decide that it must transform itself into an authoritarian one, precisely to meet the challenge of terrorism. If that were to happen, Conrad pointed out, the terrorist would have won the battle, but if it did not and if England continued to operate as an open society, then the terrorists could at best win a tactical victory. But they would inevitably lose the war.

That is indeed a hard lesson -- especially for the victims of heinous crimes like those in Beslan and the Moscow metro and for all those committed to human rights and freedom. But it is one all of us need to learn and perhaps relearn: democratic and law-based states are strong, and the terrorists, however dramatic and ugly their actions, are weak – and they will remain so unless we act in ways that unintentionally multiply their influence and reduce our own.

Hat tip: MAK

Alexander Podrabinek, in PRIMA:

Из страшной ситуации в Беслане был простой и разумный выход: отказаться от российского террора в Чечне и тем самым спасти захваченных заложников. По крайней мере, начать переговоры с правительством Масхадова в обмен на освобождение детей. Понять, что единственное требование террористов – остановить войну в Чечне и дать мир ее народу – вполне конкретно и абсолютно оправдано.

Террор оправдать невозможно. Тем более, в отношении детей. Но понять его причины можно. И было бы ханжеством не признать – чеченцы отвечают террором на террор. Если Россия не прекратит насилие в Чечне, террористическая война будет продолжаться.


In Olga Sharp's translation:

There was a simple and sound solution to the horrific situation in Beslan: stop Russian terror in Chechnya to spare the lives of the hostages, or at least, begin negotiations with Maskhadov’s government in exchange for the release of the children. It must be understood that the terrorists’ only demand — to stop the war in Chechnya and give peace to its people — is concrete enough and absolutely justified.

It is impossible to justify terror, especially against children. But it is possible to understand the reasons. It would have been sanctimonious to deny the fact that Chechens’ response to terror is terror. Until Russia stops the violence in Chechnya, terrorist war will continue.

The whole article is here in English, and here in Russian.

William Pfaff, writing in the International Herald Tribune, has an interesting take on the subject of nationalism in the modern world. One may disagree with him on Afghanistan and Iraq, but find oneself nodding in assent when he reaches the end of his article, with its conclusion that

Nationalism has been the most important force in modern history, resisting and outlasting all totalitarianisms. It easily merges with religious fundamentalism, which is another way to affirm identity. It makes use of terrorism because this is the weapon of the weak. But nationalism is what it is all about. After all, what has driven U.S. policy since Sept. 11, 2001, if not outraged nationalism?

Hat tip: M.-A. Kelam

Two recent books that throw light on what has happened in Chechnya, at Transitions Online.


31 July 2004
Chechnya: An Open Wound
Two recent books show why Stalin's deportations remain an open wound for the Chechens, one through the dry brutality of new archival findings, the other through a tale of human suffering.
By Brian Glyn Williams

Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migration in the USSR, by Pavel Polian. Central European University Press, 2003. Hardcover and paperback, 444 pages.

The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire, by Khassan Baiev. Walker Books, 2003.Hardcover, 400 pages.

While the collapse of communism in the Balkans and Soviet Eurasia brought many positive concepts into the world's lexicon, such as "glasnost" and "Velvet Revolution," the seismic consequences of those events also introduced a darker term into the world's vocabulary, "ethnic cleansing." The Western press mainstreamed this term to describe such post-communist hellholes as Bosnia and Kosovo--but those in the field of Sovietology know that the concept actually has older roots in the region.

In the late 1930s and 1940s the Soviet Union institutionalized ethnic cleansing on such a massive scale that the USSR ranks among the world's worst perpetrators of this crime against humanity. While the war crimes of the Nazis and Serbs have been widely exposed, it is a testimony to the total power of the Soviet organs of oppression and secrecy that the Soviets' successful cleansing of whole nations was by contrast kept largely secret both at home and abroad.

NKVD SOURCES TAPPED

The shroud of secrecy surrounding the deportation of millions of Soviet citizens belonging to targeted ethnic groups was lifted, to a degree, by the publication of two trailblazing books on the topic in the 1960s: Alexander Nekrich's The Punished Peoples and Robert Conquest's The Nation Killers. But these works were, perforce, based on anecdotal evidence smuggled out of the USSR.

