← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 20190 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2005-09-13
2005-09-13 21:58 | User Profile
[B][I]This could explode into an all-out war between Christians and Muslims all over Caucasus, with Russians and Ossetians (and possibly Armenians) on the other side and these various Muslim tribes on the other... for some background on this escalation, check out these links:[/I][/B] [COLOR=Red][SIZE=4][B] "Beslan: The Sick Sense"[/B][/SIZE][/COLOR]
[url]http://www.exile.ru/2004-September-17/war_nerd.html[/url]
and [SIZE=4][B][COLOR=Blue] "Crushing Islam in Beslan"[/COLOR][/B][/SIZE]
[url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20049&highlight=taymuraz[/url]
[url]http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2358&ncid=2358&e=11&u=/csm/20050913/wl_csm/ocaucasus_1[/url] [FONT=Arial] [SIZE=5] Russia struggles to keep grip in Caucasus[/SIZE] [B] By Fred Weir, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
Tue Sep 13, 4:00 AM ET[/B]
NAZRAN, RUSSIA - Murat Zyazikov, the pro-Kremlin president of the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia, is a hunted man.
Since taking office in 2003, he has narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of a suicide car-bomber and a sniper, allegedly sent by local Islamic militants. In the past month alone, insurgents have bombed the motorcade of his deputy premier and opened fire on his security chief. A year ago, fighters loyal to Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev briefly seized the Ingush capital of Nazran, killing almost 100 police officers and government officials.
Mr. Zyazikov, a former general of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), shrugs all that off. "Things here are calm and peaceful," he told journalists at a meeting in his plush, golden-domed presidential palace. "These attacks against me and my officials are the work of desperate men who want to destabilize the situation in southern Russia. They hate the fact that we are building a worthy life for our people."
As the war in neighboring Chechnya grinds into its seventh year with no resolution in sight, conflicts are metastasizing around the troubled north Caucasus, which has been a zone of tension since it was conquered by Russia in the 19th century. The region is a patchwork quilt of warring ethnic groups and rival religions that makes Europe's other tangled knot, the Balkans, look tame by comparison.
Many experts say the Kremlin's grip, iron-hard in Soviet times, has slipped disastrously in recent years. "The Chechen conflict is spilling into neighboring republics, escalating the process of destabilization," says Alexei Malashenko, an analyst with the Carnegie Center in Moscow.
Zhairakhsky, a sparsely populated district amid the high, snow-capped mountains of southern Ingushetia, has remained relatively untouched by conflict. But, says local administrator Yakhya Mamilov, "if you stand on a mountaintop here and look around, you'll see wars flaring or brewing in every direction. It's impossible to build for the future with any confidence while these conditions last."
Rebel fighters from Chechnya, a few kilometers to the east, often take refuge among their Ingush ethnic kin in Zhairakhsky, locals say.
Further east is the Caspian Sea republic of Dagestan, with 32 constituent ethnic groups, where Islamist rebels stage almost daily bombings and ambushes against Russian security forces.
To the south and west two breakaway republics, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, are locked in long-simmering wars of independence against the post-Soviet state of Georgia. Just next door on another side is traditionally Christian North Ossetia, hereditary enemy of the mainly Muslim Ingush, with whom they fought a savage border war in 1992.
Moscow has tried to maintain its authority by phasing out "unreliable" local leaders, and replacing them with loyalists like Zyazikov. "This tactic is not working," says Alexander Iskanderyan, head of the Center for Caucasian Studies. "Moscow imagines that exchanging 'bad' officials with 'good' ones will change things, but the main trend we see is a steady loss of control."
Passions in Ingushetia and N. Ossetia are still seething over the Beslan school massacre a year ago. On Sept. 1, 2004, a squad of 32 terrorists, most of them ethnic Ingush, drove from Ingushetia and seized 1,200 hostages in Beslan's School No. 1, just across the border in N. Ossetia. Three days later Russian security forces launched a massive assault on the building, leaving 331 people dead, half of them children.
