Here She Is, Miss Janjaweed

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Few things in this world are as preposterous and amusing as totalitarianism.

     Totalitarian rulers lie all day until they believe what they're saying, and only an idiot would tell them the truth about anything. Gaining extreme power is like being inflated with hot air, until eventually you drift free of reality entirely. Unless you're a victim, one of the poor saps who end up cleansed, that's funny.

     If you don't believe that Russia is a totalitarian society, you should look at how ITAR-Tass, Interfax, or the St. Petersburg Times covers Chechnya. It's all happy, productive collaborators warding off terrorists and smiling for the cameras.

     The Moscow Times on the day I write includes this item: "A 15-year-old high school student danced and baked her way to the title of Miss Chechnya on Saturday, beating out twin sisters for the grand prize of a sleek Toyota sedan. . . .The Chechen administration organized the pageant as part of its efforts to show that calm has returned to the war-scarred republic."

    Meanwhile, ITAR-Tass reports this: "Two battalions fully manned by local residents ≠ either conscripts or those serving under contract - have entered duty in Chechnya. . . . 'In fact, this is the first instance of young Chechens drafted for service in the Russian Interior Ministry Troops. With time our youth will be a full-fledged member of the family of Russian peoples,' Chechen President Alu Alkhanov said at the special ceremony on the occasion."

     In Russia's campaign of extermination in Chechnya, perhaps 200,000 people have been killed and another 400,000 displaced in an ethnic population that probably started under a million. Many of these people have been displaced multiple times, as the Russians evict them from surrounding republics.

     Meanwhile, from Grozny, his capital, leveled by the Russian regime he serves, "President" Alkhanov throws beauty contests. Indeed, almost daily Alkhanov participates in some event intended to show the normalcy of a place that he is simultaneously making a hell on earth.

     The Russians are fortunate to find conscripts, since they've disappeared a significant proportion of the male population into "filtration" camps. Many of the Chechen resistance fighters are young women: young women without fathers, brothers, lovers. Were I a Russian commander of Chechen draftees, I'd be wearing body armor to bed.

      Meanwhile, every act of resistance, whatever its target or purpose, is labeled in the state-controlled Russian media as terrorism.

      The Chechens, unfortunately, have reinforced this idea by bringing down airliners and by the monstrous action in Beslan.

     But comparing the Chechen resistance to al-Qaeda is fatuous. The Chechens are fighting against a long and thorough genocide, an attempt to bury their culture.

    In the 1940s when the Chechens tried to achieve independence, Stalin removed the entire population of Chechnya to central Asia, allegedly because they were 'collaborating with the Nazis.' This form of words did for Stalin what 'terrorist' does for Putin: he could look in the mirror and not see the murderer staring back.

    Krushchev allowed the Chechens to come home in 1956. Many of the resistance fighters now were born in exile or are the children of exiles.

    But Putin's treatment of Chechnya has been even more brutal than Stalin's; it included expunging Grozny with thermobaric weapons: incendiaries which kill everyone within range by consuming all the oxygen. (The US has experimented with thermobaric weapons in Afghanistan.)

    In short, with the possible exception of Darfur, Chechnya is the globe's most acute and enduring humanitarian crisis. Perhaps the Sudanese government can pick up a few tips. They might try rounding up some cute victims of the Janjaweed and throwing a Miss Darfur contest.