Excusable terrorism

I found this editorial from Boston Globe only yesterday. On July, 11, 2006 the editor of the newspaper commented on the death of Shamil Basayev. I think it’s a good example of how lies, distortions and double standards come together. After Beslan it became really difficult for mainstream newspapers to write about Basayev and other freedom fighters in Chechnya. The BG editor wriggles but still the point is evident – there are bad terrorists and there are excusable terrorists depending on whom they fight. One line from the editorial:

There can be no excuse and no justification for Basayev's targeting of innocent civilians. But Putin's re conquest of Chechnya has been no less vicious to innocent civilians.

That’s right. There can be no excuses and also no justifications for “buts”. When you use “buts” you mean that the previous sentence is simply a ritual. If there were less “buts” in helping bin Laden fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan there would’ve been less surprises why this “friend of America” hates America so much. For people like Basayev or bin Laden there could be no friends among infidels – only idiots who support them politically, with money, or with weapons and who are spared for the time being.
The Boston Globe editorial tells the usual Chechnya story – Basayev was a good freedom fighter but then Russians were so bad that he had no choice but to become a terrorist and start killing Osetian schoolchildren.
Here’s a phrase about the first Chechnya war:

In that war, Basayev took part in the defense of the Chechen capital, Grozny. Journalists saw no traces of the remorseless savagery or the Islamist fanaticism that were to characterize his behavior in later years.

The editor forgot about Budenovsk that happened in 1995 when Basayev took a hundred pregnant women hostages but the editor is not lying. In fact “journalists saw no traces of the remorseless savagery” in Budenovsk. In 1995 I saw live report from Budenovsk on CNN. Then I, like most of Russians, believed that Western journalists are unbiased. What I saw was a shameless show of hypocrisy. An anorexic blonde about 25 years old is reporting live, “We see women in windows of the hospital, Chechen gunmen are shooting, Russian soldiers taking positions. I only hope that Russians don’t start shooting at women but Russians are known for their savagery”. I gasped. Basayev’s gunmen are using pregnant women as human shields but the blonde is worrying about Russian savagery. She goes on, “Kremlin calls this a terrorist attack but let’s listen to the other side.” Then goes a long interview with Basayev. Then an interview with a hostage – the woman tries to smile and says, “Chechens are very friendly, they give us food and water, they told us about their fight and now I truly believe that they only want freedom and all of us – there are about hundred Russian women here – support Chechnya independence and ask the government to stop the war”. And the blonde again, “What looks like a terrorist attack was actually a desperate act of Chechen rebels to gain freedom and now even Russians support them.” Probably even the CNN editors thought that the blonde’s report was a bit over the top because I never saw her again reporting from Chechnya.

Now back to the editorial:
He (Basayev) was a Chechen nationalist then and, like most Chechens, practiced a temperate, traditional form of Islam. He even ran in Chechnya's 1996 presidential election, losing to the moderate Aslan Maskhadov, whom he then served as prime minister for six months. That was a tragically brief era of independence, moderation, and democracy for Chechnya.

During this “tragically brief era of moderation” Chechnya was run by cave-age Sharia laws, there were at least two open slave markets, trading hostages became the biggest Chechnya industry, the country was ruled by warlords and Islamists. In fact the “moderation” was so high that every human rights organization or NGO left Chechnya for security reasons. They all came back in 1999 when the second war started. Under protection of Russian arms human rights defenders started doing what? Right – documenting Russian soldiers’ crimes that protected them from freedom-loving Chechnya gunmen. Not a single Western NGO in Chechnya did publish a single report on slave trading or hostage taking.

By 1999, when Basayev led a disastrous raid into neighboring Dagestan -- which Russia seized upon as the rationale for its second invasion of Chechnya -- Basayev had grown a long beard, come under the influence of the rabid Arab Islamist known as Ibn al-Khattab, and plunged into the terrorist maelstrom of beheadings, kidnappings, and hostage-taking.

The Boston Globe editor lies here – Basayev invaded Dagestan already with Khattab, already with a long beard and “the maelstrom of beheadings, kidnappings, and hostage-taking” started long before the invasion. When we cannot tell what is the cause and what is the effect, we would hardly understand the bin Laden syndrome.