[education]

Originally posted by onodera

Not made public? As far as I know, Arakcheev has been acquitted several times, and not by a Corrupt Military

JudgeÂ�Â*â„¢, but by different jury panels. Link? The source on those 12 was from 2005 so something might have changed since then, but I can't find anything online.

Originally posted by onodera
That's not even good English. Or Russian, as well. Actually "disappear" has been frequently used as an action verb for some time within the limited human rights context, and that usage is included in the dictionary, not that it matters.

Originally posted by onodera
How can you convict someone of disappearing a person? ... You can prosecute for murder, for kidnapping, but in all

these cases you need either a body or a witness or a confession. If someone disappears, there's neither. How can you

tell that was a crime? Why do you want to convict Russian servicemen of that? That was probably poor wording; in this context "disappearances" are meant to distinguish the apprehension (or kidnapping) and subsequent extrajudicial execution from killing of civilians in a combat zone. This doesn't necessarily mean there is no body, though there might not be one. Obviously there would be difficulties of proof without a body, though the combination of witnesses and documentation confirming that the victim was taken into custody by the accused, and the accused's lack of a believable explanation for where the victim was released, could be enough to establish a presumption that the victim was killed in custody. If you go to the ECHR Case Law Database and search for "disappearance and Chechnya," you'll find several cases that make that inference based entirely on surrounding circumstances (Bazorkina v. Russia is one good example). Granted, those were civil suits against the government itself rather than prosecution of individual servicemen, but a case could probably be made against them or at least their commanders since who has custody of whom is usually a matter of record. In any case, I just found the dearth of disappearance prosecutions only notable; obviously the low number of murder prosecutions and impotence of domestic investigations is far more important.

Originally posted by onodera
Yes, General Shamanov is ruthless, even brutal. I don't know if he was involved in ordering the massacre, but I guess he'd turn a blind eye to it. Ordering it and turning a blind eye are morally equivalent as far as I'm concerned. Sending the message that there are no consequences only encourages the conduct.

Originally posted by onodera
Also, picture: So? I'd be the first to tell you that the Bush Administration is guilty of willful ignorance at best or a curt nod at worst. Let's not forget that the second war was mostly in the aftermath of 9/11. In 1999 Bush as a candidate condemned Russia’s “bombing women and children and causing huge numbers of refugees to flee,” and threatened to cut off IMF and Export-Import Bank loans to Russia, while then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms called for punitive sanctions and Russia's expulsion from the G-8. Even after the election Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State John Beryle held a friendly meeting with the exiled Foreign Minister of Chechnya, and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice showed commendable nuance in stating that “not every Chechen is a terrorist and the Chechens' legitimate aspirations for a political solution should be pursued by the Russian government.” In the late 1990s the Kremlin’s public relations machine had morphed its fight against the “bandits” of a dangerous “mafiocracy” into a broad crusade “to destroy global terrorism,” claiming Chechen separatists were intertwined with al-Qaeda. This convinced few outside Russia as the Sovietized Chechen Sufis had little in common with Wahabbi jihadists, not to mention the fact that Dudayev had himself fought them while a Soviet general in Afghanistan.

Then 9/11 changed everything overnight. Putin declared that Russians and Americans “face a common foe” in Bin Laden as his organization was “connected with the events currently taking place in our Chechnya,” and enthusiastically joined the so-called “coalition of the willing” against the Taliban. Establishing the massive military presence in Central Asia needed to oust the Taliban would have gone best with Russian approval, plus Russian intelligence and contacts with the Northern Alliance proved crucial to our operations there. The single-mindedness of the War on Terror also made Bush's cronies blind to the complexities of the fragmented Chechen insurgency, which was (at least back then, not so much now) mainly made up of secular nationalists like Mashkadov who condemned the attacks of 9/11 and terrorism in general. At the 2002 G-8 Summit Bush simply said “President Putin has been a stalwart in the fight against terror,” and the same year Colin Powell bluntly stated that “Russia is fighting terrorists in Chechnya, there is no question about that, and we understand that.” The post-9/11 sea-change in the administration's stance on Chechnya is obvious and is inexcusable IMO, but so what?

Why is it that any time Russia is criticized, the kneejerk reaction is "well yeah, but the U.S. did this!"? I've heard that canard out of Putin a half-dozen times, out of Serb countless times, and so far there's been two examples of the phenomenon on this thread, even though nobody here would be stupid enough to claim the U.S. has clean hands...