Zyazikov, and other pro-Kremlin officials, blame the outrage on "international terrorism." North Ossetia's acting president, Taimuraz Mamsurov, says the Beslan school siege was a deliberate attempt by "certain forces" to stir up ethnic war between Ingush and Ossetians. "Tensions have increased (since Beslan), that's natural," he says. "But I think we've succeeded in restraining our people from fulfilling that scenario."
[B]Others doubt the danger has passed. "Everyone here is always talking about getting ready for war with the Ingush, to get even with them," says Madina Pedatova, a teacher at Beslan's spanking new School No. 8. "I'm terrified of it, but I'm sure it's coming."[/B]
Just across the heavily fortified Ingush-N. Ossetian border thousands of Ingush refugees forced from their homes in N. Ossetia in 1992 live in a sprawling, squalid refugee camp. Here the hatred is palpable. "The Ossetians are like Nazis. They drove us from our homes (in 1992) like cattle, showing no humanity," says Umar Khadziyev, unemployed, who lives in a small hut with his wife and three children.
Mr. Khadziyev says he condemns the Beslan attack, with its terrible death toll of children. But then he adds: "Do you know why the fighters drove past two Ossetian schools before taking School No. 1 in Beslan? It's because the Ossetians used that very school as a prison for our people in 1992. Yes, our women and children were held there, in that same gym, beaten up and denied food and water. Nobody talks about that, do they?"
For Moscow, the spreading unrest, fuelled by Islamic extremists in some republics and ancient ethnic antagonisms in others, poses an almost nightmarish challenge. After Beslan, President Vladimir Putin warned that the cost of failure could be "the destruction of Russia." [B]Says Khadziyev, the Ingush refugee: "Our grandfathers told us the USSR would collapse one day. I'm sure that Russia is going to fall apart too."[/B][/FONT]
2005-09-14 15:20 | User Profile
If I were bin-Laden, I'd deploy one of my newly-acquired nuclear warheads in Moscow, preferably near the Kremlin itself (seeing as how I'm uncertain how large these warheads are). I hope very much it doesn't happen, but such monstrous events are beginning to look an awful lot like inevitabilities in this revolting excuse for the modern world in which we are forced to dwell.
2005-09-14 15:41 | User Profile
I have a hunch that states like USA or Russia (not even mentioning Israel) have made it unofficially known to Muslim militants that if some of their cities goes off in a mushroom cloud, Mecca and Medina will be wiped off the face of earth in retaliation...
Petr
2005-09-15 02:59 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]I have a hunch that states like USA or Russia (not even mentioning Israel) have made it unofficially known to Muslim militants that if some of their cities goes off in a mushroom cloud, Mecca and Medina will be wiped off the face of earth in retaliation...
Petr[/QUOTE] If only that were true.
2005-09-15 04:51 | User Profile
I don't doubt for a second that Putin has the sack to pull it off.
Who else has the balls, since the Aussies don't have nukes? Reagan is dead.
AE
[QUOTE=BlueBonnet]If only that were true.[/QUOTE]
2005-09-15 06:00 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]I have a hunch that states like USA or Russia (not even mentioning Israel) have made it unofficially known to Muslim militants that if some of their cities goes off in a mushroom cloud, Mecca and Medina will be wiped off the face of earth in retaliation...[/QUOTE]
I suspect you are probably correct, but I don't share in what I discern to be your optimism that such a threat, assuming they take it seriously (and they probably do), will be in any way effective. They can keep Mecca and Medina in their hearts, whilst they wallow in our now-radioactive blood. I have little doubt they are willing to sacrifice all they claim to adore, in order to topple us, and I rather suspect they're going to do it (and thus the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle/Feith/Goldberg/Sharon undertaking of the whole Mossad/Skull-and-Bones/neo-"conservative"/U.S. intelligence community & military-involved conspiracy to impose a, shall we say, very non-idealist/insincere, quasi-fascistic, totalitarian plutocracy in these United States, through the use of their Islamist agent-provacateurs, whom they cultivated during the Soviet-Afghan War, and whom we know as "Al-Qaeda," will perhaps turn out to be the single largest mistake humans have ever made....)
