Chechnya

Today the world was asked to remember the mass deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush population by Stalin after the Second World War. One in three died in the lorries and cattle trucks as they were transported on mass from their homes. The Soviet Army considered others too old or too high in the mountains to be transported out. Whole villages were forced to their deaths over cliffs or shot on the spot.  It has been recognised by the European Commission for Genocide as an act of genocide.

Events were held all over the world and more will be in the coming weeks.

There was a ceremony held around midday on 23^rd February at the Yalta memorial in South Kensington. About eighty people turned up. The Ingush and Chechens are of course Muslims. None of the major media channels or news papers were there, no representatives of any political party, and no major Muslim organisation was represented, even though some were making such a fuss about only the Holocaust being remembered and refusing to turn up for that. Vanessa Redgrave however was there.

Stalin died and Chechens returned to their homeland. Their farms and homes had been stolen by Russians, but they rebuilt their lives. As the Soviet Union collapsed Chechnya made its bid for independence. The response from Moscow was, and still is, war. The Chechens have resisted heroically, but the price they have paid is severe. Right now atrocities just as horrific, in fact much more so, and loss of life just as sever are taking place in Chechnya.

At the beginning of the war (1996) the Chechen population was about a million. About 250,000 have died. Grozny, the capital, is in ruins, the economy and infrastructure non-existent. Well over 200,000 people have fled their homes. According to human rights organisations Russian forces commit war crimes on a regular basis. Massacres, rape and torture of civilians, bombing of civilian housing, hospitals and ambulances, looting, detention without charge or trial, and filtration camps where any male from the age of  ten to sixty are taken for detention interrogation and torture.

This is all at the hands of a government (Russia) that the US and UK and EU supports and funds with aid.

The butchers and warlords of Bosnia and Kosovo are quite rightly being hunted down, but the Russian commanders and troops involved in massacres of Chechen villages, bombing flat schools and hospitals and homes, and presiding over the torture pits and torture rooms are not even mentioned.

Slobodan Milosevic is known as the ring master of Serbian war crimes, but Putin is invited to have tea with Queen and is Tony Blair’s “personal friend.”

 This interview  with Shamil Basayev sums it all up.....

Shamil Basayev - Chechen hero, most wanted man in Russia- sits in front of me and lights a Marlboro. We are in a dusty courtyard at the dge of Dargo, a village lost in the jungle-like foothills of the Caucasus, 1hour behind the frontlines, with only the speck of a war plane circling high overhead to remind us of the Russians.

Basayev wears a faded camouflage suit, sandals and a Moslem amulet on a thin black cord around his neck. A Russian special forces rifle topped by a silencer lies on his lap and he drinks heavily-sweetened lack tea from a tin mug. Nearby sit bodyguards: tall men with carved, tanned and bearded faces - faces from another age, almost Biblical. their chests are heavy with grenades, Kalashnikov ammunition clips and the long Caucasus dagger, the kinzhal.

A hush falls as soon as Basayev - thickly bearded, dark-eyed and surprisingly small - begins to speak. This is the man who two weeks ago ,shot his way into a hospital in the Russian town of Budennovsk, held 500 people hostage to force a ceasefire in Chechnya, and got away with it. He is the criminal whose barricades were made from living, innocent bodies, who turned a hospital into a battlefield. But he is also the man who fooled the mighty Russian army and made it halt its war. In Dargo, he is king.

‘We showed them, Basayev laughs and everyone laughs with him. Basayev plays the celebrity terrorist - flippant, unbalanced, spouting pretentious political statements one moment, crass boasts of war the next but the bravado slowly cools. He stops talking about what he did at Budennovsk, or even about this brutal war. He goes back to his legendary namesake, Shamil, the Islamic warrior who led a 25-year struggle against the tsars’ armies in the 19^th century. He speaks of communist repressions. He recalls, above all, that event which enveloped ‘e entire Chechen people like a shroud: Stalin’s genocidal deportation in 1944 of every man, woman and child to Central Asia, a repression that as many as one in three did not survive.

‘When Stalin deported us,’ Basayev begins, ‘the Russians took over our empty homes and they ripped the stones out of our graveyards, then they used them to make roads, bridges, pigsties. His voice is quiet, but filled with hatred. Of course. What could be more loathsome to a people who consider ancestors as important as the living, who still rise out of their car seats in respect as they drive past cemeteries? The Soviets tore out hundreds, perhaps thousands of tombstones, purely to insult and humiliate. Eventually, Stalin died and the Chechens returned to their homeland. As soon as they got the chance, they gathered all the stones up again and built a memorial, a garden of death, in the centre of Grozny. Dignity was restored.

