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Pushing the Envelope of Journalism Until It's Inside-out
By Russ Wellen (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Russ Wellen - Writer
"The 'Chechnya' special operation has infected the whole country, which is becoming more and more beastly and idiotic. The value of human life was already very low in Russia, and now it has slipped to almost nothing. We have all reached the depths, like the unrescued Kursk [the sunken submarine]. And there's no order for rescue."
-- "A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya" by Anna Politkovskaya (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
One hundred twenty-six journalists have been killed in Iraq, many of them native to the country. We don't mean to slight them, but we've chosen one from elsewhere to represent all journalists whose lives are imperiled.
It's not just that she demonstrated as much courage as any journalists that ever lived while reporting on a conflict, the Chechnyan Wars, at least as savage as Iraq. But from the standpoint of convenience, it's easier to examine her life because a large body of her work is available in English.
Anna Politkovskaya wrote for a Moscow periodical critical of Russian government policy. Its initial funding was provided by -- get this -- Mikhail Gorbachev. He used the money he won for his 1990 Nobel Prize to found Novaya Gazeta in 1993.
Imagine the American corollary? All you can come up with is Jimmy Carter helping get a new American Prospect off the ground with his Nobel Prize money. And that's a stretch.
The Chechnyan separatist movement never garnered much sympathy in the US. What little most of us know about it is, for one, the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis (known to Russians as "Nord-Ost," after the production playing there at the time).
After Chechnyan terrorists seized the theatre, 39 of them were killed in the chaos that erupted when Russian forces flooded the theater with poison gas. Worse, 129 to 200 of the hostages lost their lives as well.
Second, of course, we remember the Beslan school hostage crisis in 2004, which ranks as one of the most hideous events in this or any century. After another typically heavy-handed Russian response, at least 334 civilians were killed, including 186 children.
In both incidents, Politkovskaya herself was called upon to help negotiate the release of hostages with rebels who knew of her reputation. But they weren't separatists as much as terrorists taking revenge for Moscow's oppression of their people in the wake of the Chechnyan separatist movement's onset.
From 1989 to 1991, the Russian republics, like Estonia, Ukraine, and Belarus, asserted their independence. When Chechnya, a small republic followed suit, Russia gambled that it could hold on to it without the major war required to prevent the large republics from leaving.
It's not that Russia minded losing Chechnya. It's just that its secession set a bad example for the other small republics whose resources and industries were more valuable to Russia than Chechnya's.
During the First Chechen War, from 1994 to 1996, the Russian forces, despite obvious superiority, were unable to establish control over Chechen guerrillas in mountainous areas. Then the separatists seized a hospital in Budyonnovsk, a city in Southern Russia.
As with Beslan and Nord-Ost later, the troops were blamed for killing more hostages, over 100, than rebels. A shock to the Russian public, it discredited the Russian government's mission in Chechnya.
7,500 Russian military, 4,000 Chechen combatants, and from 35,000 to 100,000 civilians dead later, Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared a ceasefire in 1996 and signed a peace treaty a year later.
But in 1999, unwilling to leave well enough alone, Chechnyan guerillas tried to invade the neighboring republic of Dagestan. After enduring a series of apartment bombings in their cities, including Moscow, the Russian people were less inclined to object this time when its government, working with increased efficiency, installed a pro-Moscow regime in Chechnya.
From 2000 to the present, Russian officials have periodically declared the war is over. While attacks continue in the north, Chechnya, in fits and starts, is finally undergoing reconstruction.
Russ Wellen is the nuclear deproliferation editor for OpEdNews. He's also on the staffs of Freezerbox and Scholars & Rogues.
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