Russian Hostage Resolution

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

If you have the gold and the weapons, you make the rules and control what and how media represents the facts.




Josh

 

yes, just think sharon and arafat, and many others like them more.

interesting little piece on the (non-)distinction between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter":
http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans38.html

as much as senseless bloodshed is to be abhorred that accomplishes little other than inciting a vicious cycle of aggression and retaliation, no matter if it's state terrorism, non-governmental terrorism, freedom fighting etc, but here at the very least attention has been re-focused on one incredibly dirty war that has been waging in chechnya, on and off, for almost a decade, and that the world had almost forgotten.

thankfully an ever growing majority of russians, according to recent polls, seem to be fed up with their governments futile, albeit tenacious, belligerence towards chechnyas urge for independence. putin will probably understand that his hold on power will to some degree depend on his handling of the chechnya situation, giving some hope for a negotiated settlement involving a degree of initial autonomy that may eventually be forthcoming.

Under the Jackboot

Russia’s ‘forgotten war’ in Chechnya turns uglier—and looks increasingly likely to spread beyond its borders. A report from the front

By Christian Caryl

NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

Oct. 14 issue — It was the kind of story that people in Chechnya know only too well. In the deep of night, Russian troops clad in camouflage uniforms and masks surrounded the village of Krasnostepnovskoye. After a brutal search for presumed rebels, they detained six men, 32 to 44 years old, blindfolded them and loaded them into an armored personnel carrier.

THE MISSING MEN turned up four months later—in a mass grave on the border with neighboring Ingushetia, uncovered in early September. The tip-off came from the soldiers who had done the killing. They charged the villagers a hefty fee for telling them where to find the corpses.

The episode, documented by the Russian human-rights organization Memorial, testifies to the savagery and cynicism of the Chechen war.

... The Russians call these operations zachistki . Literally meaning “cleansing” or “cleaning up,” the word is one of the more cynical euphemisms devised by a government to cover up violence committed against real and imagined enemies.

Far from choking off support for the rebels among the population, the zachistki—often accompanied by various forms of extortion, plundering, beatings and rape—are actually having the opposite effect.

... Blowing people up, alive or dead, she reports, is the latest tactic introduced by the federal Army into the conflict. It was utilized perhaps most effectively on July 3 in the village of Meskyer Yurt, where 21 men, women and children were bound together and blown up, their remains thrown into a ditch.
...

NEWSWEEK

entire highly atrocious story, really not for the faint hearted:
http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/817645.asp