Chechnya

Calamity that Befell Beslan

When can we expect the white races to learn that they are not the great gift from God to humanity and as such have the right to bring ‘democracy’ to Iraq and Tsarism communism or whatever ism rules Russians to Chechens?

The calamity that befell Beslan has sent a wave of horror throughout the world because electronic media have been able to take the ogre and blood into millions of homes. Its background and genesis covering some 300 years of white Russian imperialism is lost in musty historical records gathering dust in archives.

As Chechens are Muslims (they were Sufis of the Naqshbandi and Qadriya orders before the brutalisation by the Russians), we in India have a lot in common with them and must make their plight known.

The professionally anti-Muslim bodies such as the RSS, VHP, BJP, Shiva Sena [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bharatiya Janata Party] and militant Sikhs will use this tragedy in ingratiate themselves with the Bushes and the Putins of the world and it should not be said that they alone represent India.

A column has its limitations of space and we cannot go into all the grisly details of Russian atrocities. We shall therefore start with a circular sent in 1864 by a long serving foreign minister of the Tsar of Russia to all his embassies. The name of this worthy was Prince Alexander Gorchakov.

Russia expanded its empire for 300 years up to 1917 at the rate of 55 square miles per day. This activity frightened the British as they perceived a threat to India, their golden egg laying goose. Lord Palmerston and others indulged in propaganda to make Russia’s rapid growth known and criticism started appearing all over the world.

Prince Alexander Gorchakov’s circular was intended to provide Russian ambassadors with a justification of their expansion and the brutalities necessary to the process. The letter explained Russia’s forward policy in cadences that reflected the spirit of the age of white European expansion.

What he said then could apply today to the Bush doctrine of bringing ‘democracy’ to Afghanistan and Iraq. Russia’s position, he said, was the same as that of all civilised societies ‘brought in contact with half-savage, nomad populations’.

He maintained that in such cases, ‘It always happens that the more civilised state is forced, in the interest of the security of its frontiers and its commercial interests, (italics added) to exercise a certain ascendancy over neighbours of a turbulent and unsettled character.’

He went on to say: ‘First there are raids and acts of pillage to put down. To put a stop to them, the tribes on the frontier have to be reduced to a state of more or less perfect submission … It is a peculiarity of Asiatics to respect nothing but visible and palpable force … Such has been the fate of every country which found itself in a similar situation.’

The United States in Latin America, France in Algeria, Holland in its colonies, England in India; all have been irresistibly forced less by ambition than by imperious necessity into this forward movement where it is difficult to know where to stop.

This was Gorchakov’s justification to extend its fortified posts deeper and deeper into Asia in what he called ‘nomad’ territories. The fact that the Chechens as Sufis were spiritually far advanced of the Russians was ignored.

It required an Alexander Solzhenitsyin and the Gulag Archipelago to record the dignity which the Chechends bore adversity. In 1944 from 24 – 28 February, 194 convoys of 64 trucks each deported 521,247 Chechens and Inguish from their homeland to Kazakhstan.

Solzhenitsyn says: ‘I would say that of all the special settlers the Chechens never sought to please, to ingratiate themselves with the (Russian) bosses; their attitude was always haughty and openly hostile… As far as they were concerned, the local inhabitants and those exiles who submitted readily belonged more or less to the same breed as the bosses.

‘They respected only rebels. And here is the extraordinary thing everyone was afraid of them. No one could stop them from living as they did. The regime has ruled the land for thirty years could not force them to respect its laws.’

As this reminds one of Bhagat Singh and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi we should as the policeman Putin to have rethink his position vis-à-vis the Chechens.