Now, following the same trail, comes Pavel Polian's Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migration in the USSR, an ambitious study that, largely using declassified NKVD sources made available since 1989, provides a systematic analysis of the cleansing of a wide variety of ethnic groups whose existence was hardly recognized by the outside world. While Polian's work provides an essential outline for those studying ethnic oppression in the USSR, it also has wider applications for scholars in a variety of fields from those engaged in comparative genocide studies to those focusing on nationalities policies in Soviet (and post-Soviet) Eurasia.

A scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences widely known for his studies of deportations and ethnic cleansing in the USSR, Polian is the author of 300 articles and a number of books. The Russian original of Against Their Will appeared in 2001.

In essence, Polian's well-documented new study offers the most comprehensive chronology to date of the Kremlin's brutal cleansing (Stalin actually used the Russian term ochistit, "to cleanse," in his orders to Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD security police) of a wide variety of peoples ranging from the Far Eastern Koreans (who were deported in anticipation of war with Japan) to Finns and Poles deported from territories annexed by the USSR in the initial days of World War II.

SCAPEGOAT PEOPLES

A theme that emerges from Polian's study is the arbitrary nature of the targeting of peoples inhabiting the USSR's borderlands for "removal" in order to fulfill Soviet foreign policy exigencies. In particular, Polian demonstrates that Stalin sought pre-emptively to remove distrusted non-Slavic ethnic groups from near the borders of countries that he intended to invade. Stalin and Beria, for example, ordered the expulsion of distrusted Muslim minorities inhabiting the USSR's southern flank--in its main naval bastion facing Turkey on the Black Sea, the Crimea, and along the Georgian Military Highway through the Caucasus--in anticipation of an offensive struggle with Turkey in 1943 and 1944. Although Stalin never invaded Turkey, hundreds of thousands of Muslim Crimean Tatars, Karachais, Balkars, Chechens, Ingush, and Meskhetian Turks were nonetheless deported on the spurious charge that they had engaged in collective "betrayal of the Soviet homeland" to the Nazi invaders. Polian's work clearly demonstrates that, for the most part, Orthodox Slavs
did not, by contrast, experience deportation even though Russians and Ukrainians collaborated with the Germans to a greater extent than any of the deported nations (the homelands of the deported Chechens and Meskhetian Turks, for example, were never conquered by the Nazis, thus preventing any mass collaboration of the sort manifested by Russians and Ukrainians). This fact might lend credence to a claim made by many deportation survivors I interviewed in the Crimea and Uzbekistan, that Soviet policies of deportatsiia were driven more by latent racism and prejudice toward Muslims--which was endemic among the Slavophile Soviet elite--than by a
considered state-sponsored security policy.

In this regard the deportation of ethnic groups in the USSR may actually have had more in common with the ethnic cleansings carried out much more recently in the Balkans than has been argued. As Russophone Georgians, Stalin and Beria seem to have evinced a deep-seated distrust of their Muslim neighbors from the Caucasus, and this probably played a greater role in the deportations than Polian recognizes.

MASS STATISTICS AND ONE MAN'S TALE

This neglect to consider the human motivations of his actors is the only major flaw in Polian's work. The human element is all too often lost in his dry recounting of the "spoilage rate" in the deportation trains, in the litany of NKVD deportation decrees, in the numbing recitation of mortality statistics in the places of exile, and in the useful (but perforce cold) geographic "displacement" information collated by the author. While Polian's meticulous study will be an important resource for those who seek to quantify and trace Stalin's policies of ethnic-based oppression,
anthropologists, political scientists, ethnographers, and others concerned with the effect these deportations had on the targeted peoples on the human level will find Polian's work lacking in this important ingredient.

Sleptovsk, Ingushetia, June 2000: A woman wounded during a house search.

The human element is foremost in Khassan Baiev's The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire. This powerful book offers a case study of the Kremlin's past and present efforts to crush the most stubborn of all nations in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, the Chechens. Baiev's work is a truly epic tale of his efforts to run a hospital in a Chechen village during the two Russo-Chechen wars that have dragged on throughout the last decade but for a respite between 1996 and 1999. By telling the background story of his upbringing as a distrusted Chechen in the USSR and his subsequent efforts to run a village hospital during the Chechen conflicts, Baiev brings his people's story to life.