Or number two, after the crucifixtion of Jesus, for our Christian friends (its interesting to note the role Jews played in both of these two collossal, and devastatingly immoral errors).
2005-09-15 06:12 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Angeleyes]I don't doubt for a second that Putin has the sack to pull it off.[/QUOTE]
I suspect one would be a fool to doubt that; maybe we could trade Presidents? You think the Russians would take Bush, if we threw in Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Midway, Wake, Puerto Rico (assuming they'd even want that, which I doubt; I certainly do not), the U.S Virgin Islands, any and all U.S. shares in any future mineral wealth extraction procedures in Antarctica, and a cash payment of $200 billion dollars, assuming we can get China to loan it to us?
Probably not. Who can blame them?
2005-09-15 09:27 | User Profile
[COLOR=DarkRed][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "They can keep Mecca and Medina in their hearts, whilst they wallow in our now-radioactive blood." [/I] [/B] [/FONT] [/COLOR]
You are [I][I]projecting [/I] [/I] Western romanticism on non-Western peoples. "Keeping something in their hearts" sentimentality is not simply enough when one of the [B]pillars[/B] of the entire Islamic religion is a pilgrimage to Mecca.
[SIZE=3][FONT=Garamond][B][COLOR=Blue]"The final pillar of Islam is the pilgrimage to Mecca performed during the month of Zul Hijjah. Performance of the Hajj at least once in one's lifetime is obligatory to all who are physically and financially able to undertake it, and about two million people go to Mecca each year."[/COLOR][/B][/FONT][/SIZE]
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Pillars_of_Islam[/url]
[COLOR=DarkRed][FONT=Arial][I][B] - "I have little doubt they are willing to sacrifice all they claim to adore, in order to topple us, and I rather suspect they're going to do it"[/B][/I][/FONT][/COLOR]
First of all, nuking some Western city will not mean "toppling us." It would just mean total coming-off of gloves, and Islamists know it.
Second, Al-Qaeda types [B]themselves[/B] are clearly not nuclear physicists. Those sources that [B]might[/B] provide them with nuclear capability are more or less secular-minded Muslims, fat cats who love life and are [B]not[/B] all that thrilled at the idea of sacrificing their position for the glory of Allah.
Petr
2005-09-16 03:21 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]I have a hunch that states like USA or Russia (not even mentioning Israel) have made it unofficially known to Muslim militants that if some of their cities goes off in a mushroom cloud, Mecca and Medina will be wiped off the face of earth in retaliation...
Petr[/QUOTE] Seymour Hersh wrote about it: "The Samson Option"!
If Bin Ladin or Al Qaeda had a nuke (apparently a 50/50 probability if you listen to the experts), no doubt only American cities are on Bin Ladin's 'top 10 cities to nuke' list. Moscow would probably rank somewhere between Houston and Cleveland on that list.
2005-09-16 08:27 | User Profile
The Chechens and Ingush are a real threat. But there aren't very many of them (although they have extremely high birthrates).
The much more numerous Azeris are in my estimation not much of a threat. Their heart just isn't in the fight. They look to secular Turkey as their model, and they just want to make money, methinks. Which they're doing now that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is up and running. Azerbaidzhan is projecting - if memory serves - something like 15% growth this year and next.
Besides, a ragtag group of Christian Karabakhi Armenians kicked their asses but good, and they all seem to me to be rather resigned to having lost their Armenian population.
I mean to say that if radical Islam were ever to sweep Azerbaidzhan, then yes indeed you'd have problems, but as it is I just don't see the Azeris going that route.
Hope I'm right.