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Bad news in Russia

Image from Reuters

More than 320 killed in the school siege in southern Russia, at least half of them children.

Just when you think that human depravity can't get any worse, it does. Fighting violence with violence isn't the answer, but Jesus, how do you negotiate with people that behave this way? How can you get inside the heads of people that are willing to create an atrocity like this? The mindfucking thing about all this is that we will have to. If we can't beat them with military force then we'll have to find out how to engage them.

I think that Putin and Bush are wrong when they say that you can beat the terrorists by blowing all of them up. Even if there was some way to find all the terrorists, I think there's enough evidence to say now that using military force against them just inspires more terrorism. Look at Israel, which has been very effective at finding and hitting the terrorists where they live. The security situation there is still pretty unstable. The military strategy isn't working very well.

The people that attacked the school (there's some doubt about who they were) said they wanted independence for Chechnya. There are a lot of people in the West that support Chechnyan independence as well. But the last time Russia gave Chechnya autonomy, after the 1995 war, Chechen extremist groups attacked Dagestan next door and tried to topple the government. So an independent Chechnya might not be the best long term solution for the stability of the region. Fuck knows another Taliban-like state with expansionist-evangelist tendencies is the last thing we need.

So we need a political strategy- one of the very few things I agree with Bushie on is that a functioning political process can serve as an outlet for the anger of people that can't always get what they want. But how to make a functioning political process in Chechnya? The last election was more or less a farce, and guys like Maskhadov, Zakayev and even Basayev may still have more popular support in Chechnya than the "elected" president. (I'm basing this purely on what I've heard on the news- I can't confirm any of it)

After this siege, the instability is going to spread, and the spaces in which political solutions have a chance to thrive will be pulled even narrower. It's a pretty fair bet that Ossetia and Ingushetia will be at each other's throats again once the bodies are counted (according to reports, many of the hostage takers were Ingush and others were Arabs). That will bring the Russian army in on the side of the Ossetians. The whole region may go hot. What a mess.

The pictures on the news are heartbreaking... those poor kids.

Posted by case at September 4, 2004 08:06 PM