let me be perfectly clear dana. i mean absolutely crystal clear.

i don't give 2 fucks about what type of suffering a person who chooses to murder innocent women and children has endured in their lives. it is a decision to destroy the innocent. pure and simple. couching it in terms of they are trying "to achieve a goal" is morally repugnant.

and i haven't followed it too closely so feel free to give me an objective answer to this - aren't the russians fighting to keep a portion of their country from seceding?

A portion of what used to be the Soviet Republic but which considers itself seperate and was seperate before it was incorporated into Russia.

Dont get me wrong Lookout. On a personal level I abhor what is being done ( by both sides) however there is also a political analasys to be had as well as a moral one.

There is little doubt of Russia's guilt in their past treatment of Chechnya, but now the Chechens are losing the moral battle. As Lookout has said, you can never justify terrorism against civilian targets, no matter what has preceded it.

The only hope that Chechnya has, is to back off, and basically concede defeat, as painful as that will be for them. They have to accept that they belong to Russia, and forget about their independence. I know that Dana and Jag will say that I would feel very differently if I had been subjected to the same treatment as the Chechens, but they have to draw a line, and say "no more, we give up". The alternative is more of what they have been receiving, and eventually leading to Bruce's solution. They have to realise that they cannot win - ever - and that their only hope is surrender. Otherwise, they have no future.

bluesdaves, thankyou for displaying some truly awe inspiring ignorance about post-soviet eastern European geopolitics or for that matter, any kind of independence movement anywhere, the roots of pretty much any terrorist movement in history or hell - pretty much all history now I think of it. Your combined lack of understanding of chechen history, Russia's reasoning behind the ongoing conflict, the role of strategic resources and the history and structure of the chechen rebel movement is sadly not unique in it's awesome lack of understanding.

The most interesting thing though is the demonstration about the role of media illusions, nervous, often drunk russian conscripts can waste kids and noone will ever hear about it but as soon as the chechen rebels take the flight to Moscow they've 'lost the moral battle'? Who the fuck are you kidding, there is no moral battle, there never was, you think morals worried the russians? Welcome to the majority of today's battlegrounds, dirty, unfair, horrible, inhuman and entirely free of media spotlight except when something 'newsworthy' like this happens. Keep in mind too that the FSB (KGB with a new nametag) was behind many if not all the apartment bombings attributed to the chechen rebels.

The only people left in that god forsaken hellhole now are rebels and people that couldn't leave - the sick, the elderly, who have been subject to general brutalisation by an army consisting mostly of nervous 17y.o conscripts, drunk and unpaid and hardass specops that would be more at home in the SS.

THE most disturbing image I’ve ever seen on the internet was a Russian soldier on the ground with a boot on the side of his head. A knife pushed slowly through the side of his neck all the way through to the ground. Then in a sawing motion cut out through the front of his throat. For some reason this was more disturbing than the beheadings in Iraq. Or he can blow up the school and blame it on the hostage takers.
BTW, don't forget the two planes these scumbags blew out of the sky, this week. :mad:

"The only hope that Chechnya has, is to back off, and basically concede defeat, as painful as that will be for them. They have to accept that they belong to Russia, and forget about their independence. I know that Dana and Jag will say that I would feel very differently if I had been subjected to the same treatment as the Chechens, but they have to draw a line, and say "no more, we give up". The alternative is more of what they have been receiving, and eventually leading to Bruce's solution. They have to realise that they cannot win - ever - and that their only hope is surrender. Otherwise, they have no future."

Someone raised earlier the idea that if governments give in to Terrorist pressure then the terrorists have their methodology proven effective and this leads to other people who consider their cause serious enough taking up terrorism as a proven effective method.....By the same token, if people who are oppresed or occupied simply accept defeat without resistance then violent occupation is proven effective and countries which have a vested interest in maintaining their control over another people are more likely to ignore the cries and pleas of those they oppress. After all they know that if they can only hold on to that land and it's people long enough, no matter howmuch they brutalise them the world will not support their calls for independance or freedom and eventually the disputed territory is theirs. This just encourages the most agressive and violent occupations to continue. After all, why give in to the demands of the oppressed when time will give them both the oppressor both victory and worldwide acceptance for their actions.