In so doing, Baiev's work succeeds in humanizing a nation that has been variously depicted as "untamable savages" by the Romanov Tsars and "Nazi traitors," "anti-Soviet elements," and "mafia ethno-thugs" by more recent rulers. Baiev's richly descriptive prose illuminates the traditions of the Chechen mountaineers as a backdrop to his own personal narrative, as he lovingly describes the rhythms of Chechen life, from his people's respect for their elders to the Sufi folk Islam of the mountains. In the process, Baiev weaves in the stories of "The Deportation" as a background to understanding his people and their historically contentious relations with Russia.

Baiev recounts being taken to his ancestral mountain village by his father to hear ritualized stories of those who were killed during the Soviet expulsion of the Chechens. And it soon becomes apparent from Baiev's account that, far from being a bygone event, the memory of the Chechens' deportation in February 1944 is very much alive today in the hearts and minds of this people. Villagers whose deaths were recorded as statistics in the sanitized NKVD accounts utilized by Polian are still mourned by the Chechens as beloved aunts, uncles, grandparents, or parents who died at the hands of "the Russians."

ORAL HISTORIES

Most importantly, the vivid picture Baiev paints of the Chechens' generational transfer of their sense of victimization to those who did not actually experience the 1944-1956 deportation and exile helps to explain the real roots of the ongoing conflict between the Chechens and Russia. In this respect Baiev's firsthand account offers an invaluable eyewitness counterpoint to Kremlin reports on the Chechens that once again seek to vilify this people by portraying them, on this occasion, as an "Al Qaeda terrorist nation." While the memory of the deportation continues to be a
powerful source of discord between Chechens and Russians, the Russian Federation's clumsy efforts to destroy Chechen secessionists (and genuine terrorists) through a policy of state-sponsored terrorism may have superseded the horrors of the deportation in the collective consciousness of the Chechens.

Baiev graphically describes the course of the last decade's two wars from the perspective of a doctor who ministered to hundreds of Russian soldiers and Chechens wounded in this forgotten heart of darkness. Over and again he relays stories of Chechens whose limbs are blown off, loved ones slain, and lives terrorized by those who seek to dehumanize them. And as one follows the author's struggle to keep his hospital up and running during wartime, one ingredient emerges from his tale that has been all too often lacking in media reports on the Russo-Chechen conflict--the human face of his people.

Brian Glyn Williams is an assistant professor of Islamic history at the
University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. He is the author of The Crimean
Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation.

Photographs by Stanley Greene. These photographs are reproduced from his
book Open Wound: Chechnya 1994 to 2003 with the kind permission of the
publisher, Trolley.

Some noteworthy comments by Adam Michnik, the former Polish dissident and Solidarity activist, who served six years as a political prisoner, and is now editor-in-chief of Poland's largest daily, Gazeta Wyborcza. Via Marius, of CHECHNYA-SL.

http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/swiat/1,34174,2270678.html

Hostages of the Russian authority

Adam Michnik 05-09-2004, last update 05-09-2004 22:02


How it could come to this unheard barbarity, that Chechen terrorists used such inhumane weaponry, and the storming Russian soldiers caused deaths of so many people, including so many children?

President Putin's answer is flabbergasting: "Some want to tear away a more delicious slice from us and others are helping them. They are helping them in belief that Russia, as one of the largest nuclear powers, still poses a threat to them and, therefore, this threat has to be eliminated. "And terrorism is, of course, only an instrument for attaining such goals."

This mysterious search for some anonymous enemies beyond the borders of Russia doesn't change the reality - Putin's policy towards Chechnya has suffered defeat.

The second Chechen war which raised Putin to the peaks of popularity, has evolved into a spiral of violence. No norms, nor any scruples work any more. All the tricks - even the most inhuman ones - have became allowed. Meanwhile, president Putin announces more of this tightening of screw. That's a road to nowhere.

No arguments - political, national, religious ones - can justify acts of Chechen terrorists. By taking children as hostages, a guerilla unit had transformed itself into a bandit gang. But the thing is, that the bandits turned up to be more effective than president of Chechnya Aslan Maskhadov, who declares his will for a dialogue and compromise.

