www.newsandletters.org
|
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2001 War in Chechnya "G-8, the Summit of Silence?" was the title of an appeal submitted by the dissident Russian journalist Andrei Babitski to the Genoa summit. Also signed by hundreds of prominent intellectuals such as Elie Wiesel, John Le Carré, Daniel Bensaid, and Elena Bonner, the appeal detailed the horrors of Russia's war in Chechnya: mass executions, roundups of civilians, torture camps, and rape. The appeal was in fact met by silence, not only by the leaders of the economic summit in Genoa, but also at the individual meeting between George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Was it entirely a coincidence that the two executioners had an especially warm encounter, despite strong Russian opposition to Bush's missile "defense" plan? Ten days before Genoa, Russian soldiers swept through two Chechen villages,
arresting and torturing every single adult male, some 1,500 people. They also ransacked the village. Some Russian soldiers laughed that "freedom"
was a "railroad car" to Siberia, a reference to Stalin's deportation of the entire Chechen people in 1944. The Chechen people charge that Putin aims to
rule Chechnya at any cost, with or without the population. A month earlier, on June 15, Russia, China, and four Central Asian countries signed a
little-noticed "Convention for the Struggle Against Terrorism, Extremism, and Separatism." The first fruits of this sinister agreement were: 1)
denial of a visa to Chinese exile Wei Jingsheng, who had been invited to |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
