Lets Talk Quagmire...Russian Style

A life of fear, after the war
The bloodbath continues in Chechnya as the country goes to the polls, writes Mark Franchetti in Grozny
November 28, 2005

AFTER surviving two ferocious wars that claimed the lives of 18 relatives, Dzhambulat Dushayev hoped that yesterday's parliamentary election in Chechnya, the first in eight years, would herald peace.

The 35-year-old builder from the village of Staraya Sunzha believed the Kremlin's claim that the election signified a return to democracy, stability and security and even served on the electoral commission supervising the polling. But his faith proved to be tragically misplaced.

Ten days ago, he went to get his car washed at a garage on the outskirts of Grozny, the capital, and invited his cousin Ruslan to come along for the ride. Darkness was falling as he left his bungalow. He called out to his wife Raziat, 30, who is eight months pregnant, to lay the table for dinner. His children Deni, 3, and Amina, 14 months, waved as he left.

On the journey home, Dushayev and his cousin came across 10 heavily armed Russian soldiers who had spent most of the day drinking vodka in a wood, apparently to celebrate the end of their tour of duty in Chechnya.

The soldiers had just flagged down three scrap-metal dealers in a small truck. They had dragged two of them from the vehicle and ordered them to lie on the ground.

As Dushayev drove up, they were beating the men with their rifle butts. Some of the soldiers ran towards his car, brandishing Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles.

"They were shooting in the air," Ruslan Dushayev said. "They dragged us out of the car, threatened us and shouted abuse. They were very aggressive. Dzhambulat was calm. He thought it was an ID check."

Sure enough, one of the soldiers demanded Ruslan's papers. He checked them, then ordered Ruslan to run away. As he fled, another soldier fired at him but missed.

Dzhambulat Dushayev was ordered to lie on the ground next to the two scrap-metal dealers who were being kicked and beaten.

What happened next was witnessed by the third scrap-metal dealer, Movsar Munayev, who had been held at gunpoint in the truck by a soldier so drunk that he could barely hold his weapon straight.

"He kept shouting that I had killed his brother and that now he would kill me," Munayev, 23, said. "He wanted money and I gave him all I had as well as my watch."

The soldier shot out the lights of the truck and reached for a large hunting knife strapped to his chest, shouting that he was going to cut off Munayev's head. His commander intervened but the soldier shot Munayev in the leg and he fell out of the truck screaming.

"I turned my head to the side and saw the other three men on the ground," Munayev said. "They were beating them severely and one soldier kept yelling that they had killed his brother.

"One of the men on the ground was pleading for his life. 'Don't kill me', he kept saying. Then the Russians executed them."

Dushayev, whose young family was waiting for him to join them for their evening meal, died first, shot in the forehead at point-blank range with a heavy machinegun. The bullets blew a gaping hole between his eyes and obliterated the back of his head. The other two men, Yusup Usmanov and Husain Ahmadov, both also married with children, were shot several times.

The Russians then repeatedly stabbed the bodies with a large hunting knife that was found later at the scene. Dushayev's family said he had nine stab wounds. His cousin Ruslan escaped by crawling into a roadside ditch.

"Is this what the Kremlin calls a return to normality? They executed my husband and two other innocent civilians, just like that," Dushayev's 30-year-old widow, Raziat, said as women in headscarves huddled around her and dozens of men prayed outside in the yard.

Three of the soldiers, whose uniforms were soaked in blood, have been arrested and are being questioned by military prosecutors. They are expected to be charged with murder.

Relatives of the dead men believe there is little chance they will be receive punishments that fit their crimes. "There won't be any justice," Raziat said. "The killing isn't stopping. We still live in fear, just waiting for the day when our turn comes to be murdered."

The roadside killings could hardly have come at a worse time for the Kremlin. The parliamentary election is the first since Russian troops surged into the breakaway republic in 1999 to combat Muslim rebels who have countered with a series of terrorist atrocities, including last year's Beslan school siege in which 344 people died, more than half of them children.

While large-scale Russian military operations have ended, an estimated 3000 Islamic rebels still carry out regular attacks from their mountain hideouts against the Russians and allied Chechen forces.