By rejecting negotiations with Maskhadov and taking his family as hostages, president Putin has strenghtened the most radical wing in the Chechen resistance. By this route, will be reaching for power in Chechnya, these kind of people like Basayev or other Chechen talibans. A bid on violence will be breeding the next terrorist acts. Does the Russian president not know history of Russia? Has he forgotten that in the past centuries the conquest of Chechnya for the Russian tsars had had taken 75 years. Has he forgotten that for the Chechens memory of deportation by Stalin, is the same as memory of slaughter for the Armenians, and memory of Holocaust for the Jews? Has nobody told him that in Chechen custom, a vengeance is mandatory, that by giving up to avenge, a Chechen becomes an object of disdain among his countrymen, and that's worse than death?

The Chechen society is shattered, set up against each other, is simple and anarchical, but it integrates itself in the resistance against the Russian occupation, therefore the most horrible acts of terror might be acceptable, or at least don't cause a protest.

In Israel, in Iraq, in Chechnya, there's explosion of terrorism and suicide bombings - specific to ideology of Islamic fundamentalism - when conquered, a society accepts that only by this road can reach its goals. That's why president Bush or premier Sharon, after some bitter experiences are seeking other solutions than only a naked violence. It's obvious, that in Russia, only president Putin can give an impulse for any dialogue. Will he have a courage of de Gaulle, who understood that is better to grant independence for Algeria, than entagle France in this dirty war without any end?

Sooner or later Chechnya will be sovereign, because Chechens won't become Russians. As the Americans should have been recalling Vietnam for themselves, to not to repeat in Iraq their defeat from there [Vietnam], in Moscow they should always remember about the defeat in Afghanistan. How many more people have to lose their lifes, to become obvious, that a war which can't won, shouldn't be continued? This
kind of war has to be ended.

A few years ago, a group of Russian intelectuals, among them Yelena Bonner (widow of Nobel Prizewinning physicist Andrei Sakharov) and Dmitry Furman were writing: " The maximum what can be achieved, by killing a lot of Chechens and losing many of our people, is to establish in Chechnya a regime of occupiers for years, which inevitably will cause deformation of the Russian justice and democratic structures, will change Russia into a police and criminal state in a larger degree than today. This absurdal at the first sight, of the Russian president [then Yeltsin], premier [then Putin] and our generals aim, to keep demanding independence Chechnya at any
cost, within the borders of Russia, is unfortunately absolutely natural. This kind of authority needs turbulent Chechnya. But all of us - people of Chechnya, and people of Russia - we're hostages of the present authority and of each other."

That's why, disdain and condemnation of cruel act of terror must come together with pensiveness [thoughtfulness with sadness] over the catastrophe of Russian policy in Chechnya.

Today's Scotsman has a succinct leader on the situation in the North Caucasus;

Crumbling Russian empire


The crisis in Chechnya has a simple cause and it is not a lot to do, at least in principle, with al-Qaeda. Unless President Vladimir Putin grasps this, everyone - Russians, Chechens and even those of us in the West - will go on suffering as did the children of Beslan. Russia - Czarist, Bolshevik and "managed democracy" under Mr Putin - is determined to assuage its dented national pride by retaining as much of its old colonial empire as possible. But, as Europe discovered long ago, unwilling empires are expensive to run and ultimately futile to try and hold on to.

The Russian Empire annexed the Caucasus region, and with it the Chechens, in 1858, the year Britain put down the Indian Mutiny. Britain eventually left India in 1947. Two generations later, few in the UK remember, far less care, that Britain was split for years over the question of Indian independence. The British Empire has been consigned to Lenin’s dustbin of history. But not so the vast empire the Czars built from Poland in the west to Vladivostok on the Pacific, an empire then ruthlessly consolidated by the Bolsheviks. On the fall of the Soviet Union, the Chechens temporarily evicted Russia and elected their own president in January 1997 - Aslan Maskhadov, a former Soviet officer. But Mr Maskhadov was unable to control his more radical supporters and the breakaway republic descended into anarchy. Rather than help, Mr Putin seized the excuse to send Russian troops back into Chechnya in 1999, to avenge the earlier humiliation and to re-exert Moscow’s control over the oil-rich Caucasus. We are now living with the consequences.

