09-02-2004, 12:33 PM
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#32 (permalink)
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Loser
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Follow up question:
What would an American do if they were in the position of a Chechen?
Quote:
Chechnya Gripped by Stalinist Terror, or Where Do Suicide Bombers Come From
Why are women traveling from a remote southern Russian region all the way to Moscow to put on explosive belts and kill themselves, taking innocent bystanders’ lives with them? Oleg Orlov of the International Society Memorial, Russia’s top human rights organization, sheds light on the reasons that push Chechen suicide bombers to their drastic actions. The number of quiet, undocumented kidnappings of people from their homes by federal forces in Chechnya is comparable to statistics for the peak of Stalinist repressions in 1937-1938.
Memorial estimates that approximately 3,000 people had vanished in Chechnya during the four years from 1999 to 2003. Given Chechnya’s estimated population of 700,000, that works out to approximately 43 disappearances per every 10,000 people. During the height of Stalinist terror, people were plucked from their beds at night and taken away, never to be seen again; the figures for those years are, 44 disappearances per every 10,000 people. Back in those days, slander or hearsay information from a malevolent neighbor or co-worker was often enough to doom someone.
Which is exactly what’s happening in Chechnya — people are beginning to inform on each other as a way of personal revenge or sometimes for “commercial” reasons — for instance, if a member of a well-off family is taken away, ransom can be demanded. Over the past years, says Orlov, he’s seeing a hereto unknown feeling paralyze Chechen villagers: fear. “It used to be that fear was considered beneath Chechens, that they must be courageous and open.” And now, “Chechens are afraid of Chechens. Neighbors are afraid of neighbors.”
In the light of these changes, the previous tactic of zachistki begins to make sense. It seemed like a dumb way of combating terrorism, Orlov says — taking all the men of a village, beating them, and asking them ridiculous questions, such as “Where is Basayev?” (Shamil Basayev is one of Chechnya’s militant warlords; according to some hypotheses, he’s behind the current attack on a school in southern Russia) or “Who are the rebels in your village?” However, when the beatings are conducted on a mass scale, someone’s bound to crack. Someone’s bound to say something, implicating one or another fellow villager. And then this someone is forever hooked by the special services.
“From that moment on, this person can always be handed a bill,” Orlov says. “You can always say to him — ’Hey, man, do you remember how last year you said something about some people from their village and then they disappeared or else fragments of their bodies were found in the forest? Do you realize that now you have to always tell us things?’” Thus, the zachistki of two years ago helped create a region-wide network of informers — whose reports are now used to execute the targeted kidnappings of today.
Full Article:
http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2004/09/01/terror.shtml
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Last edited by OpieCunningham; 09-02-2004 at 12:36 PM..
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