Far from ushering in a liberal democracy, the election is expected to prepare the way for Ramzan Kadyrov, 29 -- whose father Ahmad was president until his assassination last year -- to become the republic's leader.

Kadyrov heads a feared pro-Moscow paramilitary force of 5000 men, many of them former rebels. The force is widely accused by human rights groups of abducting, torturing and executing people it suspects of having links with the rebels.

Under recent reforms introduced by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the presidents of republics such as Chechnya are nominated by the Kremlin rather than elected.

Barely a day passes without an abduction, a murder or some other abuse. A few days before the killings at Staraya Sunzha, a young female medical student was crushed to death by a Russian armoured personnel carrier at a market in Grozny.

Last month, Ibraghim Shovkhalov, 31, a father of three children, was taken away at gunpoint by a dozen men in camouflage and black masks.

The next day, his body was found under a bridge with a plastic bag taped to his head. He had been beaten and suffocated. Human rights activists say 5000 people are missing after being abducted in Chechnya.

"The Russians claim the war is long since over," Dushayev's elder brother, Sultan, said. "But in the space of a few minutes, we ended up with three dead fathers and three families without a breadwinner. They are killing Chechens systematically, day by day, but no one cares."
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...5E2703,00.html

Not like Iraq....The Kremlin picks out the leaders! No open elections like we'll see in a few short weeks.

MOSCOW (CP) - War-weary Chechens head to the polls Sunday to elect a new parliament that the Kremlin hopes will permanently cement the wayward republic into Russia's constitutional system.

The campaign, which has seen 353 candidates from eight political parties competing in a relatively free atmosphere, will give Chechnya its first elected legislature since the current war began in 1999.

"These polls are for external consumption, to convince the West that all is normal in Chechnya," says Malik Saidullayev, a leading Chechen businessman and critic of the pro-Moscow local government.

"Until there are negotiations with the rebels, any parliament will be a sham that can never represent all the Chechens," he says.

In one sign that conditions remain far from normal in Chechnya, several dozen human-rights activists demonstrated in the capital of Grozny last week to demand that Russian forces limit their use of armoured vehicles in urban areas and dismantle hundreds of military checkpoints that still impede daily life throughout the republic.

The protest was sparked by a Nov. 16 rampage by Russian troops in Staraya Sunzha, near Grozny, in which three Chechen civilians were shot dead.

"Servicemen in Chechnya drink to excess and behave badly," Chechen human-rights commissioner Nurdi Nukhazhiyev told the independent Mosnews press agency. "If they decide to kill civilians, they just go ahead and do it."

The new bicameral legislature will complete the Kremlin-designed system of local government, which includes a republic constitution, elected president and parliament, cemented under Moscow's rule. A constitutional referendum and two presidential elections - the first leader was assassinated by rebels - in the past two years drew charges of official manipulation and voter coercion from human rights monitors.

"Real elections are not possible in this environment," says Oleg Orlov, chairman of Memorial, the only Russian human rights movement with a presence in Chechnya.

"Russian authorities have imposed stability through terror, and now they are imposing a governing structure based on the same methods."

Russian officials insist the Chechnya conflict is winding down and the few remaining separatist guerrillas are increasingly isolated from the war-weary population.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin recently said Russian military deaths in Chechnya have fallen from 1,397 in 2000 and 485 in 2002 to 161 last year. The number of rebel attacks against Rusian forces so far this year is just 28, compared with 130 in 2004, he added.

Sergei Khaikin, director of the Moscow-based Institute of Social Marketing, which conducts public opinion surveys in Chechnya, says Chechens are exhausted after a decade of turmoil and most appear ready to embrace Moscow rule if it will deliver peace.

"According to our surveys, 86 per cent of Chechens accept the idea of remaining within Russia, compared with 67 per cent three years ago," he says.

But Khaikin adds that only 48 per cent believe Sunday's legislative elections are likely to be free and fair.

"People are worried about the way votes will be counted, and possible falsifications," he says.

