What the hell is going on with escalation of violence in Russia? In just a few days, two airplanes downed, suicide bombing in a subway, and now this siege at a school. I guess the Chechen fighters decided the world wasn't paying enough attention to them.

And I suppose they are at least somewhat right about that--the world at large seems to care not a whit about the reported human rights abuses and ongoing war in Chechnya. Sure, it gets a blip on the BBC or NPR radars, but you don't really hear about it in the more popular outlets. They are too busy covering the mindnumbing, selfcongratulatory schmoozefests that are the Democrat and Republican Conventions. Putin proclaims normalization, lumps the Chechens in with the war on terror, and the international community seems all too eager to let Chechnya be the proverbial elephant in the room (and it's getting crowded in there).

Though Putin rushed to join the "war on terror" bandwagon and put the pro-independence Chechen thorn in his side in the terrorist category, he has turned down the feeble calls for a greater role for the UN in the area. There's been fighting in Chechnya for the last ten years.

Separatist or pro-independence groups are a sticky issue. On the one hand, in theory, it'd be nice if no group of people had to stay part of a country they don't want to be in. But it's not really practical--the world's existing countries have an interest in preserving the status quo and in not encouraging this sort of thing lest it happen to them. And I think if this were the case (that is, if chunks of any country could leave their parent country at any time), it'd be much too easy to quickly descend into chaos--a worldwide Balkanization. I suppose after some time, small nation states would start grouping together to form larger ones, until people started getting sick of it again, and dissolve into small groups again. I can only imagine what kind of havoc this cycle would wreak on world economy--trade, transportation, infrastructure, etc.

The existing nations of the world, of course, also have an interest in not letting countries invade each other--because (among many other reasons) of the precedent it sets for them.

I think it's easy to see where these two interests might come into conflict. What's the magic number to mark a country as being invaded recently enough to warrant help in ousting the invaders, at what point have the invaders been there long enough to consider the affair done with? What about conflicts that have the support of the majority of the native population and have been ongoing for a very long time? I don't have the answers.

At any rate, I was able to gather the following bits of history on Chechnya, mostly from the BBC (which I love dearly). Chechnya was first conquered by Russia in 1858. My own native Chile was only about 40 years old then, the war for independence from Spanish rule having only started in 1810. Similar pro-independence movements were going on throughout South America. In 1922, Chechnya was declared an autonomous region (and a Soviet Socialist Republic in 1934); in 1944, Stalin deported the entire Chechen and Ingush populations. Sixty years is not enough to forget that kind of sociopathic madness.

By 1991, with the collapse of the USSR, the local Communist leader was overthrown, and Chechnya was declared independent from Russia, and a year later, adopted a constitution that defined it as a secular state governed by a president and parliament. The Russians, none too happy with this, came in 1994. According to the BBC, up to 100,000 people were killed over the next 20 months. One. Hundred. Thousand. That's 5,000 a month. That's September 11 and then some every month.

It's hard for me to relate to carnage of such proportions; I know the numbers are large, but the casualties and the effect on individuals remain abstracts, blank cutouts in a shooting range. Maybe that's part of why the world doesn't do anything. The advances in technology haven't changed the fact that places like Chechnya are very far away--even though you may be able to get there in just a few days, you don't get to see what's going on there in a meaningful, everyday way any more than you did a hundred years ago. Sure, there's TV, but the images of TV resemble an action movie more than anything real--sanitized and dreamlike.

In 2000, Russia appointed Akhmat Kadyrov as the head of its administration in Chechnya. In 2003, Kadyrov was elected president in an election that was at least suspicious and troubled. Less than a year later, this May, he was killed in a bomb blast. In August, Kremlin-backed Alu Alkhanov was elected as president, though critics claim that, again, these elections were not free or fair.

But though I think there is plenty of blame to lay at Putin and Russia's feet, the Chechen fighters have been making things worse. The strategy of hostage-taking goes back to as far as 1995, when hundreds were taken at a hospital. I admit that my sympathies tend to go towards the people fighting for independence instead of the rulers in this type of thing, but spreading the conflict to civilians, resorting to hostages and suicide bombings of people who aren't directly involved in the conflict are simply not acceptable in my mind--that's where you cross the line and become simply a terrorist.

Russia captured Grozny in 2000, after attacks by Chechens (including a series of apartment block bombings that killed some 300 people). Some 200,000 civilians fled Chechnya.

And of course, there was the theater siege in 2002; sure, Russian response wasn't good by any stretch of the imagination--more people died when the soldiers stormed the place than at the hands of the Chechens, but goddammit, you can't just go in to a theater full of people and take them hostage and expect anything good to come out of it.

Which brings me to today. Whose bright idea was it to take a school hostage? I have to assume that the people who did this don't care about sliding from freedom fighters into terrorists; that they think hostage-taking is a valid way to get things done; that they don't care about involving the civilian population. OK. Not fine, but OK. Even taking that into account, didn't it occur to anyone planning this thing, that, if nothing else, it's really bad PR for your cause? It's a bunch of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers, for crying out loud. Just add some grandmothers and puppies, and you're set. It's not even like they had the excuse of saying they were acting suspicious, or allied with the Russian government, or causing trouble. These are just people starting their schoolyear.

Even discounting the adults, no one likes to see children harmed. And surely this played an important part in deciding to take them hostage--they must have figured that it would put the Russian government in an untennable position, that the families and community--the world--would be pushing for the hostages to go unharmed. And that's true. But on the other hand, people are probably also cheering that these terrorists rot in jail for the rest of their lives, and any shred of sympathy for them is gone. From a purely strategic point of view, it seems idiotic and shortsighted; the more gruesome the actions by a group like this, the more strongly the government will react, the more that common people will turn against it, the more the international community will clamor for harsh actions to be taken against them. The long-term harm an action like this would bring to any movement seems to me to far outweigh whatever demands might be met because of the shock of who the hostages are.

I find myself so tired and frustrated with the world news. I do hope those bastards get to spend their lives in jail, but they'll more likely end up dead. Which I guess is OK. Like everyone else, I hope the hostages come out of this fine, but honestly, I'm not optimistic.