The terrorists have won....

There is not a jot we can do to stop them, they can get us anywhere, how do you crush that sort of thing, where they are prepared to do anything.
It will sadly always happen, russia's 911.

 

I think it is all to do with beards. When i lived in Saudi Arabia a few years ago I was convinced that the longer one of the locals beard was the smaller their brain and the narrower their mind. I know that some of the murderers in Russia where women but i'm convinced they where really bearded women who'd shaved.
If this kinda stuff continues in the world then i'm afraid somebody is going to come up with a final solution that involves buckets of instant sunshine.

 

It has allways been the same with terriost from the beginning, the only people that loose are the victims, only way we will win is if the world is brainwashed or somthign to that effect.

And to be honist i dont want that to happen and cant see if happenening.

 

Scotland on Sunday. 5th Sept,04 VIV GROSKOP

I am still trying to understand what has happen. My first reation is why do people first reaction is to blame Putin's for this disaster. Should the blame not be squarely on the terrorists who plan this idiotic atrocity? However, this article in newspaper suggests that whatever the reasons people do this kind of thing real background is a bit more darker then suspected. This is a story of one of these suicide women. It does involve brainwashing but a lot more sinister.

Quote:
DRINKERS in the Moscow cafe had not noticed Zarema Muzhikhoeva until she frantically tried to set off the explosives in her black shoulder bag.

The 20-year-old took a deep breath and reached for the detonator. She had been calm at first, then frantic as the 1.5kg of explosives failed to detonate.

In the heat of the day, on July 6 last year, sweat began to pour down her face.

"I pushed the button about 20 times to set off the bomb but it just wasn't working," she said later in police interviews.

The bomb did go off eventually, when Moscow police officer Major Gennady Trofimov, 30, was killed attempting to defuse it.

Captured by the Russian police after her mission failed - uniquely for a Chechen woman - Muzhikhoeva has been held in prison in Moscow ever since. Because of the bungled attempt, more is known about her than about any of her predecessors: she has had the chance to tell her story in the Russian media, never in direct interviews but in second-hand reports via the police.

In the Beslan siege in North Ossetia at least two women were among the 30 terrorists who seized the school on Wednesday. Two weeks ago, the names of two women appeared on the passenger lists for one of the Moscow planes which crashed in southern Russia. The same week a woman exploded a bomb outside a metro station.

Russia is becoming obsessed with these women - and with good reason. Almost every suicide bombing connected to Chechnya in the past two years has involved women.
Surprisingly, Muzhikhoeva is not a defiant Islamic extremist desperate for her place in heaven. Her story is one of poverty and desperation typical of a country that has known nothing but war for the past decade.

From 1994-1996 Boris Yeltsin's troops reined in the breakaway republic where she grew up. Chechnya remained unstable throughout the late 1990s, however, and President Putin sent the Russian army back in again in 2000, following terrorist bombings in Moscow which were blamed on Chechen extremists. Muzhikhoeva's regional home, Achkoi-Martan, where she was brought up by her grandparents, was largely destroyed in the first war. Her personal fate was sealed during the second invasion of Russian troops.

She attended school from the age of seven to 15, leaving to marry when she became pregnant with her daughter. Her husband died fighting for Chechen independence before she gave birth. According to Chechen tradition, she and her baby then "belonged" to her husband's family, who treated her as a household slave.

She eventually escaped alone (knowing that her husband's family would never let her have custody of her child) and got by however she could, unable to find work, stealing and borrowing money. At one point her debts became so great that a group of men she had taken a loan from told her she had no choice but to pay them back with her life: if she would complete a suicide mission all her debts would be repaid and her family would also receive a sum of money.

She claims she lived in a mountain village for a month with Chechen independence fighters, who constantly fed her with stories of Russian atrocities. She also says she slept with the man in charge of the group (she has not claimed this was against her will, although other female terrorists have alleged they were raped as part of their recruitment).

She was eventually told she was ready for her mission and sent to a safe house in Moscow where a woman with the codename Black Fatima looked after her.

Muzhikhoeva has claimed she wanted to carry out the suicide bombing anyway, to avenge her husband's death. But she also says she was drugged regularly in Moscow with an orange juice which gave her headaches.

On the designated day, she was sent to a central Moscow café. She attempted to detonate the device in three different places before eventually being arrested in a fourth restaurant. Police later reported that she was extremely upset over the death of the officer who had defused the bomb.

It is still unclear whether Muzhikhoeva was a willing self-sacrifice or an exploited victim. Her story shows perhaps that for many of Chechnya's 'Black Widows' their motives lie somewhere between the two extremes of choice and coercion. Until very recently Chechnya's female suicide bombers have been portrayed as religious martyrs who have made a personal choice to die for their country and their faith, just like Wafa Idris, the 27-year-old Palestinian paramedic who became the world's first female suicide bomber.

The Russian authorities have been keen to link Chechnya's terrorists to ideas of religious fanaticism, in an attempt to draw in other countries to support their own "war against terror" and in an effort to distance themselves from the havoc they have caused in Chechnya with the second war there in 10 years. But the Chechen situation is completely different to that in Arab countries where terrorism is closely linked to Islamic fundamentalism. Far from being free-thinking, freedom fighters with an equal right to die for their beliefs, Chechnya's female martyrs are more likely to be forced, blackmailed or brainwashed to their self-inflicted death.

Even when they have chosen their mission of their own free will, it is not because of a religious mission or a political cause, but for very personal reasons, perhaps to avenge the death of a husband or a brother. More often than not, like Muzhikhoeva, they are pawns in a man's game.

 

there are 3 ways of dealing with terrorists and unfortunately all of them are objectionable.
1) give in to their requests.
2) ignore them and let them know that their acts won't get the desired results.
3) the swordfish solution - if they blow up a bulding of yours, you nuke a town of theirs.
like i said all are objectionable however 2 is probably the way that will cause the least long term damage. unfortunately when children are involved it's very difficult to be objective about things.
cheers


julian

 

complex question - no real answer as such

 

Human Rights abuse by Russian govt in Chechniya is nototrious.
The wives of the tortured and killed men turned into Chechnya's 'Black Widows'.

There can never be any long term winners in situations such as this. Russian government will now go and kill a some more Chechens.

Violence begets violence.

 

We can do things to try and stop them though, thats the job of the security and intelligence services. At the very least they make it difficult for the terrorists.

As for 'they've won', I don't see how, the people in chechnya are probably going to endure more suffering, the Russian response to the events I feel will be with extreme violence and military force within checnya towards the separatists, again hardly a victory for the long suffering people of chechnya. Maybe you could say its a victory to the nutjobs who took the children hostage though, heck they're martyrs now, though any God there is I'm sure won't look kindly upon them.

Looking at the domestic terrorist threat with regards to Al-Qaeda, I can't really see that they've won anything either, unless getting a few people scared counts as a victory (perhaps a small one). But we're still free, we don't have to follow their twisted version of Islam or face death, hell our foreign policy wasn't really changed by 9/11, still the same use of force in the Middle East, bias towards Israel, dependence upon oil...what 'victory' of any real significance have they had?

The threat is there of course, and occasionally they will get through and carry out their attacks, but saying 'theres nothing we can do to stop them' isn't strictly accurate IMHO, and they certainly haven't won either (since their stated aims includes the spread of 'fundamentalist' Islam, eradication of Jews and other infidels, destruction of the USA, etc, and they haven't come close to 'victory' in any of those).

The other question you pose is a difficult one, 'how do we crush terrorism?', well I don't know the answer to that, i don't think anybody does, theres no clear solution, military, diplomatic or humanitarian

 

winning, as in they can and will kill, and there is not a jot we can do to stop it, sadly. It will happen. give in, and its a license for it. fight them, and the unfortunate people who get kidnapped, etc. are dispensable, and their fate is sealed.
Their goal is destruction and they have the upper hand. It is more insidious than the cold war.
how easy is it to go into a school, any other place where people congregate....shopping, concerts, sports, offices, just the odd security guard who is probably useless, how simple. Sitting ducks, everywhere
incidentally, the demon god of the old testament likes bashing enemies babies heads against walls.

 

data,
A terrorists goal is usually not just destruction, their goals are disruption, publicity and the aquiecense of a govornment to their demands.
dealing with each of these goals and not spinning the situation to suit your own agenda is a better way for a government to deal with a terrorist act but as they say 'there's no such thing as bad publicity' (for either side) it's more tempting for 'the good guys' to witter on endlessly and then send in the marines to **** it all up - all on camera of course.
cheers

julian

 

There are two other ways that have proved far more effective in reducing the incidence of terrorism.

Firstly, intelligence. Arrests have been made and incidents prevented. Hopefully the gathering of intelligence will become more effective as techniques and knowledge improve.

Secondly, and some also consider this objectionable, target the leaders of terrorist organisations and assassinate or imprison them. This has been successful with Hamas and the Basque Separatists where, in both cases, terrorist incidents have declined. The leaders of terrorist organisations tend to be good at recruiting, training and organising suicide bombers but are not so keen to sacrifice themselves in the cause.

 

I think maybe the only positive way to view what is going on now is to take a very long term historical view. Things may not be sane and rational in the next 30,40 50 years. But ultimately the general desire of most people to live peaceful prosperous lives may win out in the end.

I predict by then that Islamic fundamentalism will have worn itself out or been defeated militarily by other arab states (just like Fascism was in Europe) and the political map of the middle east will be radically different, and many of todays Arab regimes gone and replaced with liberal democratic but still islamic states - after a period of bloody violence and possibly war between arab states that will have massive implications on the rest of the world. Chechnya and other parts of the world in a similar condition will be independent, and some (but not all) of today's terrorists will be national heroes and senior politicians in countries like Chechnya - just like Menachem Begin, Eamon De Valera and many others in the past.

The relative peace and prosperity which we enjoy today in Western Europe came about after two horrendous wars which caused massive death and destruction, followed by 40 years fear of nuclear war. Would someone in our position in the 1920's or 1930's have been optimistic about the defeat of Fascism and totalitarianism? The World looked pretty bleak then too.

 

Ultimately the only solutions against terrorists are political ones. Terrorism (the use of violence in pursuit of a cause, real or imagined, as opposed to the cause of lining one's own pockets) invariably has its roots in failed politics. They have to be corrected. This is the sort of answer people don't like to hear, because it's complicated and messy. Military solutions à la Israel are short term - the resentment will linger on for future generations, and if you think it won't, just look at how quickly the apparently peaceful and harmonious country once called Yugoslavia disintegrated into a bloodbath of ancient ethnic rivalries. Without addressing the root causes that give terrorism its oxygen and sense of justification, you merely try to resuscitate a corpse by applying Band-Aids(R) thereto.

Chairman Mao described his fighters as "the revolutionary fish swimming in the sea of the people". If you do the political solution, you take away the sea. I don't know a lot about it, but I understand that this was the basis of the British success against Communist guerillas in what was then known as Malaya in the 1950s. The British used the Army on the one hand, but used it hand in hand with an enlightened programme of reform and getting the villagers on-side, so that support for the guerillas dried up. Indeed, a similar programme in Algeria in France was so successful that the FLN guerillas took to assassinating the French officials in charge - which unfortunately led to the heavy-handed attempted military repression of the FLN, instead of pushing on with the programme.

The Chechen problem goes right back to Czarist times, when Russia took over what later became the central Asian Soviet republics. There's a lot of bad blood going a long way back - colonalism, racism, the works. A lot of wrongs to put right. This is not a reward for terrorism, simply a recognition that terrorism derives its oxygen from past wrongs, and the only way to remove terrorism is to remove that oxygen. I keep hoping that my homeland (Northern Ireland) will cotton on to the idea.

 

prevention I think is the key here, if russia hadnt done what it had then this would never of happened, it takes one side to back down after somthing like this to settle the system.

I would be very supprised if Russia will back down and do option 2 here regardless of there being hundreds of children involved.

i'm sure if russia gavin to agree to talk about there independance then that would end up with the best result allround.

 

Is the only way, fight fire with fire, make terrorium so unthinkable that they'll not try it.

Ok course if we stop selling them weapons / explosives that would also stop it.

or give them a nuclear power station and watch them destroy themselves (again).

 

An eye for an eye and the whole world will go blind . Trying to fight terrorism with retaliatory violence has been shown time and time again to be singularly unsuccessful.

There's no way to make terrorism "unthinkable". In fact, it's the terrorists that are doing the "unthinkable". If a group of people are prepared to hold 1200 young kids hostage with no regard whatsoever for their lives then you have to wonder what made them capable of that. Same goes for suicide bombers. They don't do it for kicks. They've been backed into a corner by the policies of various governments where they feel they have no alternative. The governments in question need to think long and hard about the demons they've created and why - that's where the solution lies.

Michael.

 

This went much further than having 'no regard whatsoever for their lives'. They were shooting children in the back as they tried to escape for f**k's sake.

I'm sorry Michael. This was inexcusable no matter what the behaviour of 'governments in question'. Far from being the only alternative for these people, they have set the (valid) cause of Chechnyan independence back 100 years.

Your statement: 'Trying to fight terrorism with retaliatory violence has been shown time and time again to be singularly unsuccessful' is also untrue. In fact, where this has been done, the incidence of terrorism has declined over time.

I don't hold with every action of the US, Israeli, UK, Russian, Chinese or French governments. In retrospect, I suspect that The Crusades were not such a great idea either. However, those that feel strongly enough to kill themselves over government policies can direct their suicide missions against military or (even) government targets. They then become guerilla fighters rather than terrorists. I will not condone terrorist actions against civilians under ANY circumstances.

It's very popular in our relatively free societies to talk of government policies backing the terrorists into a corner and leaving them with no alternatives. It's straight out of the 'Cherie Blair book of left wing liberalism'. Bollocks. It's not true, it doesn't help and it further empowers these sickos.

 

Hmm yeah its not an easy one but a more ethical foreign policy would be a good start. There are plenty of examples where our screwing over of the poor people of faraway countries might lead me to want to exact some kind of bloody revenge if I'd been a citizen there.

 

Couldn't have said it better myself

The mantra 'one mans terrorist is anothers freedom fighter' seems to be commonly stated these days, but I don't hold it to be true - those who blow up civilians when there are numerous military and governmental targets that could still be attacked will always be terrorist scum to my eyes, regardless of the validity of their cause for independence or whatever.

For example, the Palestinian militantss could easily inflict heavy casualties on the occupying Israeli army which is scattered all over 'their' land despite the superiority of the Israeli forces (the Iraq insurgency shows how poorly equipped, ill trained soldiers can still inflict serious losses on a vastly superior army, both numerically and technologically, with effective guerilla tactics). But these 'brave warriors' of Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-aqsa and so forth choose to target buses, hotels, and restaurants instead which are inexcusable whatever the circumstances the Palestinians. Same goes for the Chechen militants....

 

Can't agree more. The world's No. 1 terrorist is George W. Bush, a man who has blown up and killed over 10,000 civilians in Iraq alone whilst claiming to be a "freedom" fighter. Bin-Laden etc are small fry by comparison.

Tony.