Then this war. New blood, new fury. ‘When the Russians stormed Grozny, they fired their tanks from the memorial,’ Basayev says. ‘On the hill over Alkhan-Kala, the soldiers took stones from the graveyard there and built toilets for their camp.’

Basayev stared at the ground a lot before, during the joking, but now, he’s looking me right in the eye. They want to force the whole people on to its knees and turn us into their slaves, but we can’t take these insults anymore. Our fathers and grandfathers fought and died for freedom, and we consider it a great honour to die for this too. It’s an honour to continue the fight.'

 

Allah's Mountains:
The Battle for Chechnya by Sebastian Smith

 

 

Comments

[Percy]

The Chechens aren't true Muslims: they're forced Christian converts from the days of Islamic oppression. I no longer have sympathy for their plight since reading about how they so enthusiastically participated in the genocide of 1.5 million Christian Armenians in 1915. Perhaps if they didn't indulge in their typical Islamic ways by crucifying and castrating Russian conscripts they'd be treated better. The Middle East is for Muslims: that's where you should all go and that's where you should all stay because if you remain in Europe, quite frankly, sooner or later we'll wipe you out for our own preservation.

ARGcomment: Amazing how people believe their own lies!
Take note everybody. These people REALLY do still exist.
...oh yes Percy. If the middle east is for Muslims, what the hell are you and your armies doing there then!
Also I think you are confusing the Chechen's with the Kurds. Please provide any reliable documented evidence to prove your claims, and we'll be more than happy to post it here.

[ahmed]

islam is 4 all humanity and that is why is islam the most diverse in the world. u have arab,balck,European(Albania.bosnia,and ofcourse chechniya plus all the white muslim minority in Hungary,serbia and miost eastern Europe! yes let me tell u arminians and their christain europens allies the truth.white people in the west have been doing well to brainwash the western Europeans how all muslims are arabs and muslims live in only in middle east,well hello hello who gives them the right to speak 4 the muslims or white muslims in Albania,bosnia,chechniya. and the truth is look the map of the world much of the eastern Europe are muslims or majority,besides u can find every race in the world a Muslim. tell me one race that doesn't have a muslim!?
arminians i have one word 4 u guys,sorry geographically u located a place called Middle east lol so what re u doing there if middle east is muslim land,oh one more what are the jews doing there,oh one more thing what on earth the romans doing in Jerusalem historically,

ARGcomment:...and we could go on and on with endless examples.

[Abu Mogadishu ibn Somal]

Asalaamu Aleykum wr wb
yeh Islam for everybody, I personly is Somali and I'm muslim.
and I'm from africa, not from east africa. there you see, Islam should be
everywhere and for everybody.

I love my brothers in Chechnya, may Allah(sw) have mercy on them, because they have been an example for the ummah. The people of Chechnya have suffered so much and for so long because they are muslim, so I ask Allah(sw) to be bleased with them and make they name remember by the ummah, amiin.

From a brother who love and support his brothers and sisters in Chechnya.
Asalaamu Aleykum wr wb
one of the servents of Allah.

[Islam is for some not all]

Islam is not for everyone.

Remember Beslan and the Muslim Chechins doing their worl for Allah.

ARGcomment: I think you are confusing Islam and Muslims.
Islam prohibits terrorism. Muslims may and do things against Islam.
If you take a barrel of water and drown someone in it, it is not the fault of the water.

[Baysangur]

There are no fakts and no history that is saying that chechens were forced to accept Islam Chechens the only nation in the muslim world who accept Islam by peacefuly without fighting because chechen culture and tradicion is very similur to Islamic and there is one thing,Islam was broght to Chechnya by chechen warriors who went to Middle East and no noone came to Chechnya not arabs or turks they didn't came to Chechnya to force to accept Islam or to fight with Chechens the only people who came to Chechnya is fight with chechens are russians and since that we we fighting with that russians and we chechens never fought that long not even with mongols..No one knows the history of chechnya better then we chechens so please stop......Chechnya will be independent free muslim country DALA MUQLAH......

ARGcomment: May Allah bless you, thanks for the comment. Just a point that Muslim armies did not conquer Indonesia, Malaysia or China and they also accepted Islam without anyone coming to try and conquer them