Maybe you could fax the following scrap to your buddy, "terrorist-basher" Putin.....
Jamestown Prism, January 26, 1996
CHECHEN TERRORISTS--MADE IN THE USSR
by Stanislav Lunev
At the beginning of January, the world was shocked by a new act of mass terrorism in the Russian Federation. As foreign and Russian news agencies (1) reported, Chechen fighters seized about a thousand hostages in Kizlyar--a city in Dagestan in the Russian North Caucasus. As in Budennovsk last June, they demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, and called for their own state outside of Russian sovereignty. The question of the independence of Chechnya is a rather complex historical, political, social, and economic problem which can and must find a solution, but it is difficult to condone these methods of achieving the terrorists' goals.
After the slaughter in Budennovsk, all Russian politicians, beginning with Boris Yeltsin and his closest advisors, spoke of the danger of international and domestic terrorism and the need for a decisive struggle against this evil. The recent events in Kizlyar and the series of terrorist acts in Grozny which preceded it, directed against representatives of the Russian federal authorities, have still further alarmed Russian officials. But slogans are slogans: what is really being done in Russia in the area of the officially-declared "decisive struggle" against terrorism? To answer this question, it is necessary to state that there are indications that, after the fall of the former USSR, which, for many decades, was a support base for world terrorism, the practice of supporting terrorism was not abolished. According to reports in the Russian press, (2) just as before, there is in the GRU (the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces) a network of special centers and camps for training saboteurs [diversanty]. The now internationally-famous Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev received training as a saboteur capable of working behind enemy lines in Abkhazia from the GRU.
Of course, over the last few years, the number of these special training camps and centers has gotten smaller, since those which were located in eastern Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and on the territory of other former Warsaw Pact allies, have been closed. But the methods and ideology of training terrorists, based on the principle that "the end justifies the means," have remained substantially unchanged. And, no fundamental changes have been made in the training of international terrorist groups either, who continue to receive special "education" in
Russian training centers not for ideological reasons but "for a fee." In particular, as Mikhail Zadornov, a member of the Russian parliament, has said, quoting "informed sources" in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, that several members of the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo sect, notorious for its chemical attack on the Tokyo subway, had not long before gone through special marksmanship training at a secret GRU base located near the city of Ryazan. (3)
It is worth noting that a significant part, or even the overwhelming majority of, the famous terrorists of the 1970s were trained in the former USSR, and in the countries under Soviet control. And what has happened in this area recently? Have the "repentant" GRU or Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, who are offering their special services to a Russian government which is no longer totalitarian, but "democratic," admitted their responsibility for the crimes committed by the specialists in murder whom they trained? Nothing like this has happened. Even in the case of Shamil Basayev, who was trained by the Russian special services, the GRU and FSK [Federal Counterintelligence Service] specialists have kept silent. As the Russian press has noted, Shamil Basayev's detachment went through not only training, but was also "broken in" under fire in Abkhazia under the direction of GRU specialists, whose professionalism and individual courage received the highest marks from the Chechen terrorist himself. (4)
Legends have circulated about the inhuman cruelty of Basayev's men during the time of the Georgian-Abkhazian war: they purportedly drank their enemies' blood by the glass, and invented a new form of execution--the "Chechen tongue," in which the victim's tongue is pulled out through a slit throat. As the Moscow magazine recalled, all of this was shown on television and described in the press numerous times. But the Russian authorities and the special services remained indifferent to the fanaticism of the Chechen terrorists and they went unpunished. For this, the population of the little Russian town of Budennovsk paid with their blood.
Basayev graphically demonstrated how he could turn what he had learned from his teachers against them. In this respect, the stubborn unwillingness of the Russian special services to divulge all the facts about all the real and potential terrorists trained in the former USSR and the Russian Federation by the GRU and FSB, becomes understandable.
Moreover, starting in 1992, the new Russian leadership began to conduct the old Soviet policy of "divide and conquer" in the countries of the so-called "near abroad." Separatist forces in Moldova, Georgia, and other former union republics were supported by the Russian special services, with the blessing, and at the insistence, of the country's highest military and political leadership. In these republics, detachments, officially called "diversionary groups," were trained and prepared under Russian control. At first, these detachments really served Russia's interests, creating zones of instability in newly-independent states whose leadership insisted on their countries'complete independence and refused to follow Moscow's orders.
For this, the Russian special services "urgently needed" the "Dniester" diversionary battalion in Transdniester [Moldova], with its half-crazy "Transdniester Avenger" Colonel Kostenko, and the "Chechen Battalion" in Abkhazia under the command of "Colonel" Basayev. But, as ought to have been expected, as time went on, local and internal interests began to take precedence over all-Russian interests for these terrorist groups spawned by the Russian special services. And to the great amazement of the Kremlin leaders, in October 1993, the "Dniester" battalion led the storm of the Ostankino television center, and in June 1995, Basayev's battalion seized hostages in Budennovsk.
[snip]
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