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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (84933)	8/7/2000 11:00:36 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Steven, I found what you wrote about Mindanao fascinating, not least because of the parallels with Chechnya. For example, the remark about the "secessionists" being "a diverse and largely disconnected group of rebels, bandits, kidnap-for-ransom groups." And the Bin Laden connection. And the beheading fixation. Boy, does that sound familiar! The kidnapping craze around the globe is a particularly striking phenomenon. As far as I know, there is only one book on the subject, written by a former Wall Street Journal reporter (Ann Hagedorn Auerbach): Ransom: The Untold Story of International Kidnapping. Not a "great" book -- largely anecdotal -- but it does have an illuminating chapter about the social/political conditions that have been producing this curious symbiosis of revolution, the kidnapping industry, and the drug trade in the most seemingly disparate areas of the world. Seems to me, it would certainly behoove governments faced with this sort of thing to take a long look at similar developments in other countries,, and at how other governments have dealt with them. UIn Chechnya, for example, the kidnapping industry began to flourish only after the first war. It was clearly an outgrowth of the war (or rather, of the conditions it produced), and it appears to have been introduced and/or encouraged by "Wabhhabi" outsiders. Most of the victims, incidentally, have been ethnic Chechens themselves. But to listen to Russians, you would think that the Chechens invented kidnapping; that there is something inherently "predatory" about Chechen culture and the Chechen people; that the whole enterprise is aimed specifically at them -- at "destroying" the Russian ethnos, etc. They seem to have no idea, in other words, that anything of the kind is happening -- or can happen -- anywhere else in the world. I am by no means sure, on the other hand, that Chechnya is/was as "bad" as Mindanao, in cultural/economic respects. Chechnya is poor and miserable right now, but that is thanks to two very destructive wars. Even today, however, any intact Chechen village looks a lot more inviting than any Russian one. Chechens know how to live (and how to build houses), and do not have a penchant for drinking themselves to death. Joan