Moscow steps up its reign of terror in Chechnya after horrors of Beslan...

[HuckleB]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/26/wruss26.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/26/ixworld.html

Moscow steps up its reign of terror in Chechnya after the horrors of Beslan siege

"It was just after 5pm on Saturday two weeks ago when Anzor Machiev, Alikhan Vitaev and a third friend from their Chechen town approached a junction with the main Grozny road in their battered Lada.

At the crossroads, several vehicles with blacked-out windows were waiting. As the Lada braked, six figures in camouflage and masks got out and unleashed a hail of automatic gunfire into the car. Then they calmly walked up to the wreck and fired a "control shot" into the head of each of the unarmed victims to ensure that he was dead.

A handful of stunned taxi drivers watched as the attackers - thought to be security forces loyal to Moscow - lingered for a moment before driving away, leaving the bodies sprawled on the road.

A month after the Beslan school siege in North Ossetia, in which more than 340 people died at the hands of mostly Chechen militants, Russia's reign of terror appears to be continuing in neighbouring Chechnya.

..."

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The terrorist known as Putin continues his daily rampage.

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http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/0904/19chechen.html

'I would listen to their screams, see their faces' -- An interview with Dr. Khassan Baiev

"Sometimes I would not leave the hospital, would not go out to see what was going on, to talk to other people. I amputated so many legs, I would come to feel that no one outside could be walking normally. That no one had two legs. That I cut off the leg of everybody.

In the village, people were saying I would go crazy, or I would have a heart attack. Even when I would manage to catch three or four hours of sleep, in my dreams I would only dream about my patients. I would listen to their screams, see their faces.

...

I had only a metal hacksaw that I borrowed from a neighbor. Sometimes the neighbor would need the hacksaw, so I would send the nurse to give it to him to cut what he needed, and then he would bring it back for me to continue doing the amputations. Even the brain surgeries I was doing with a regular household drill. The kind that you turn with your hand.

...

My life changed 100 percent. I saw what firearms really do to people. I saw a lot of corpses of Ingush people. I saw torture — all kinds of burns, all over their bodies — on women and children. When the war started in my country in 1994, with no question, with no second thought, I returned because I knew that a lot of people would be hurt and that a lot of people would need my help.

..."



Regarding Baiev, I cannot recommend his book, The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire, enough. It's an incredibly intense and well-done book about Baiev's experiences as a Chechnyan surgeon during the two Russian-Chechnyan wars of the 1990s. The atrocities that surrounded him must be witnessed by those of us who can spread word of what war is truly like. He was chased from his homeland because both the Russians and some Chechnyan insurgents wanted to kill him for treating the wounded regardless of what side they fought for. Of course, most of the time he treated innocent civilians caught in the middle of it all. He also discusses the process that Putin used to curry Bush's favor in ignoring Russian atrocities by labeling the Chechnyans as terrorists.

[HuckleB]

1. More on Chechnya...

CE: Chechnya should have human remains identification lab
http://www.interfax.ru/e/B/0/28.html?id_issue=10705933

"The Council of Europe on Saturday offered to help Chechnya set up a laboratory to identify human remains, arguing that such identification would help cut the list of missing people.

At a meeting in the Chechen capital Grozny with Chechen President-elect Alu Alkhanov, Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles said people whose relatives had gone missing kept looking for them for a long time and would do so before they found out what had happened to those who had disappeared.

..."

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Russia’s Chechnya Abuses Fan Terror: Group
http://www.islamonline.org/English/News/2004-09/26/article02.shtml

"An international rights group on Saturday, September 25, accused Russia of encouraging terrorism through its human rights abuses in Chechnya and rejected Moscow 's claims that the decade-long conflict was an internal affair.

“The Chechnya crisis is the worst humanitarian crisis in the region,” AFP quoted Aaron Rhodes, the head of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation, as telling a press conference in Sofia , Bulgaria. There have been “hundreds of thousands of murder and deaths during the last 10 years,” he added.

The small mountainous republic pf Chechnya has been ravaged by conflict since 1994, with just three years of relative peace after the first Russian invasion of the region ended in August 1996 and the second began in October 1999. 

At least 100,000 Chechen civilians and 10,000 Russian troops are estimated to have been killed in both invasions, but human rights groups have said the real numbers could be much higher.

..."

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Russians hunt down potential 'black widows'
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10890719%255E2703,00.html

"AFTER surviving nearly a decade of savage, seemingly interminable warfare in Chechnya without seeing any of her four children come to harm, Khalimat Saidullayeva thought the worst was over.
She started to believe the Kremlin's claims that life in the breakaway republic would return to normal, and somehow clung to her optimism about the future even after her flat was burnt down two months ago in a gun battle between Russians and Chechen rebels.

Saidullayeva, 37, had never had any connection with the rebels, but someone in her home town of Argun, 25km from Grozny, the Chechen capital, spread a malicious rumour that they had paid her $US45,000 ($64,300) in compensation for the loss of her property.

It was a highly improbable claim in a region where the average monthly salary is $US180. Russian commanders appear to have given it credence, however, with devastating consequences for Saidullayeva and her children, the youngest a boy of eight.

..."

[HuckleB]

2. Umm. Where is everybody?

I remember when Beslan happened, and the threads about it went on and on, as they should. But when one brings up the horrors of Putin's state terrorists in Chechnya, no one has anything to say?

What's going on? Why the disparity?

[Blue_Tires]

3. it's about what i expected

i figured when that tragedy at the school went down, the chechens were going to suffer a lot of wrath, even though most of them had nothing to do with it

[HuckleB]

4. It won't end in peace until Putin is gone from power.

[TheLastMohican]

5. You should carefully read the first article

"A handful of stunned taxi drivers watched as the attackers - thought to be security forces loyal to Moscow - lingered for a moment before driving away, leaving the bodies sprawled on the road".

That tells me that a bunch of unidentified warriors, chechens by nationality shot other chechens from probably the other teip (clan). This is the usual shit that is happening daily in Chechnya between different warring chechen factions.
Is it somehow Putin-related?

[HuckleB]

7. I guess all those human rights observers are just liars.

They haven't observed and corroborated these stories time and time again, have they? No. It's just Chechens killing Chechens, and Chechens killing Russians for no good reason, with poor Saint Putin crying for all the dead unable to stop it.

:eyes:

We've all read the racist ramblings that you offer about Chechnyans time and again. Thanks for offering another one. It'd make me laugh if it wasn't so terribly sad.

[Forkboy]

6. I'd hate to be a hostage in Russia

The odds of being saved seem rather low.