It is understandable that Friday's hellish massacre has caused Mr Putin to threaten retribution. Certainly, the perpetrators involved should be hunted down as a threat to everyone. But if over a decade of Russian scorched earth policy in Chechnya has failed, what more repression short of an outright Carthaginian peace will stabilise the situation? Far better for Mr Putin to recognise that the roots of this conflict lie in Chechen nationalism and Russian colonialism, and solve the problem by starting a dialogue with more moderate Chechen figures like the ex-president Mr Maskhadov, who has said that his forces were not involved in the school siege.

The rest of the article is

here.

Also in the Scotsman, a report that Raf Shakirov of Isvestia newspaper, Moscow, "was sacked today after his newspaper published pages of photos of wounded and dead children and other victims of the school hostage crisis. Ekho Moskvy radio and other Russian media said the exit of Raf Shakirov, 44...was connected with the newspaper’s Saturday issue, which contained the photos."

Two comments on media reports of the aftermath of the Beslan atrocity, both courtesy of Chechnya-sl:

Comment by Norbert Strade:

> Source: Reuters

> The man, dressed in dirty black shirt, looked and spoke very much
> like a native of one of Russia's North Caucasus regions, which
> include Chechnya and neighbouring North Ossetia, where the hostage
> crisis occurred.
>
> "I did not shoot. I swear by Allah I did not shoot," said the man,
> who looked scared. "I swear by Allah I want to live."


This complete episode was shown on Danish TV tonight. Two men in camouflage and masks drag this young guy into a little room and to a chair, twisting his arms so he is forced to almost crawl. He has North Caucasian features and looks very scared, and as far as I can hear, he speaks with a North Caucasian accent. He repeats the lines mentioned in the Reuters telegram. Btw., the sentence "I swear by Allah I want to live" comes after the masked men ask him several times: "Do you want to live?". But the most interesting part isn't mentioned in the telegram. He says he would never have shot, he has children himself. And he says "I didn't shoot. We had orders to shoot into the air when we are attacked" (!).

The man could have been one of the hostage-takers, but the clip doesn't contain any conclusive signs of this. It can be real, staged, using a prisoner forced to make certain statements (we've seen this many times in Chechnya), or it could even be a leftover from Dubrovka. But *if* it's authentic, the statement about "orders to shoot into the air" sounds like a repetition of Dubrovka, where the hostage-takers actually didn't shoot a single hostage (only one intruder), and their suicide belts were dysfunctional.

It also makes the observer wonder why such a claim is published on Russian national TV.

__________________________


http://www.ingushetiya.ru/news/4120.html


The only terrorist left alive gives statements

Ingushetiya..Ru, 05.09.2004 22:57

On the First Channel on 5 September they showed the only fighter who is alive and participated in the seizure of hostages in Beslan. It was possible to establish for our correspondent a surname of this fighter - [this surname is] Kulov, he is a Chechen, born in the Nozhay-Yurt district of Chechnya, recently he was renting an apartment in the town of Karabulak in Ingushetia. Kulov reported during investigation that their group commanded a Chechen fighter who had the nom de guerre "Colonel - [Rus. Polkovnik]". Only Polkovnik and Khodov knew where their group was going. After the seizure of school, in the group of fighters occurred a quarrel, since many of them were upset that the children were seized as hostages. Polkovnik personally shot down a leader of the group of those who were indignant, and to frighten them more, he blew up two women- smertnitsas, who were in their group. He blew up those women using his personal remote radio transmitter. In all, in their group there were 32 fighters. Taking into account that the bodies of 30 fighters have been discovered, one of the terrorists must had hid. Kulov does not know nationalities and surnames of other fighters, since among them it wasn't accepted to ask for a surname, but they addressed each other using Arab names. There wasn't a black man (a Negro) in their group. They took for a black man some fighter whose face was burnt and was covered by soot during the assault.

