Re: Likud or not...

[Chris Doss <lookoverhere1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Attacking neighboring regions of Russia in order to
conquer them, after kidnapping and torturing their
residents, is a strange way to seek independence!

Moscow Times
August 26, 2004
Remembering Basayev's Raid Five Years On
By Zaira Abdullaeva
Zaira Abdullaeva, a freelance journalist based in
Moscow, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

Five years ago this month, Shamil Basayev led hundreds
of well-armed fighters into Dagestan, where they
seized a number of remote mountain villages. Later,
footage shot by a cameraman in Basayev's group was
shown around the world: bearded men with Kalashnikovs
and Stinger missiles marching along a dusty road in
the Botlikh district and the dismayed faces of local
residents.

But all that came later. In the beginning there was
fear. Fear and loathing in this southern Russian
republic plagued by robbery and kidnapping during
three years of so-called Chechen independence.

http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/8343-18.cfm

The rebels had expected to receive more support from
the local Muslim population. Indeed thousands of
Dagestani's have already indicated they are ready to
take up arms. However, the situation in Dagestan is
significantly different from that in neighbouring
Chechnya. The Chechens make out the big  majority in
their republic and managed to reach a greater degree
of unity on the issue of independence from Russia.
Especially after Russian forces resorted to brutal
means to quell the independence drive.
In Dagestan however, no single nationality has an
overall majority. The republic is home to more than
thirty small ethnic groups, who have learned to live
together in what today is Russia's poorest region.
Many Dagestani are convinced that the incursion of
Islamic rebels from Chechnya can only disturb the
fragile ethnic balance that has been reached in
Dagestan.

http://www.rnw.nl/hotspots/archive/rus/html/dagestan990823.html

By 1999, when he and Basayev launched the raid into
the mountains of Dagestan that helped trigger the
start of the second Chechen war, Khattab was already
deeply unpopular in Chechnya. He should have known
that his fundamentalist brand of Saudi Islam was very
unpopular in both Chechnya and Dagestan, where Sufism
has been the central faith for two centuries. But the
second war gave him a chance to take up the fight
again.

http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/cau/cau_200205_127_4_eng.txt

However, the ordeals suffered by an estimated 3,300
Russian nationals at the hands of Chechen kidnappers
have received little publicity in the West - hence
last week's delegation to Geneva.

As well as Perchenko's testimony, journalists and
officials heard accounts from Aslambek Khasbulatov,
former rector of the Chechen State University, and
Grozny regional head Shaid Dzhamaldaev. The talks were
followed by the screening of a film, "The Slave
Trade", which focuses on the horrendous tactics
adopted by professional kidnappers in the breakaway
republic.

The members of the delegation claimed that kidnap
victims - some of them infant children -- were bought
and sold in a "slave market" in the town of
Urus-Martan, then imprisoned in caves or cramped
underground cells.

http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/cau/cau_200009_50_03_eng.txt

The kidnappers have been known to mutilate their
captives, even children, severing their ears or
fingers. Gangs have sent videotaped recordings of
mutilations and beheadings to relatives to terrify
them into finding the ransom. Russian authorities have
used the gruesome videos to feed anti-Chechen
sentiment and boost public support for Moscow's latest
war in the separatist republic.
When the kidnapping industry reached its peak a few
years ago, there was even a relatively open "slave
market" in Grozny, near Minutka Square, where the
names and details of human livestock circulated on
lists for interested buyers. Gangs often traded
hostages or stole them from one another.
In the years between Russia's first war in Chechnya,
from 1994 to 1996, and Moscow's launch of a new war
against Chechen rebels last fall, kidnapping was one
of the biggest sources of enrichment for criminal
gangs in an economy that had little else to offer but
oil theft, arms trade, counterfeiting and drug
smuggling.

http://www.vor.ru/Chechnya/arx.html

'Nuf said.




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