Word: chechenization
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Vladimir putin wasn't able to rub out the Chechen guerrillas, Viktor Shenderovich remarked ruefully last Saturday, but he sure got us. Shenderovich, whose impishly satirical programs are wildly popular in Moscow, had just resigned from NTV, Russia's only privately owned nationwide network. A few hours earlier NTV as the Russian public knew it - opinionated, strident but often head and shoulders above the competition - had ceased to exist. In the early hours of the morning police and security guards hired by the network's new owners had taken over its studios and installed a new management headed by Boris...
...wave of terrorist bombings in the Russian northern Caucasus late last month killed 23 people, including a 15-year-old girl, and wounded 144. In Rostov-on-Don, 1,100 km south of Moscow, the trial of Russian Colonel Yuri Budanov on charges of murdering an 18-year-old Chechen girl resumes next week. Both events highlight the madness of Russia's tragic Chechen quagmire...
...Budanov, 38, was a rising star in the Russian army when he came back to Chechnya as commander of the 160th tank regiment in September 1999. He was a hardened veteran of both Chechen wars, having earned two medals for valor and two early promotions that put him on the fast track to a general's stars. But that brilliant military career went off the rails when Budanov became the first high-ranking Russian officer to be charged with what amounts to a war crime: the abduction and premeditated murder of Kheda Kungayeva. Full Story...
...main prizes being fought over in this war. Many thousands depend on handouts from the few international agencies working in the city. Grozny's mayor, Beslan Gantemirov - amnestied in 1999 from a Russian prison where he was serving six years for embezzling municipal reconstruction funds after the last Chechen war in the mid-'90s - is highly visible. Thanks to his fast cars and retinue of heavies with nicknames like King Kong, he can hardly be missed. But local people say he does little to help, and official salaries are paid only intermittently. At 6 p.m., when darkness starts to fall...
...Moscow insists that it is winning the war, that the Chechens are rallying to its side, and that the situation in Grozny is almost normal. Many Western critics of Russia's operations in Chechnya, Putin said during an Internet conference earlier this month, just do not understand what is happening. "We feel that the actions of the Russian army are aimed at liberating the Chechen people from the terrorists who seized power and who compromise Islam and the Chechen people," Putin said reassuringly. He may well believe that. Yet as a visit to Grozny makes evident, the Russians...