An interesting clipping from the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza (translated by Marius at CHECHNYA-SL):


Russians prefer not to know what's going on in the Caucasus

Waclaw Radziwinowicz 03-09-2004, last update 03-09-2004 19:50

Before I began to write this text last night, I switched for hundredth of time my TV to the Russian government channels. And I didn't get disappointed again. On the RTR, theater artists were talking about their friendships, on the ORT, there was a movie about adventures of female astronaut - Valentina Tereshkova. All the world's channels already for many hour had been reporting only this Beslan's tragedy, and here the same as in the last days, when the terrorists kept hundreds of hostages in the school in North Ossetian town - dance, shows or movies about the big Soviet past.

This unending holiday was being broken only by short news, from which the Russians were getting informed that the school in Beslan was assaulted by Islamic fundamentalists, sent by al-Qaeda. They were also learning that the whole world tands together with Moscow, it sympathizes with her and supports her with her fight against international terrorism. They didn't hear anything about demands of the terrorists, about this, that this event in Beslan reminded to the world the tragedy of Chechnya.

These two TV channels are the main, if not the only one source of information for the majority of Russians. Moscow's newspapers which are still keeping some independence have a very small circulation, and beyond Moscow are practically unreachable.

What has happened with the media in Russia? After all, for these channels still work people, who in Beslan without helmets and bulletproof vests were coming under bullets and without the blink of an eye were reporting live from there. And the same people while standing at attention in the front of some officer of special services were taking his stories about that Beslan was raided by "mercenaries of world's terrorism", and were afraid to ask an obvious question: - How many hostages got killed?

But, why this question, when Russia, Moscow in reality don't want to know what's going on in the Caucasus. They don't want also to hear about tragedies that had taken place much closer. I won't forget Sep. 11th 1999. Then, on the Manezh Square in the center of Moscow, a military orchestra was playing and people were dancing - exactly at the place, where 12 days earlier, in the first bomb attack in that summer, a woman was killed. Two days earlier, explosion in the house on the Guryanov Street killed more than 100 residents of Moscow. And they were dancing, having fun.

On Friday, after the tragedy in Beslan, I was calling my acquaintances in Moscow. They were telling me, that for the whole day in offices, their work places there were discussions only about the massacre, and were repeating that everyone was indignant on the authorities, because "children got killed, and the Chechens, these monsters, walk our streets and nobody hits them on their mugs", adding that the president, the government should act, "like Stalin" - without any mercy - and "take them all away somewhere to hell"

I recalled myself that on the 11th of Sep. of 1999, when I had enough this image of dancing on the Manezh Square, I went to the river Moscow, to the famous House at Naberezhnaya, where in the 30's, the Soviet elite used to live. In 1937, people were disappearing from there every night, taken away by the NKVD. Neighbours were pretending that they weren't noticing this, pretending that nothing was going on. How strong in this country is still this Stalinist ghost?

Oleg Gordievsky, writing in today's Sunday Telegraph, discusses Beslan and its likely consequences. Gordievsky was one of Putin's former colleagues in the KGB, and was also the highest-ranking KGB officer to work for MI6.

Despite all the caring, sympathetic noises he is now making, Putin has a fabulous indifference to human life. When the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk was stuck on the bottom of the Baltic, its 118 crew suffocating and freezing slowly to death, he didn't even bother to interrupt his holiday. When he was later interviewed on CNN about what had happened to the Kursk, he simply smiled and said: "It went to the bottom." About the 118 Russians who died he said not a word.

The thousands of deaths in the war in Chechnya don't move him in the least. He regards them as "normal wastage" - a hardly noticeable price which has to be paid for maintaining Russian control of Chechnya. That is the traditional KGB view, an attitude I remember all too well from my own days in the organisation

Russia's army and its security forces aim to inculcate an attitude of total indifference to the loss of human life, and they certainly succeeded in the case of Vladimir Putin. For example, for at least as long as he has been president, the Russian press has published stories about the more than 1,000 Russian army conscripts - they are teenage boys - who are killed every year during training, often as a result of being viciously bullied by other soldiers. And what has been Putin's response? Nothing at all.

