Chechnya And The Holocaust

I have been re-reading the keynote speech given by Zbigniew Brzezinski at the "Catastrophe In Chechnya" conference that was held at the American Enterprise Institute last December. It is a powerful and thought-provoking document, and it contains, among other things, the following remarks:

And I asked myself yesterday, in thinking as to what I might contribute to this discussion, what is it that I should focus on, what is it that I can really add, given the presence of so many experts, people with a direct sense of involvement, some people with direct involvement, what can I really add. And, ultimately, I decided that perhaps the most I can do is to share with you some reflections regarding two issues:

The first is maybe somewhat subjective. Why should one care? Why do I care? And then, secondly, what next?

Why do I care? Because I do care. I have been involved in this issue now for a decade. And I care because I'm very much a child of the second half of the 20th century, and I'm very much aware of the fact that the 20th century was, in fact, the most lethal century in the history of mankind. It was a century in which more people died by deliberate design of others in the name of a variety of passions than in the entire human history. Literally, if you actually total up the numbers, more people were deliberately killed in that century than in all of the centuries preceding it. That is a staggering statistic.

And it was a century of unprecedented cruelty to the most defenseless. And anyone who lived through that has to be sensitive to the moral imperative that this implies.

And who were the principal victims? I think we can say, with a painful statistical accuracy, that the principal victims, if we were to rank them, were the Jews, all of whom were destined to be killed if even not all were killed, but they were destined to be killed. Secondly, the Gypsies, all of whom were destined to be killed, even if not all of them were killed. And thirdly, the Chechens, actually the Chechens.

Because if one considers the fact that in 1944, after 100 years of repression, they were chosen to be eliminated as a nation, which means uprooted from their soil and deported in the midst of a cold winter to an alien territory, in the process of which half of them, almost, died--men, women, and children--it closely approximates what happened to the Jews and the Gypsies, even in terms of statistical proportions. Roughly one-half of the population perished.

And since the 1990s, how many more have died? We hear different estimates. But, by and large, I think there is consensus that probably somewhere in the range of a quarter of the total died--not by accident, not by earthquakes, not by climatically induced starvation, but from the hands of others, deliberately.

And how did they die? They died like the Gypsies, like the Jews: amidst global silence, in solitude, with occasionally some people murmuring, "Never again," but not really attaching much significance to that.

So I think there is something very significant about what we were discussing here today, and that is one of the reasons why I think we all probably agree that we should care. And that is the first reason.

But there is a second reason why I care, and that is because what that issue, in my view, tells us about what is happening in America, and that is of enormous importance to me as an American.

Notice who's absent here today. We invited a number of official Russian speakers, and none of them came, although we will have a guest from the Russian Embassy, and we are grateful for that. We also invited a series of senior U.S. officials, whose names I will not list, but who didn't come and most of whom did not even respond. We are fortunate to have one official with us, but I cannot say that the U.S. Government is massively represented here today.

And I wonder whether that doesn't tell us something about the moral issue at stake. If I have to look at American policy towards the issue of Chechnya, from the onset of the Chechen dilemmas almost a decade ago to today, I would say that, by and large, we have seen an evolution from initial ignorance to self-preoccupied indifference. Initial ignorance reflected in the remarkable statement by the President of the United States that the conflict in Chechnya is like the American Civil War, which I think most charitably can be described as a ignorant statement. But now we have self-preoccupied indifference because we know that the subsequent President actually knows better. He actually knows better. So we're not dealing with indifference. We're not dealing with ignorance. We're dealing with a tactical expediency. After 9/11, it is better to sweep this issue under the rug, even though we know better.

Read the whole thing.