Chechnya

A spiral of regression

Nearly 370 people have died since gunmen claiming to champion Chechen national rights seized a school in North Ossetia (a territory neighbouring Chechnya) on Wednesday 1 September and took the children hostage. Nearly 200 people are still officially missing. Many of the dead and missing are children. Nothing the hostage-takers might say about Chechen rights can blur the horror of what they did. Discussing the need for harsh measures in revolutionary and class struggles, Leon Trotsky wrote: "The liberating morality of the proletariat of necessity is endowed with a revolutionary character. It...

Chechnya: death of Moscow's gangster

By Dale Street The only surprise about the assassination on 9 May of Ahmad Kadyrov, the Russian-imposed President of the Chechen Republic, was that it had not happened sooner. Kadyrov was one of the most reviled men in Chechnya, and deservedly so. Kadyrov began the first Chechen war as a field commander for the Chechen forces. In 1995 he was appointed mufti of Chechnya, with the title of "field mufti". He was appointed to this position not by the spiritual leaders of Chechnya but by other field commanders. They wanted a mufti who would declare the conflict against Russia to be a holy war...

A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya

by Anna Politkovskaya This is not a weighty political analysis of the conflict in Chechnya, but a collection of newspaper articles by Politkovskaya in which the focus is on the "inhumane empirical detail". Much of the book consists of personal stories. Many of the people of whom those stories are told are no longer alive. Reading it is certainly a depressing experience. The Chechnya described by Politkovskaya and by those who are given a voice in her articles is a physical and moral wasteland, one in which basic human values have been eroded by nearly a decade of bloody conflict. The Russian...

The writing on the wall

George Bush recently requested an extra $87 billion from the US Congress to pay for the occupation of Iraq. Most of that money will go on reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and most of those will go to American firms. One of the most notable was the $500 million to support troops and extinguish oil field fires for Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, which Vice President Dick Cheney led from 1995 until 2000. The extent of the cronyism involved in the awarding of contracts - the links between these businesses and the US administration - is quite staggering. Here's the latest...

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