Beslan
By Crispin Sartwell
No one can defend strapping on explosives and invading a school, much less the disastrous actual results in Beslan.
But maybe if you don't want to watch your children die, your planes fall out of the sky, and so on, you should respect the legitimate aspirations of a distinct people for independence.
Maybe you shouldn't pursue a policy of indiscriminate bombing and massive displacement that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and hundreds of thousands of others refugees
Maybe you shouldn't devote many years and billions of rubles to leveling a nation. Maybe you shouldn't engage in mass murder on a national scale for the sake of civic pride.
Maybe you shouldn't commit genocide. Because when you do, the people you're killing develop a fatal mixture of rage and despair.
If you try to kill and displace a whole people, they tend to blame your whole people. The conflict becomes symbolic as well as physical and on both planes has the highest stakes. Our survival is your death. Your children will grow up to kill our children. We will expunge you from the face of the earth as you have expunged us.
After 9.11, a certain strain of thought urged us to reflect on our own behavior around the world. Of course that idea was met with disgust and derision by the right. But whatever you may think of this, the political and economic role of the United States in the Middle East is an immensely complex issue. The role of Russia in Chechnya, however, is simplicity itself. It includes countless direct acts of terrorism, that is, of intentionally tageting non-combatants.
Vlad: you're reaping the whirlwind, and it's liable to get worse. Of course, ordinary Russians who may well oppose the war are also reaping the whirlwind, and so are children who maybe don't even really know what war is. That's wrong.But I might get at the essence pretty quick: Vlad, if you don't want to get killed, stop killing.
human rights watch on the chechen war:
