DISTANT ECHOES – Reminders from The Template Website
TEMPLATE ANALYSIS
Last nightโs BBC documentary Putin, Russia and The West contained perhaps the most powerful and disturbing footage broadcast on terrestrial television yet.
A boy from a village in Chechnya is dragged out of his home by Russian soldiers, he is heard screaming for his life โ โhy-aa Allahโ โ and the narrator tells us that his body was found much later buried in a Russian base.
The pictures which were shot before the Moscow Theatre siege, and of course much earlier than Beslan, are perhaps also the first hard proof of what Russiaโs soldiers were doing as they attempted to reconquer Chechnya for their president, Vladimir Putin.
Russiaโs military doctrine when it comes to conquering and reconquering its restive Muslim provinces has been simple โ the harder you hit them, the less likely they are to come back again.
Russiaโs soldiers were of course the original ethnic cleansers, a process that began under Ivan the Terrible is still ongoing to this day in the Caucasus republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingush Settia.
Little wonder then that the West has found it hard to accommodate Russia as a part of Europe or Nato.
๐บ A Chechen boy is dragged from his home by Russian soldiers ๐ช ๐ท๐บ
Distant Echoes – Reminders from The Template Website.