Word: chechens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Chechens yet again declared the independence of the Ichkeria Republic, although only the Taliban regime in Afghanistan recognized it. In the first Chechen War of the ’90s, the post-perestroika Russian army was unable to break Chechen will. Forced by demoralized soldiers and angry public opinion, President Boris Yeltsin signed a ceasefire. The second, ongoing Chechen War began under Vladimir Putin’s leadership, with a much stronger military. In a battleground too obscure and too dangerous for Western journalists, the military launched total war against the rebellious Chechens. In order...
...only journalist unafraid of asking questions and writing answers. She brought the Russian military excesses to the Russian public sphere. Almost raped, almost deported, and almost killed several times, she reported summary executions, torture, and starvation. During the famous Moscow theatre kidnapping in 2002 that ended in tragedy, the Chechen terrorists only trusted Anna to mediate with the police authorities...
...Russia, the Kremlin treats the media as a powerful weapon, to be purchased, coerced, or driven out. Partly spawned by the Chechen conflict, the government has been using proxies like its oil behemoth, Gazprom, to acquire media outlets for years. Examples of this include the NPV television network and Izvestia, a leading newspaper. Anna wrote for the Novaya Gazeta, which is one of the last bastions of dissent in Putin’s Russia, partly owned by Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Gorbachev...
Uncompromising, Anna was truthful to both sides. She wrote about under-armed and underfed Russian conscripts and about ailing Chechen civilians. She wrote about Chechens terrorizing Russian populations and Russian torture camps for irregular guerrilla fighters. No wonder passionate fan mail vied with vivid death threats in her letterbox...
Anna heavily criticized Muslim extremism, but she also dug up cases of Russian intelligence services falsely incriminating innocent civilians in the war zone. Her dissent sought to convince Russians their freedoms were the worst victim of the Chechen...