Yaacov, sorry to be answering your Chechnya query more than a week late. Been busy & preoccupied with just that -- the Chechen situation. You ask about my background.
Until last year, I was a correspondent with the VOA (Post-Soviet Affairs). I am also a "fully credentialed" historian, and I had developed a particular interest in the North Caucasus, to which I often travelled. I was planning to write a book on the area, which Americans were totally unfamiliar with, and I was in Chechnya, on a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, when the war began. So I stayed on, naturally, for the full year of the grant. Returned to cover 1996 peace negotiations, 1997 Chechen presidential & parliamentary elections..
One thing made me -- and still makes me -- cross. When I left for Chechnya, in Oct. 1994, the number of people who were interested in it could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But once the bombs started falling, everyone got interested! Conferences! Newly fledged "experts"! Ridiculous articles! But when the bombs stopped falling, and everything seemed to be "settled," everyone lost interest again. Then -- the bombs started falling again! Then everybody got all interested again!
Do you really have to be bombed, to get other people's interest???
As for sources, there are plenty, thanks to the Communications Revolution which has occurred in Russia since the 1994-1996 war: the Russian Internet has grown tremendously (even the "militants" have a website), and you don't have to go broke phoning people anymore, thanks to e-mail...
My own sympathies in this matter are not with the Russians, not with Basayev & Khattab & Co., and not even with Maskhadov (who could have risen to the occasion, but did not, IMO). My sympathies are exclusively with ordinary Chechens, who have gotten it in the neck from everybody..
jbe |
