Chris Doss wrote: And Russia's reaction to being invaded (twice) should have been what? How should Russia react to thousand of its citizens being kidnapped and tortured? What should the Dagestani reaction be to attempts to force it to become a medieval Islamist state?
Reply: The Chechens invaded Russia?
After the Soviet Union collapsed, 14 regions become independent nations. After Dzhokhar Dudayev was elected president of Chechnya, he declared independence. But Boris Yeltsin refused to accept this and sent in troops. After Chechen rebels drove off the Russian troops, a full-scale invasion was mounted in 1994. These are the facts. As far as Dagestan is concerned, Russia believes that it has the right to intervene against Islamic radical rebels there as well. I think it has about as much right as Turkey has to do so in Kurdestan. The Caucasus wars is fundamentally over control of oil nothing to do with fighting medievalism. If Putin was seriously opposed to terrorism and lawlessness, he'd had taken a stand against NATO's war in the Balkans and the occupation of Iraq.
Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA) April 22, 1996 Monday, THIRD
CLINTON LIKENS CHECHNYA BATTLE TO U.S. CIVIL WAR
By MARCIA KUNSTEL and JOSEPH ALBRIGHT Cox News Service
DATELINE: MOSCOW
Handing Russian President Boris Yeltsin a prop for his troubled re-election bid Sunday, President Clinton likened the savage, unpopular war in Chechnya to the American Civil War, and promised to use his influence to help end it.
As both leaders prepare to face their voters this year, they denied after five hours of Kremlin summit talks that there was any political motivation behind the high-sheen gloss they laid over their disagreements.
Winding up his third visit to Moscow as president, Clinton said he agreed "to do a thing or two" that Yeltsin asked to help secure a diplomatic end to 16 months of hostilities in Chechnya.
Clinton plans to urge Muslim leaders, especially King Hassan of Morocco, to act as intermediaries and bring Muslims of the secessionist Chechen Republic into a peace agreement with Moscow, an administration official explained later.
But the American side also gave Russia a green light to keep troops in Chechnya, Yeltsin said. Drawing no correction from Clinton at a joint news conference, Yeltsin said the United States agreed to let Russia "temporarily" deploy more troops in the war-torn Caucasus region than permitted under the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. That pact limits troops and heavy weapons from the Atlantic to the Urals.
"I would remind you that we once had a civil war in our country in which we lost on a per-capita basis far more people than we lost in any of the wars of the 20th century over the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for - that no state had a right to withdraw from our union," Clinton said sympathetically.
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