I find it interesting that the world community is prepared to take action against a weak oppressor nation but not against a strong oppressor nation. What has been happening in Chechnya for the past few years is not wholly dissimilar to the goings on in and around Kosovo a few years ago. Serbia was not the great bear though. Therefore Serbia faced international condemnation and action. When the great Bear roars and mauls the Chechens the world is less willing to act or even condemn too vocally. Right now there is talk of sending in troops or imposing sanctions against the Sudanese government over it's complicity/inaction against the janjaweed militia in the Darfur region. This is well and good and about time, but nobody seeks to impose sanctions against Russia for it's crimes against the Chechen people. If Russia was a small, third rate state the international community might have been more vocal in it's condemnation of her acts. Instead we save our ager and vitriol for states who are weak enough for us to dominate and allow horrors to be committed unchecked by the strong.

And now here we all sit in condemnation of the Chechen rebels and their actions whilst no sympathy can be found for their suffering. Suffering which the world has been deaf to for as long as they have been tormented.

The world didnt listen when they screamed so now they will make sure the world listens whilst they shout.

Unless the world community starts taking this on board then the war on terror will remain as unwinnable as a war against mist

To be in a position to espouse an opinion about this which has any worth whatsoever, one needs far more information that almost anyone has, there are complex geopolitical games in action here, Russian politics, chechen rebel politics, islamic radicals are tied up and there is careful strategy in play by both sides. There are plenty of interesting personalities involved as well. The targeting of a school isn't accidental. First thing is you can't blow experimental Russian nerve agents over a bunch of kids and expect even the majority to survive, that rules out the way they ended the theatre siege. A direct assault would be very high risk and almost certainly end in the deaths of a number of hostages - kids, very effective media tool. Now they've released a bunch of them, awww, how nice.

The thing is, most of you are approaching this with a fair degree of if not extreme moral absolutism, sadly, the real world exists in shades of grey, not black and white. There is no space for moral absolutism in the modern world and certainly not in dirty little wars in the ex-buffer states of the Soviet Union. I challenge anyone (sadly impossible to prove) who can't see this being done to take a long hard look at themselves and try to say that whatever happened to them, their families, their friends and their communities they couldn't imagine themselves doing this. Lets face it, we all live (as far as I'm aware) in relative wealth )by utilising the poverty of the 3rd world), safe, comfortable, without the fear of a stray mortar going though the roof tonight or watching our wives and daughters raped by gangs of drunk conscripts, what kind of position is that to moralise to people from?

Both sides are dirty as hell here, most of you have at best displayed a very faint understanding of the history of this conflict and the groups involved. I mean the group who did this probably did to the great annoyance of the majority of rebels and when it comes to the islamic angle things get really messy.

It certainly explains why the US elected a president who espouses a similar position to mask a government full of people that make chechen rebels look like peaceful protesters in their extreme ideology. The trick worked the first time, we'll see if after watching the result of such ideologies in action it works a second time.

Well said Jaguar.

I dont know nearly enough about the complexities of the Russia-Chechnya conflict and I have followed it for some years. It is almost impossible to actually get a clear accounting of what has been going on as we are to a large extent reliant upon the agendas of major media corporations for our information.

What I find saddening is that we are all much moved at the heartrending scene of a little russian girl being half dragged half run to safety from that school yet the equally heartrending picture of a little chechen girl half running half stumbling to get out of her house as the Russians begin to demolish it around her gets no attention.

What the children in that school and their parents are suffering is appalling. It does us credit as humans that we are moved by this. But countless Chechen children have died in fear or shivered through a night of terror. Countless Chechen mothers have had seen their little ones die and countless Chechen babies have lost their families to a russian advance. That we as a community remain unmoved by their plight does us no credit whatsoever.

It strikes me as interesting that many of the people who display the least understanding of the Chechen point of view are American. Perhaps America is simply too strong for it's people to be able to truly understand what it might be to be weak.

Many people have said that nothing excuses the targetting of innocent children. I would counter that nothing excuses the strong violently imposing their will upon the weak.

Being killed is kind of absolute.

Fine, now, why doesn't this happen in Yorkshire?

You didn't really answer my question, what would make you pull the trigger on a five-year-old? Because

There is no better example of this than pulling the trigger on a five-year-old.

"Fine, now, why doesn't this happen in Yorkshire?"

This did happen in Yorkshire. It happened over a thousand years ago. The crimes commited against it's people were manifold and the region saw itself as culturally seperate from Wessex right the way through to the 10th century. They were eventually forced to accept their domination by the southern kings and time did the rest, now we do not think of Yorkshire as anything but an integral part of the kingdom of England. The second a nation/people accept their defeat and allow occupation unnopposed they lose their seperate identity.

