Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (14691)	9/28/1999 11:19:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

George... Oh, George! You might have had a strong case for a fair and balanced tear-jerker on the Kosovo crisis. Unfortunately, you systematically --or is it pathologically?-- bias your posts towards your fellow Orthodox Serbs. You're hopeless....

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (14691)	9/28/1999 6:44:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Russian Campaign Against Chechnya Copy-Cats NATO In Kosovo By Jon Boyle Despite its fierce criticism of NATO tactics in Kosovo, Russia has adopted a similar air war strategy against Islamic militants in Chechnya, even adopting western-style media presentations to build support for the campaign. The military top brass has been drafted in to explain the air raids on the Chechen capital Grozny, attacks on communication centers, the republic's main airport, key roads and bridges, and oil facilities. The offensive was launched last week after Moscow accused Chechen-based rebels of being behind a wave of huge bombings of Russian apartment blocks this month which killed nearly 300 people. Analysts said the Chechen campaign mirrors the strategy of the Atlantic alliance in Yugoslavia, where NATO jets carried out a three-month bombardment of military and infrastructure targets to force President Slobodan Milosevic to halt a crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists. Pitched as a merciless war against "bandit formations," the Russian campaign aims to pin down the guerrillas, destroy them in their bases, harry resupply routes, and cut off radio and mobile phone links used by the rebels. The goal of the aerial attacks, analysts said, is to avoid a potentially bloody ground offensive while retaining support for an operation among ordinary Russians who are still scarred by Moscow's disastrous 1994-96 war against Chechen separatists. Airforce chief General Anatoly Kornukov at the weekend detailed the more than 30 bridges and some 250 kilometers (150 miles) of roads destroyed during 1,700 combat sorties from August 3 to September 24. His press conference, broadcast on national television, bore an uncanny resemblance to the daily briefings given in NATO's headquarters in Brussels by the Atlantic alliance's chief spokesman Jamie Shea. Using high-resolution reconnaissance photographs and footage from in-flight cameras on SU-25 ground-attack aircraft, Kornukov showed bombs destroying designated targets in "surgical" strikes which first hit the world's television screens during the Gulf War. "Russia severely criticized NATO for all it did in Kosovo, but this experience has not become a reason to avoid similar actions in Chechnya," Ivan Safranchuk of the PIR-Centre think-tank said in an interview published in the Vremya daily on Monday. "The logic of the military operation in Chechnya consists of minimizing losses," added Vladimir Baranovsky, from Moscow's prestigious Academy of Sciences. "The NATO operation in Yugoslavia was founded on the same principle." Military sources quoted by Vremya said Moscow's air campaign could last up to 18 months as its warplanes try to destroy the republic's infrastructure, including roads leading to Georgia and Azerbaijan. At the same time, the army will seek to seal Chechnya's border with the neighboring Russian republics of North Ossetia, Ingushetia and Dagestan, as part of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's strategy to protect Russia from the "terrorist contagion." A second aspect of the campaign is apparently to sow discord among the Chechen warlords and trigger a civil war which would turn public opinion against the gunmen and pave the way for installation of a pro-Moscow leader in Grozny who would curb Chechnya's fractious groups. However, the strategy is high risk because, as Baranovsky told Vremya, NATO military planners had better aircraft and more accurate weapons systems at their disposal than their Russian counterparts. Chechnya's "foreign minister," Ilyaz Akhadov, told Echo Moscow radio at the weekend that about 100 civilians had died in Russian air raids since Thursday, a rate of loss which threatens to further alienate ordinary Chechens from Russia. Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent defense analyst in Moscow, predicted that the air campaign "will be a total military disaster." "The more Russia destroys the remnants of civilian society and the civilian economy in Chechnya, the more Chechnya will become a land dominated by warlords," he said. "You can bomb warlords until doomsday, they don't give a fig about civilian casualties, but you can't destroy them by such attacks. So this strategy is doomed from day one." ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse)