+OT+ Doug -- just a few points on the State Department & Chechnya. Your summary of their position is more or less correct, but there are many problems with that position, including (but not limited to):
1) Nobody, but nobody, in the State Department knew anything at all about Chechnya before the war. I can assure you, in fact, that before December, 1994, there were at most five people (myself included) in this entire country who took the trouble to learn about the political situation in Russia's North Caucasus in general, and Chechnya in particular. (I exclude, of course, the handful of ethnic Chechens who live here.) As usual, instead of looking ahead, anticipating possible developments, State reacted after the fact, and without the necessary knowledge.
2) This was not a "rebellion," which the Russians had to come in and quash. Not even the Russians used that term. The Chechens declared their independence in November, 1991, more than three years before the Russians sent in their troops. Negotiations between the Russians and Chechens had been going on, by fits and starts, throughout the course of those three years. It is still not quite clear why the Russians suddenly decided to use military force in December, 1994, to overthrow the Dudayev regime. One theory is that it was all about oil: Baku had just concluded the "deal of the century" with the international consortium to develop its off-shore oil fields, and the Russians wanted to make sure that the oil could be exported through the "northern route" (e.g., from Azerbaijan through Chechnya to Novorossisk), which meant they had to secure the Chechen segment of the pipeline. Just a theory.
3) Many qualified observers and international lawyers argue that it WAS genocide. I can attest that the civilian population (including the many ethnic Russians in the republic) was the primary target. The situation was immeasurably worse than in Kosovo. If you want the details, I will be happy to supply them. And this genocide followed Stalin's 1944 deportation of the ENTIRE Chechen people to Central Asia, in the course of which a good half of them died of starvation and/or cold. (Khrushchev allowed them to return in 1956.) The Chechens (who had earlier lost more than half their population during the war of annexation in the 19th century) are convinced that every 50 years there is an effort to destroy them.
4) Just to make the complexity of the background a little clearer: the Soviet Union's territorial divisions were based on ethnic identity, with "first class" peoples, "second class" ones, and "third class" ones. The "first class" ones (Russians, Uzbeks, Georgians, etc.) had Union Republics. The "second class" ones had "autonomous republics" or "autonomous regions," located within, and subordinated to, the Union Republics. "Third class" ones had no "state formations" at all. These divisions were arbitrary. The Chechens -- like many other ethnic minorities in the former Soviet Union -- thought this system unfair, and originally just wanted to raise their status from that of "autonomous republic" to "union republic." (That had happened numerous times before in the Soviet period: Kazakhstan and Kirgyzstan, for example, were once Russian autonomous republics, and subsequently were elevated to Union Republic status.) Note that the Chechens declared their independence of Russia BEFORE the final collapse of the Soviet Union.
4) Even if the State Department had felt it would hurt Russian-American relations to issue even the mildest reproof to the Russians, that still does not mean that State, and the President, had to SUPPORT the Russian war effort. That was gratuitous.
I could go on and on, but perhaps you should wait for my book on the subject. <g>
jbe |