Putin believes he can bludgeon the Chechens into submission. Hundreds of dead children from a school in North Ossetia won't be enough to persuade him to change that policy. He may never accept that it has failed. And yet Russia has very little reason to continue to be so intransigent on the issue of greater autonomy for Chechnya. Chechnya's oil reserves are almost spent; the country has few other natural resources; and its "strategic" importance to Russia is largely a myth. Most Chechens are not Islamic fundamentalists, or even seriously Islamic at all. Al-Qaeda is not welcome there, and I regard it as almost inconceivable that there was any serious al-Qaeda involvement in the hostage-taking in Ossetia, despite the claims from the Russians that they have identified 10 "Arabs" among the dead.

Putin has been able to convince the world that his war in Chechnya is part of the global "war on terror". It is not. It is a totally avoidable civil war which has very little to do with Osama bin Laden or indeed any group of Islamic fanatics. But by persuading gullible Western leaders such as Tony Blair and George W Bush that, in Chechnya, he is dealing with the same sort of people who destroyed the World Trade Center, Putin has been applauded, even while he uses exceptional cruelty in prosecuting his unnecessary war. No civilised person can deny that the hostage-takers have taken barbarity and inhumanity to new depths. But in President Putin, they are up against a leader who has as little regard for human life as they do.

The whole article is worthy of serious attention.

A friend has just given me the information I need so I can make an online donation to the work of the Red Cross in Russia, to help the victims of the Beslan school siege. I just donated, and the site works ok. I thought I would share the information.

The relevant site is

here

You need to tick 'North Caucasus/Russian Federation.'

Some information on their work in Beslan can be found

here.

For some time now I've been concerned about the very distinct flavour of support for the Russian President that seems to come from Little Green Footballs. For one thing, it seems odd in the context of the weblog's routine denunciation of President Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder, many of whose policies on the Middle East and Iraq differ little or not at all from those of Putin. For another, it could strike one as incongruous that such support should go to a president who has done little or nothing to protect his people from international Islamic terrorism, and who can reasonably be accused of having aggravated its consequences in Russia by a barbaric use of force against the Chechen people ever since he took office. The barbaric atrocity of Beslan did not simply come from the blue - it's the result of a long and murky history of connivance between corrupt Russian security forces and Islamic terrorists, which dates back at least to 1999, and the controversial apartment bombings, in which Russian security personnel were almost certainly involved.

Now the weblog has apparently begun to insult anyone who considers that President Putin might have something to explain as Euroweasels. A rather large number of concerned Russian citizens will also find themselves in this category, if such is the criterion that's to be applied.

I mention this only because I admire LGF and the stand it has taken against Islamic terrorism and Islamofascism, and can only think that somewhere a misunderstanding must have arisen. Putin's brand of fascism, with its cynicism, Goebbels-like propaganda and double-speak, and use of ruthless force, fits together with the fascism of the terrorists perfectly. It's strange that LGF apparently can't see this.

Once again a hostage crisis involving Islamic extremists has been ended by Russian security forces with large civilian casualties. There can be no possible justification for the actions of the terrorists. But there are major questions hanging over the nature of the resolution of the siege. As at Dubrovka, questions include: how was the hostage crisis allowed to happen? Are Russia's security forces so corrupt that they can be bribed into letting such situations develop? Who are the terrorists who managed to escape before the main assault on the school building? Are they, as at Dubrovka, agents of the security police, the FSB?

This tragedy, and the evil it exposes to view, cannot even be compared to the horror of 9/11, for there are widespread suspicions - both among Russia's population, and abroad - that the work of the Islamofascists was enabled and connived at by the very forces who are supposed to provide security for Russia's citizens.

President Putin is no friend of democracy or liberty. His government's support for terrorist states such as Iran and Syria speaks for itself. Prominent dissident figures such as Andrei Babitsky, Vladimir Bukovsky, Elena Bonner and others have pointed to the history of Putin's involvement with the KGB - the organization that was responsible for creating the PLO, and which encouraged and orchestrated the spread of international extreme left and Islamic terrorism during the 1970s and 80s.

The recent arrest of Andrei Babitsky, and the poisoning of Anna Politkovkskaya, point to continued KGB activity in the suppression of free speech and democratic debate in Russia.

Western leaders and their governments should keep their distance from Putin - he is no friend of the West, and his loss of control over his own country, practically delivering it into the hands of the Islamofascists, is a mortal danger not only to Russia, but to the whole world.