In the 11th century when England was invaded and occupied by the Normans there was resistance this resistance was met with extreme force and actions which in todays society would be descried as war crimes. It worked. The resistance was crushed and England lost it's independance and pride and became a French territory. Now a thousand years later we are what we are and that is no great sadness to me. But for the Anglo Saxon culture which ended on the battlefields of Hastings this was a grave conclusion. The decimation of Saxon resistance and the punitive destruction meted out to all and sundry silenced the anglo saxon tongue and relegated it to the history books once and for all.

If the Chechens simply accept defeat then maybe in a thousand years it wont matter to the people they have become. But right now the idea of simply losing one's identity cannot be acceptable to them. It would not be acceptable to me and it would not be acceptable to you.

What would make me pull the trigger on a child? I would like to say nothing owuld mak e me do that. I cannot say that with absolute certainty because i do not have any experience of being brutalised to the point of desperation and hate. As far as I am aware neither do you. I do think that most people if faced with a simple choice of pull the trigger on a foreign unknown child or pull the trigger on their own daughter wold likely choose the former as the lesser of two evils. It's a wholly unlikely scenario that someone would be faced with that choice but hypothetically speaking that is one circumstance which would lead me to kill a 5 year old. If it was a simple choice of someone else's five year old or my five year old the animal in me would seek to protect my own.

By the same token, what would make you hold a chechen child at gun point and rape her in front of her brother?

Well turned D. Much respect.

In order for me to hold a chechen child at gun point and rape her in front of her brother, I would have to be extremely mentally ill. It would require a pretty serious delusion probably combined with some sort of paranoia.

I can't imagine that it's the policy of the Russian government. But if it is, then this kind of resistance may be warranted. Still, if I were resisting I would target agents of the state, not random people. The agents of the state are the ones responsible and I think they would take the situation more seriously if they were personally targetted.

As far as personality goes I take my cues from the culture and not the state. In this case does the state want to institute a new culture, like enforced language changes and such?

Well they have been wacking russia stooge presidents for a fairly long time and I'm sure plenty of people have seen those delightful videos of decapitation of russian soldiers, it didn't seem to really get anywhere did it.

At any rate it seems the seige has been ended by a rather botched sounding rescue attempt though most of the hostage takers are now on the run and a fair few kids are dead.

*shakes head* The Russian authorities seem incapable of resisting their tendency to use strongman tactics in any given situation no matter how dangerous that might be to those involved. It was obvious to everyone that if they went in guns blazing children would die. Foolishness in the extreme.
It may have been possible to resolve this siege with minimal loss of life had they stuck to the rather novel tactic of negotiation. Unfortunately the emphasis seems to have shifted last night from protecting the safety of the children at all costs to preventing the escape of the terrorists at all costs.

"As far as personality goes I take my cues from the culture and not the state. In this case does the state want to institute a new culture, like enforced language changes and such?"

Thats a good question Bruce and I dont really know the answer. I know that there have been extremely oppressive measures taken against the civilian populace of Chechna and that brutality seems to be a mainstay of the army's approach there ( as Jaguar pointed out many of these soldiers are really conscripted teens who have no wish to be there and have grown to despise detest and fear the people they are dealing with, much as some of the younger and less well trained members of the coalition forces have found themseves hating Iraqi civilians and brutalised those in their custody)

Whether or not there are language and cultural oppressions I am unsure. Certainly the Russian culture is not sympathetic to the Chechen culture. The Chechens are an indigenous population of sunni moslems who have been fighting for their independance for upwards of three hundred years. They have made many attempts to free themselves from Russia both in it's Empire days and it's communist days. ( forgive my rather thin knowledge of the culture and history :P)

I found a really interesting site by the Human Rights Watch. It has many articles about the situation and the history of the conflict, check it out if you have time ( and inclination *smiles* ) But whilst you are reading bear in mind that not all chechen terrorists target children, in reality the school siege is notable for it's unusual nature. Nor indeed do all Russian soldiers engage in abuse.
This conflict is much wider than one set of extremists and a school of frightened children.

]Human Rights Watch on Chechnya

This would be a better tactic. It's not like the Russian government is terribly reflective of the people of Russia. Focus your hate and resources at the source of the oppression.