Word: chechnya
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...week, separatist rebels attacked a small school in Beslan in North Ossetia. On the third day of the attack, at least 330 people were killed, more than half of them children. The attack was said to have altered the whole arc of not only the horrific conflict in nearby Chechnya but also the presidency of Vladimir Putin. Beslan was supposed to have given Moscow resolve. North Ossetia - indeed, the whole of the North Caucasus, between the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east - was supposed to be tranquil, harmonious, subdued. But that's not what...
...Russians invaded Chechnya in 1994 to try to keep it part of Russia. They failed. In 1999, three years after the end of the first Chechen war, they went back, at the prodding of then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In a move reminiscent of Tolstoy's hundred-year-old Hadji Murad - which was also set in a strife-ridden Caucasus - the chief separatist, Akhmad Kadyrov, like the title character in the prescient short novel, switched sides at the beginning of the second Chechen war and crushed the rebellion. Assassinated in May 2004, Kadyrov was replaced by his son. (From TIME...
...ferocious attacks by rebels - was supposed to be over. The horrible seige at Beslan and, later, the bloody assaults on a Moscow theater and a crowded underpass and the Chechen war exported into the rest of Russia were supposed to be things of the past. (See pictures of Chechnya today...
...Chechen government of burning more than two dozen homes in punitive attacks against the families of suspected rebels. She also exposed the public execution of a young suspected separatist by a Chechen security officer. "She was fearless, and boldly defended the truth," Shamkhan Akbulatov, head of Memorial in Chechnya, told a Russian news agency. On the day of her murder, Russian human-rights groups released a report, which she had helped research, that exhaustively documented atrocities committed by all sides during the two Chechen wars...
...determined efforts over the past decade to uncover killings, torture, disappearances and kidnappings made her powerful enemies, including Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, the republic's Kremlin-backed President. (Kadyrov released a statement calling Estemirova's killing "monstrous.") She was well aware that her work jeopardized her safety. "In Chechnya, the government creates an atmosphere of fear and mistrust," Estemirova said in 2007 as she accepted a human-rights award. "Those who witness abuse keep silent, for if they speak, they can soon become a victim." By silencing this woman who spoke, her killers have victimized everyone...