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

To: goldsnow who wrote (15146)	10/31/1999 11:09:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 17770

<<I am curious as how you see indicted Milosevic tactics against KLA/Albanians are different from Russian action in Chechnia?>> Goldsnow, I have to confess than when the Kosovo/NATO/Yugoslavia situation began, I dove under the seat (as I used to do when watching horror movies), shut my eyes tight, plugged up my ears, and told everyone I was not coming out until it was over. I knew it was going to end badly, but I don't feel I am informed enough about what actually happened to draw meaningful parallels with the Chechnya situation. If you mean to ask whether the Russians are conducting ethnic cleansing, in the same way that Milosevic did, I would say -- yes and no. Yes, in the sense that what is occurring is, in fact, ethnic cleansing. No, in the sense that it is pretending to be something else (an "anti-terrorist" operation). Putin is still flatly denying that any civilian casualties worth mentioning have occurred. In an interview with the radio station Echo Moskvy today, for example, he attributed all reports of the targeting of civilians to "malicious terrorist propaganda." Thus, Western news agencies, etc., are deliberately disseminating disinformation cooked up by "the terrorists." Putin has especially vehement in denying reports of a recent Russian attack on a refugee convoy, even though they have been confirmed by the Red Cross (there were two clearly marked Red Cross vehicles in the convoy, and two Red Cross workers were killed). Putin (and the FSB, his former bailiwick) has also accused the Chechens of doing most of the bombings themselves (!), so as to have something to blame on the Russians. Putin has also offered an "interesting" interpretation of the mass exodus of refugees from Chechnya: they are fleeing (Chechen) bandits, not (Russian) bombs. But there is no single person, like Milosevic in Yugoslavia, to blame this on. Putin is not the Commander-in-Chief; Yeltsin is. But Yeltsin is non compos mentis (in my opinion, anyway). Putin is only an FSB Colonel, and no Army General is going to take orders from him. Most won't take orders from one another, either. So it's every man for himself. Meanwhile, the general public is even bloodthirstier than the "authorities", if possible. I have taken to haunting Russian internet discussion groups, and this sort of thing is par for the course: "Waste them all, the cockroaches. Use napalm, use poison gas, nuke them if you must -- but waste them all! The only good Chechen is a dead Chechen." And the attitude towards "territorial integrity" is interesting: it is all about the territory itself -- the piece of land -- not about the people who live on the territory. Here is a little post I ran across yesterday, typifying that attitude. It was posted to a thread titled "Will Chechnya remain in the Russian Federation?" The territory that is called Chechnya will remain in the Russian Federation. But what shall we do with the Chechens? What do we need them for? They have never produced anything useful. So why don't we just kick these rotten people out? Let Turkey or the United States take them. In short, we are not dealing with a "wicked dictator" here, but with a mass psychosis.