Opinion polls put the pro-Kremlin United Russia party in the lead with 47 per cent support, followed by the Communist party with 17 per cent. The liberal Yabloko party, which opposes Moscow's policies in Chechnya, is a distant third.

In recent years instability has spread from Chechnya to several of the surrounding mainly-Muslim ethnic republics of Russia's volatile northern Caucasus region.

Islamist rebels in neighbouring Dagestan have launched almost 100 attacks on Russian forces so far this year, while some experts describe the situation in Ingushetia, a kindred ethnic republic to Chechnya's west, as near-disastrous.

Last month Chechen-linked local Islamists staged a major raid against Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, leaving more than 100 dead.

"Russia has nearly 300,000 troops based in the north Caucasus, and yet its grip on the region is fading with each passing month," says Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent security expert.

Russian authorities usually explain the growing unrest as arising from post-Soviet poverty and economic inequity, which drives young men into the arms of Islamist extremists.

But they have lately begun admitting they face an "ideological" problem in the region as well.

"The Nalchik events showed that many of the attackers were young men with higher educations and good jobs, not from poor families at all," says Sergei Mironov, speaker of the Federation Council, Russia's upper house of parliament.

"Unfortunately, many of them have fallen under the spell of extreme Islam, with its anti-human views, and are pursuing these alien goals," he says.

The candidates in Sunday's polls include three former Chechen rebels who have accepted a Kremlin anmesty.

But no one who currently opposes Chechnya's status as a republic within the Russian Federation was allowed to run.

"These elections will change nothing," says Yury Korgunyuk, an expert with the independent InDem Foundation, a Moscow think-tank.

"Chechnya is an unlivable place, a totally different country from the rest of Russia. It's our own little corner of hell."
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/051124/w112428.html

That many dead? And what were the figures pre-2000?

The death toll is certainly in the thousands, including several thousand innocent civilians. As of late November 1999, Russian forces claimed to have killed more than 4,000 rebels while losing 187 soldiers since the offensive began. Chechen officials disputed those figures, saying rebel fighters have suffered minimal losses while killing thousands of Russian troops. They said the heaviest casualties have been among civilians, with nearly 5,000 killed. None of the figures could be independently confirmed, and both sides have tended to exaggerate enemy casualties while minimizing their own. As of early 2000 the Russian side admitted that over 1,100 of its troops had been killed since August 1999, but the Russian Soldiers' Mothers Committee reports 3,000 dead and 6,000 wounded. Estimates of Chechen killed and wounded are far higher, and far less certain. Russian defense officials say at least 10-thousand rebels have died. Chechen sources put the figure at less than half that, but say the number of civilians killed is far higher. The number of internally displaced persons is put at more than 230,000 people. Some were kept from fleeing the fighting when Russian authorities closed the Chechnya-Ingushetia border.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita.../chechnya2.htm

How many Russian soldiers have died in the current Chechen war? Russian officials issued dramatically conflicting accounts on February 17, with the Defense Ministry in Moscow contradicting figures released earlier in the day by the military headquarters for the Northern Caucasus. In a chilling example of Soviet-style news management, the country's best-known news agency changed its report to keep up with the change in the official line.

Russia's Itar-Tass news agency reported on February 17 that some 4,739 were killed in Chechnya in the year 2002, with another 13,108 wounded and 29 missing. The agency cited the North Caucasus Military District, which is in command of federal troops in the breakaway republic. The figures, which were for just the one calendar year of 2002, vastly exceeded previous official tolls. For example, the Interfax news agency quoted the Russian military in December as putting the number of deaths of Russian serviceman at a cumulative total of 4,705 since the current war began three years earlier in late 1999.

But when Associated Press correspondent Sergei Venyavsky contacted the North Caucasus headquarters on February 17, a spokesman, Major Igor Kaverin, denied that the casualty report had come from that headquarters. Kaverin refused to provide any figures. Another denial came from the Defense Ministry, which claimed that only 4,572 Russian troops had died in action in Chechnya from the autumn of 1999 to December 23, 2002.

