Re: Putin

[Chris Doss <nomorebounces@xxxxxxx>]

Let me quote Lieven again (for the third time) on Chechnya and Dagestan. I am starting to believe that what I send doesn;t actually get read.

Of course. The Chechen conflict has nothing to do with radical Islam. How silly of me.

Once again, in an apparently futile attempt to make people live in the real world:
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/4546.html
Current History
October 2000
Through a Distorted Lens: Chechnya and the Western Media
By ANATOL LIEVEN
ANATOL LIEVEN is a senior associate in the Russia and Eurasia Center of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He covered the 1994-1996
Chechen war as a correspondent for the London Times. His books include
Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1998).



The second Chechen war has not brought out the best in the Western
media-with the usual exception of the brave and dedicated correspondents
who have gone to report on it. All too much of the coverage and analysis
has been relentlessly one-sided and relentlessly anti-Russian. Most of the
media-and in particular, of course, television-were typically uninterested
in the signs of growing crisis, and turned their attention to the region
only when the Russians actually invaded. Equally typically, once the war
had begun, the media lost themselves in the reporting of the unfolding
events, rarely stepping back to analyze the background to the fighting.



As a result, the media missed the great majority of the attacks on and
threats to Russia from Chechnya in the two years leading up to the war.
Above all, the media overlooked the powerful forces in Chechnya and their
international radical Muslim allies, who had publicly committed themselves
to a jihad to drive Russia from the entire North Caucasus and establish an
Islamic state-whether the peoples of the region wanted it or not.


.....
Yet the bitterly anti-Western ideology of Khattab, Basayev, and their
followers is not a matter of debate, and does not have to be sought out by
intrepid journalists venturing to interview these men in the mountains of
Chechnya. Their views can be found, on the Internet, in English, on the web
site of the international mujahedeen in Afghanistan, at qoqaz.net. This is
Basayev himself on the nature of the war (interviewed in early January
2000): "The crucifix is being raised anew and war is being declared against
Islam and Muslims; this is proof that this war is like the Crusades, where
all of Europe's intelligence capabilities are geared towards providing
Russia with information and other support. . . . The Russians and their
supporters in the West are fighting us collectively, as Allah has described
them: 'And fight the unbelievers collectively as they fight you
collectively.'"



CONFRONTING RADICAL ISLAM



The campaign of Khattab, Basayev, and their allies against Russia in 1998
and 1999 was carried out in the name of this radical Islamist ideology, as
a reading of their propaganda makes clear. The culmination of this campaign
was the invasion of Dagestan in August 1999, with the avowed intention of
overthrowing the republic's government and creating a united Islamic
republic of Chechnya and Dagestan. This was opposed by the great majority
of Dagestanis and would indeed have been a nightmare for that republic. Too
many supporters of the Chechens have tried to shrug off this invasion as a
minor affair. It was not. Quite apart from the number of casualties that
resulted from the invasion itself, Dagestan, with its 34 different
nationalities, rival religious groups, and unstable government, is a
fragile and delicately poised place. Chechen incursions have the potential
to upset this balance and plunge Dagestan into a more impoverished and
hopeless version of Lebanon during its ethnoreligious civil wars in the
1970s and 1980s. It cannot be stressed enough: even if you disapprove of
the Russian invasion of 1999, in initially resisting Basayev and Khattab
and their plans, Russia was, objectively speaking, serving the interests
not just of the region but of the West as well.