Bitter fruits of imperialism
Jim Jepps
As
this article is written it seems that something like 350 people have
been killed in the Russian school siege, where Chechen terrorists took
hundreds of men, women and children hostage in a school.
The world news is full of the terrible ordeal that these people have
been through, and in particular of course the children.

Whilst there has been an historic oppression of the Chechen people
dating back to the Tsarist days and the invasion in the 1830's, the
current conflict centres around the break-up of the old Soviet Union and
Chechnya's ability to break away and form a separate state as other
regions have done.
The Russian government says that this is simply unacceptable and that
Chechnya is part of Russia, and sent troops to the area in 1994.

As the civil war intensified 1996 saw massive bombardment of the
capital Grozny and estimates are that in this year alone around 70,000
people were killed. The civil war destroyed in infrastructure of the
region, and Russian forces have continued a perpetual state of war ever
since, setting up a puppet government whose President Akhmad Kadyrov was
recently killed in a bomb attack.
Russian president said f these latest attacks that
"we have shown weakness" - the obliteration of Grozny, the many
thousands killed by Russian military forces both on the ground and from
the air - all of this Putin characterises as weakness. It's nonsense of
course - there is no military solution to the problem.
Russian
will not withdraw its forces from Chechnya not because of some historic
bond with Chechen people (of whom many Russians have a strong racist
abhorrence of) but because Chechnya is essential in securing Russian oil
supplies.
Some have been shocked by the high number of women who have taken
part in suicide attacks and other violent acts. But many of these women
have named themselves "black widows" because their husbands and other
family members have been murdered by the Russian army.
Does
Putin think these women only commit acts of terror because he's been too
soft on them? To entrench the policy of state terror in Chechnya is to
guarantee the escalation of terrorist attacks in Russia. Just as Bush's
war on Islamic terrorism has ensured its growing popularity.
The only real way to fight terrorism is to fight for social justice
on a world scale - not in order to be weak on terrorism - but in order
to wipe out the deep rooted causes of bitterness, hatred and injustice.
September 2004