Word: chechen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...choice of General Mikhailov to lead a group of journalists on a tour of Russian-controlled parts of Chechnya is an intriguing one. In 1996 he was chief spokesman for the Federal Security Service at Pervomayskoye, site of one of Russia's worst humiliations in the 1994-96 Chechen war. A Chechen leader named Salman Raduyev had seized the village, taken hostages and for days beaten back attacks by elite Russian units. Mikhailov was responsible for explaining this mortifying defeat to Russians and to the world. His performance was roundly denounced as inflammatory and wildly inaccurate, and he was fired...
This is a war fought with bombers and artillery, though the dirty, killing work of real combat will probably increase as the Russian troops approach Grozny, the Chechen capital. Reports filtering out of the front lines are filled with talk of shortages of warm clothes, sleeping bags, gloves and socks for the troops, who will have to spend a bitterly cold winter in the open...
...have been looting the place. "They stole my car yesterday," yells one man in the crowd. "The soldiers steal cattle, spare parts. They get drunk at night and shoot up the town. They harass you at checkpoints," says an engineer called Khasam, who now runs a photocopying service.Clean-shaven-- Chechen-Islamic political correctness demands full beards--and defiantly secular in his views, Khasam makes it clear that he is no supporter of the city's former rulers. The gunmen who ran the town before the Russians were no good, he says, but the troops are even worse. His view...
...restricted live coverage of the events in Chechnya on national television, effectively keeping millions of Russians uninformed of catastrophic civilian casualties. More troublesome is that the Russian government has restricted foreign and independent news agencies' access to Chechnya as well. Most of the Russian government's claims about the Chechen conflict cannot be independently corroborated, meaning that the Russian people--and the world--are basing their opinions almost entirely on the Russian government's questionable and highly politicized accounts of the truth...
Indeed, with the humanitarian stakes in Chechnya as high as they are, the world must be able to respond to the Chechen conflict in an informed and intelligent manner. The Russian government may be concerned about creating a favorable image before Yelstin's successor is elected next year, and it may be concerned with regaining lost pride after a decade of impotence. But, as citizens of a nation that purports to uphold democratic ideals, the Russian people have a right to the truth about what is happening in Chechnya...