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NEWS & LETTERS, JUNE 2003
Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
Russia's Chechen war
In Russian-occupied Chechnya, two suicide bombings killed some 75 people in May. In one case, a truck bomb struck a Russian military and government headquarters, but also killed civilians in a nearby neighborhood. In the second case, suicide bombers killed 15 Chechens attending a celebration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. This second bombing, carried out by two women, was aimed at the Russian-installed Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov, who escaped unharmed. While these terrorist attacks grabbed international
headlines, especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin made a spurious
attempt to link them to Al Qaeda, what is seldom reported, especially in the
U.S. media, is the savage and unrelenting violence with which Russian forces
have attempted to subdue Chechnya since 1999. Russia's repression has led the
Holocaust Museum in Washington to place Chechnya at the top of its
"genocide watchlist." With about a million inhabitants, the death toll
in Chechnya is estimated at somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000. A confidential Russian government document leaked to the international press this spring admitted to 1,314 assassinations of civilians by Russian forces during the year 2002, surely a gross underestimate. Many more have been kidnapped, beaten, tortured, and raped, men as well as women. One gruesome tactic is to kill with explosives, leaving only scattered body parts, which also makes a traditional Muslim funeral impossible. In April, Sergei Yushenkov, a prominent Russian politician who had spoken out against the repression, was assassinated in the heart of Moscow. |
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