Glucksmann Artikel aus dem WSJ

Stephan, Donnerstag, 02. Oktober 2003, 19:45 (vor 7896 Tagen)

Ausschnitte aus einem Wall Street Journal Artikel
ueber Chechnya vom 2. Oktober.

Our Greatest Sin of Silence
By ANDRE GLUCKSMANN
There are deaths that weigh no more than a
feather. Entire peoples who don´t count. They have
only one right, the right to disappear. They are
absent from our concerns and from our television
screens, even before the tanks, the bombs, the
raids and the landmines reduce them to nothing.
The Chechens live in absolute solitude,
surrendered to the pleasures of a massacring
Russian army. And no one -- not the United
Nations, not world public opinion, not any one of
the democracies that are so proud of their
principles -- cries bloody murder!
Neither of the conflicts that has gotten the
attention and sympathy of the world -- Iraq or
Palestine -- is as cruel as this one. The Chechen
nation counts barely a million individuals, of
whom between 100,000 and 200,000 have died at the
hand of the Russian army, which first invaded in
1994 and left a few years later, humiliated. To
celebrate the millennial year 2000, President
Vladimir Putin sent the troops back and razed the
Chechen´s capital Grozny, and transformed their
tiny country into permanent hell. The few
travelers who risk the ire of the authorities to
visit Chechnya (and I was one of them) bear
witness to the worst of the worst that dishonors
this good year of 2003.
On Sunday, presidential elections organized by
Moscow will take place on this devastated terrain.
No one lends them legitimacy. Not even the
Kremlin. Its candidate, Akhmad Kadyrov, the
current chief of the pro-Russian administration,
enjoys feeble popularity (13%). Bought or
threatened with death, all of the competitors
capable of challenging him have backed off or are
forbidden to run. As for the people, pushed
towards the ballot boxes with a Kalashnikov, they
know that it´s not the ballots that will decide,
but rather the armed man who will count and invent
them (200,000 dead Chechen "souls" are on the
electoral lists). Such a farce fools no one, not
the Chechens, not the Russians, nor the
Europeans.....

Colonial war in the Caucasus turns inexorably into
the extermination of the local people, put to the
sword, deported to the last man, villages razed,
pogroms, blood and ruins.
Why so much cruelty? The great Russian writers
revealed the secret: It´s an educational exercise.
The Chechen incarnates the spirit of resistance.
Over the centuries, the Kremlin has bled Chechnya
and made it a model for the rest of Russia, forced
to submit to the central powers-that-be. The
Russian autocracy is born and born again in the
very exemplary laying- to-waste of a little
people.
Russian diplomacy´s third message to the civilized
world is: Get lost! Yes, Sunday´s elections make a
mockery of democratic rules, but you will all
close your eyes. Paris and Berlin compromise, too
eager to integrate into their improbable "peace
camp" on Iraq a Russia that is carrying out the
dirtiest war of the dawn of the 21st century.
Thirsty for Russian oil and natural gas, the
European Union swallows its principles and rolls
over. Washington, partly out of strategy (nuclear
balance), partly out of cynicism, forgets the
support in arms and in advice that Moscow gave to
Saddam Hussein up until the last minute. Mr.
Putin´s hands are free and he ridicules democracy
by holding up his bloody ballot boxes to the
world.
The global capitulation to the Caucasian butchery,
worse than a crime, is a grave error. The
democratic governments and the millions of
demonstrators "against war," who take to the
streets against George W. Bush and never against
Vladimir Putin, are guilty of not helping a people
on the verge of extermination. Indifferent, but
not ignorant. They know about the four years of
massacres, savagery, terror and horror -- but they
don´t care.....

Everyone senses this supreme risk -- no Russian
site is any more immune to a suicide attack than
Manhattan was -- even as they buy into Mr. Putin´s
"final solution": No more Chechens, no more
terrorist threat. The silence of the pacifists and
world leaders is tantamount to their
benediction.....

Lies, blindness, indifference pave over the leaden
silence. Worse, world opinion, tacitly adopts the
genocidal impulses that drive the Russian
military. The world media rids us of our scruples
and washes them away -- a good Chechen is a dead
Chechen. We witness a world first in the Caucasus:
murder with universal premeditation.