According to the Associated Press account, Itar-Tass at first responded to these denials by stating that it stood by its initial account. But within hours, the Russian agency replaced that report with another story providing the same figures as the Defense Ministry's. Venyavsky reported that "A duty editor at Itar-Tass, which considers itself the state central information agency, refused to provide any explanation of the contradictory reports."

The Associated Press reporter also telephoned Valentina Melnikova, head of the Soldiers' Mothers of Russia, an organization that works to protect Russian military draftees from official and unofficial abuses. Based on her own group's sources, such as soldiers' families, she said they estimate that about 11,000 servicemen have been killed in Chechnya and more than 30,000 wounded since the current war began. Their estimate for the earlier Chechen war, which lasted from 1994 to 1996, is 14,000 dead as compared with the official figure of 5,500.

The Russian website Gazeta.ru noted of the contradictory reports that "many things remain ambiguous. Whether or not the official figures include those who died in hospital of wounds, or just those killed in action is unclear. There are no statistics on those who were wounded and then returned to the ranks, and no reports on the seriousness of the wounds and injuries that the military servicemen have suffered in Chechnya."

Also, these figures do not include civilian deaths of either Russians or Chechens, which a team led by human-rights activist Sergei Kovalev has estimated as exceeding 50,000 in the first war alone.
http://www.cdi.org/russia/245-14.cfm

Close to 5,000 dead in a three year period! No signs of withdrawl with 300,000 soldiers in the region. No open elections for upper offices. How do you spell q-u-a-g-m-i-r-e? Russian syle that is!!

So whats the big interest in Chechnya???

A mountainous region, Chechnya has important oil deposits, as well as natural gas, limestone, gypsum, sulphur, and other minerals. Its mineral waters have made it a spa center. Major production includes oil, petrochemicals, oil-field equipment, foods, wines, and fruits. For centuries, the Chechen people's history and relationship with the regional power, Russia, has been full of turmoil.
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Chechnya.asp


OHHHHHHHH...So the Russians have been terrorizing the Chechens for their oil??? The Kremlin appointing leaders....how many dead???? THIS IS A QUAGMIRE FOR OIL FOLKS!!! Now make your comparisons! :dance:

And a few extra figures on how much the Russians REALLY want this!


War in Chechnya, 1994-96
16 May 2001 AP: Russian soldiers: 3,826 kia + 1,906 mia in 21 mos.
Amnesty International: 20-30,000 ("Russian Federation: Brief summary of concerns about human rights violations in the Chechen Republic" (April 1996) [http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/aipub/1.../44602096.htm] )
cited by Amnesty International: Russian Presidential Commission for Human Rights: 27,000
Global Security: "1,500 Russian troops and 25,000 civilians had died by April 1995"
SIPRI 1997: 10,000-40,000 (1994-96)
War Annual 8 (1997): 40,000
CDI: 50,000 (1994-96)
Dictionary of 20C World History: 80,000
Ploughshares 2000: 80-100,000
6 Dec. 1999 Time: 4,000 Russian soldiers + 100,000 Chechens, 1994-96
Renewed fighting, 1999
6 Dec. 1999 Time: 4,000
Ploughshares 2000: >5,000
16 May 2001 AP: 3,096 Russian soldiers in 20 mos.
Both Wars:
11 Nov. 2002 Time: 38,000 combatants + 200,000 civilians
11 Nov. 2002 Newsweek: 100,000 civilians
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm

Sure, and I guess you support Chechnians all the way, even though they've stooped to the lowest forms of terrorism... I've got articles too! Hmm, Americans telling only one side of the story?? Unheard of! :D

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...299318,00.html

The Chechens' American friends

The Washington neocons' commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own

John Laughland
Wednesday September 8, 2004
The Guardian


An enormous head of steam has built up behind the view that President Putin is somehow the main culprit in the grisly events in North Ossetia. Soundbites and headlines such as "Grief turns to anger", "Harsh words for government", and "Criticism mounting against Putin" have abounded, while TV and radio correspondents in Beslan have been pressed on air to say that the people there blame Moscow as much as the terrorists. There have been numerous editorials encouraging us to understand - to quote the Sunday Times - the "underlying causes" of Chechen terrorism (usually Russian authoritarianism), while the widespread use of the word "rebels" to describe people who shoot children shows a surprising indulgence in the face of extreme brutality.

