Post by Yona Maro on Oct 3, 2005 9:13:40 GMT -5
United States shouldn’t support rebellious terrorists
LARS-ERIK NELSON
New York Daily News
01/05/2000
EDITORIAL
WASHINGTON - Imagine if a self-proclaimed Comanche Republic arose in south Texas, began kidnapping people and holding them for ransom, televised the beheadings of its captives and sent terrorists into our biggest cities to blow up apartment buildings.
How should we respond?
Negotiate, says Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican seeking the GOP's 2000 presidential nomination. At least, that's his demand upon the new acting president of Russia , Vladimir Putin, as Putin tries to suppress an uprising in Chechnya.
If the newly installed Putin does not ease up on the Chechens, McCain says, the U.S. should withhold the aid that might help Russia , at long last, embark on real democratic and economic reform.
Talk about a counterproductive policy! America has a far greater stake in a friendly, stable though democratically imperfect Russia than it does in a quasi-independent, inevitably hostile, gunrunning, drug-smuggling, historically terrorist Chechnya.
And now, my apologies to the Comanches. Russia's Chechen terrorists are far crueler, and far more dangerous to the world's safety, than the Comanches ever were. In their murderous depredations against their neighbors in Russia's northern Caucasus, they make Slobodan Milosevic's Serb goons of Kosovo look like a Red Cross team.
Yes, the Chechens have suffered over the centuries at the hands of the Russians. They were conquered in the 18th and 19th centuries, subjugated, communized and then deported en masse during World War II - after they collaborated, en masse, with the invading Nazi army.
And, yes, innocent Chechen civilians are suffering now as the
Russian Army tries to crush the insurrection. They should not be blamed, as a people, for crimes committed by terrorist bands.
But neither can Russia negotiate a political solution with the
Chechen terrorists. The Chechens are not about to surrender their dream of independence. Even if defeated, they promise to wage guerrilla war from the hills until they drive the Russians out.
In the past three years of relative autonomy, no one in Chechnya has been able to restrain the murderers among them. Chechens have twice invaded Dagestan. They engaged in ethnic cleansing of Christian Georgians. They have kidnapped and beheaded journalists, communications workers and aid workers. They are blamed for
blowing up apartment buildings in Moscow and Volograd, killing 300 people.
An independent or semiautonomous Chechnya would quickly join the ranks of the rogue states that McCain and other Republicans are so quick to condemn. On the basis of Chechen conduct so far, independent Chechnya would be a militant Islamic republic that has no compunction about attacking its neighbors, running guns, carrying out kidnappings and profiting from crime.
Russia's brutal war against the Chechens has brought out an ugly side of Russian society: a near-racist cheerleading, even among the most democratic Russians, for the cruelest actions by the Russian Army.
But Chechnya also is bringing about a disconcerting side of
American politics: the instinct that anybody who fights against the Russians somehow deserves our sympathy.
For years, we told the Russian people we had no quarrel with them; we only opposed their repressive Communist system. Now it looks as if we cannot give up the Russians as our eternal enemy.
LARS-ERIK NELSON
New York Daily News
01/05/2000
EDITORIAL
WASHINGTON - Imagine if a self-proclaimed Comanche Republic arose in south Texas, began kidnapping people and holding them for ransom, televised the beheadings of its captives and sent terrorists into our biggest cities to blow up apartment buildings.
How should we respond?
Negotiate, says Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican seeking the GOP's 2000 presidential nomination. At least, that's his demand upon the new acting president of Russia , Vladimir Putin, as Putin tries to suppress an uprising in Chechnya.
If the newly installed Putin does not ease up on the Chechens, McCain says, the U.S. should withhold the aid that might help Russia , at long last, embark on real democratic and economic reform.
Talk about a counterproductive policy! America has a far greater stake in a friendly, stable though democratically imperfect Russia than it does in a quasi-independent, inevitably hostile, gunrunning, drug-smuggling, historically terrorist Chechnya.
And now, my apologies to the Comanches. Russia's Chechen terrorists are far crueler, and far more dangerous to the world's safety, than the Comanches ever were. In their murderous depredations against their neighbors in Russia's northern Caucasus, they make Slobodan Milosevic's Serb goons of Kosovo look like a Red Cross team.
Yes, the Chechens have suffered over the centuries at the hands of the Russians. They were conquered in the 18th and 19th centuries, subjugated, communized and then deported en masse during World War II - after they collaborated, en masse, with the invading Nazi army.
And, yes, innocent Chechen civilians are suffering now as the
Russian Army tries to crush the insurrection. They should not be blamed, as a people, for crimes committed by terrorist bands.
But neither can Russia negotiate a political solution with the
Chechen terrorists. The Chechens are not about to surrender their dream of independence. Even if defeated, they promise to wage guerrilla war from the hills until they drive the Russians out.
In the past three years of relative autonomy, no one in Chechnya has been able to restrain the murderers among them. Chechens have twice invaded Dagestan. They engaged in ethnic cleansing of Christian Georgians. They have kidnapped and beheaded journalists, communications workers and aid workers. They are blamed for
blowing up apartment buildings in Moscow and Volograd, killing 300 people.
An independent or semiautonomous Chechnya would quickly join the ranks of the rogue states that McCain and other Republicans are so quick to condemn. On the basis of Chechen conduct so far, independent Chechnya would be a militant Islamic republic that has no compunction about attacking its neighbors, running guns, carrying out kidnappings and profiting from crime.
Russia's brutal war against the Chechens has brought out an ugly side of Russian society: a near-racist cheerleading, even among the most democratic Russians, for the cruelest actions by the Russian Army.
But Chechnya also is bringing about a disconcerting side of
American politics: the instinct that anybody who fights against the Russians somehow deserves our sympathy.
For years, we told the Russian people we had no quarrel with them; we only opposed their repressive Communist system. Now it looks as if we cannot give up the Russians as our eternal enemy.