*Ø* Phoney freedom websites

With the Iraq crisis, it's easy to forget that Russia has its own Iraq, and it's called Chechnya.

The Russian government has a pretty propaganda site (with sweet pictures like the one shown at right) called Chechnya Free, to fool web searchers looking for info on the tragedy.

China pulls the same trick for Googlers of "human rights China"; see this phoney site, humanrights-china.org. Then there is China's cutesy Tibet tourism site, which says that the era of Dalai lama rule: " ... basically ended in 1951 when Tibet was liberated and came to a complete end in 1959 when rebellion led by the Dalai Lama was pacified and the People's Government of the Tibet, Autonomous Region was set up", neglecting to mention that China killed one million people before turning Tibet into its new tourist resort.

On the other hand, if you find a genuine Chechnyan site like this you will read things to make us weep, but which we should all know, like:

"Estimates indicate that during the first and second war in Chechnya, on a Chechen population of 1 million, 150,000 - 200,000 civilians died or disappeared. This amounts to 15% - 20% of the entire population." [References]

One of the happy headlines in the phoney site is: "Builders are in demand in Grosny". Below is a picture from another genuine site, Free Chechnya, that will explain why.




A good site to bookmark is the official website of the Chechen separatist movement.

It is inconceivable that in Europe there hasn't been any movement of rebellion against all this, a rally, not a symbolic one, but a huge and imposing rally that says how all this is intolerable! The tragedy of Chechnya is the tragedy of Russia. Europe is a happy and thoughtless continent. A continent that doesn't think about it. About nothing. When it will be forced to think about it, it risks to pay a very high price. It's better it would begin to think about it.
Adriano Sofri, on Russia's occupation of Chechnya

There is nothing more dangerous in the war of ideas than the “realpolitik” approach which brought us so many disasters in the past. After all, was not Osama bin Laden a by-product of similar “marriage of convenience” at one point? Was it not true also in the case of Saddam Hussein? And is it not true that your new “partners” such as Russia secretly sell military equipment (including nuclear technology) to the Axis of Evil countries even now?
Will the United States ever learn this lesson, or will it continue forever to build up new enemies while fighting present ones?
Yelena Bonner (wife of Andrei Sakharov) and Vladimir Bukovsky; from an open letter on Chechnya to President George W Bush