Article continues

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On closer inspection, it turns out that this so-called "mounting criticism" is in fact being driven by a specific group in the Russian political spectrum - and by its American supporters. The leading Russian critics of Putin's handling of the Beslan crisis are the pro-US politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov - men associated with the extreme neoliberal market reforms which so devastated the Russian economy under the west's beloved Boris Yeltsin - and the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Centre. Funded by its New York head office, this influential thinktank - which operates in tandem with the military-political Rand Corporation, for instance in producing policy papers on Russia's role in helping the US restructure the "Greater Middle East" - has been quoted repeatedly in recent days blaming Putin for the Chechen atrocities. The centre has also been assiduous over recent months in arguing against Moscow's claims that there is a link between the Chechens and al-Qaida.
These people peddle essentially the same line as that expressed by Chechen leaders themselves, such as Ahmed Zakaev, the London exile who wrote in these pages yesterday. Other prominent figures who use the Chechen rebellion as a stick with which to beat Putin include Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who, like Zakaev, was granted political asylum in this country, although the Russian authorities want him on numerous charges. Moscow has often accused Berezovsky of funding Chechen rebels in the past.

By the same token, the BBC and other media sources are putting it about that Russian TV played down the Beslan crisis, while only western channels reported live, the implication being that Putin's Russia remains a highly controlled police state. But this view of the Russian media is precisely the opposite of the impression I gained while watching both CNN and Russian TV over the past week: the Russian channels had far better information and images from Beslan than their western competitors. This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable "Muslim" causes, Bosnia and Kosovo - implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there. In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.

Although the White House issued a condemnation of the Beslan hostage-takers, its official view remains that the Chechen conflict must be solved politically. According to ACPC member Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins University, US pressure will now increase on Moscow to achieve a political, rather than military, solution - in other words to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the US resolutely rejects elsewhere.

Allegations are even being made in Russia that the west itself is somehow behind the Chechen rebellion, and that the purpose of such support is to weaken Russia, and to drive her out of the Caucasus. The fact that the Chechens are believed to use as a base the Pankisi gorge in neighbouring Georgia - a country which aspires to join Nato, has an extremely pro-American government, and where the US already has a significant military presence - only encourages such speculation. Putin himself even seemed to lend credence to the idea in his interview with foreign journalists on Monday.

Proof of any such western involvement would be difficult to obtain, but is it any wonder Russians are asking themselves such questions when the same people in Washington who demand the deployment of overwhelming military force against the US's so-called terrorist enemies also insist that Russia capitulate to hers?

· John Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group www.oscewatch.org





I guess the evil Sovie... er... Russians aren't the only ones after Chechnya's oil!

"Sure, and I guess you support Chechnians all the way, even though they've stooped to the lowest forms of terrorism"

No, you don't guess you "ass-u-me". I was meerly making a lil' comparison between the so called "quagmire" that the U.S. is supposedly in compared to what a quagmire actually is. The Russians have been trying to hold these people down since the early 1900's with basically no luck. I don't support some radical terrorists actions like what happened over there a while back though!
Chill dude...hell, I live in one of the Northern States. I feel the cold!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Psycho4Bud

"Sure, and I guess you support Chechnians all the way, even though they've stooped to the lowest forms of terrorism"

No, you don't guess you "ass-u-me". I was meerly making a lil' comparison between the so called "quagmire" that the U.S. is supposedly in compared to what a quagmire actually is. The Russians have been trying to hold these people down since the early 1900's with basically no luck. I don't support some radical terrorists actions like what happened over there a while back though!
Chill dude...hell, I live in one of the Northern States. I feel the cold!

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Ok, ok, I'm sorry :D I guess I ass-u-me-d too soon... lol

Quote:

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Originally Posted by F L E S H

Ok, ok, I'm sorry :D I guess I ass-u-me-d too soon... lol

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It's all good....here's a hit for ya bro! :thumbsup: