Who Mourns Grozny?

By Crispin Sartwell




By the time the Russian army leveled Grozny in January 2000, the people
who could had fled. Out of a population of half a million, perhaps 30,000
remained. They were mostly people who couldn't run: the elderly, ill,
wounded, and disabled, as well as women in labor at the maternity
hospital.

To destroy the city, the Russians used "fuel-air" or "thermobaric"
weapons. A thermobaric warhead spreads a cloud of volatile gas over a wide
area, then detonates it, consuming the oxygen and creating a huge vacuum.
As the vacuum collapses, it generates a thunderous blast wave that crushes
everything close to the cloud, including human bodies.

It is often said that a thermobaric weapon has the effect of a nuclear
weapon without the radiation.

Military experts were fascinated by the Grozny campaign because, though
several countries had developed thermobaric weapons, they had all been too
squeamish to use them.

By the time the Russians planted their flag in central Grozny, hardly a
structure was left standing. It is impossible to know how many people
died; the bodies amounted to puddles.

Nor was the devastation limited to Grozny. Mountain towns such as Shatoi
and Komsomolskoe were expunged from the earth.

In the course of the two Chechen wars with Russia, between 100,000 and
200,000 Chechens have been killed, out of a total population of less than
a million. Probably only a few thousand of the dead were rebel soldiers.

400,000 or more have seen their homes destroyed, with tens of thousands
fleeing the province altogether, while many others are internal refugees.
In 1999 at the beginning of the second Chechen war, a column of 2,500
women and children, fleeing toward Georgia, was fired on and decimated by
the Russian Air Force.

Russian sorties into the countryside and villages of Chechnya are known as
"mopping up" operations. Typically, they kill, detain, or conscript the
men and abuse and rob the women.

Ostensibly to deal with the refugee problem and identify opposition
fighters, the Russians set up a series of "filtration" camps. Human Rights
Watch and other humanitarian organizations have documented extreme and
widespread torture as well as mass graves and incinerators intended for
cremation at facilities such as the "PAP-1" concentration camp near
Grozny.

The Russian government is currently trying to force external refugees back
into the province, and to seal the borders, creating a kind of Chechen
reservation.

The reasons for Russia's extreme response to the idea of Chechen
autonomy - which appears almost unbelievably disproportionate to the
threat it poses to Moscow - include fear that neighboring provinces in the
Caucasus would also seek to break away and that oil transport would be
interrupted.

But perhaps the deepest and the most ridiculous motivation for the
destruction of the Chechen people and their homeland is pride Putin's
renewal of the war and the vast brutality with which he has prosecuted it
is at the center of self-presentation as a strong leader.

There is almost the sense that crushing Chechnya will restore the glory of
a nation that was humiliated by the disintegration of its empire in the
early nineties..

Ethnic and religious bigotry make it possible for many Russians to
dehumanize the Chechens, who have for centuries been the objects of
Russian derision and destruction. A Russian term often applied to the
Chechens is "chernozhopyi," which means "black-assed"; the closest English
cognate is "*****."

The reasons for the mild, almost apologetic, international reaction to the
killing are also complex. The Russian army has managed to restrict media
access to the province. And the world community will, evidently, do almost
anything to avoid annoying Vladimir Putin, including watching in a silence
that amounts to complicity in genocide.

Meanwhile the Chechens themselves seem intent on undermining their cause
by monstrous and pointless acts of terrorism. And though it is not hard to
understand the rage and despair of the terrorists, America has done well
to condemn and to mourn Beslan. Who mourns Grozny?




http://www.crispinsartwell.com/mourngrozny.htm