September 7, 2004 ☼ Foreign Affairs
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, last night refused to order a public inquiry into how the Beslan school was captured by gunmen and then ended with such a high death toll, and told the Guardian that people who call for talks with Chechen leaders have no conscience.
“Why don’t you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? Why don’t you do that?” he said with searing sarcasm.
“You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are childkillers?
“No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to childkillers,” he added…
The president admitted Russian forces had committed human rights violations in Chechnya but, like the torture by US soldiers in the prison of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, these were not sanctioned from the top, he said.
“In war there are ugly processes which have their own logic,” he said.
Striking the table with the side of his right hand, he said there was no connection between Russian policies in Chechnya and the events in Beslan.
“Just imagine that people who shoot children in the back came to power anywhere on our planet. Just ask yourself that, and you will have no more questions about our policy in Chechnya,” he said. [The Guardian/via The Agonist]Putin has put the self-righteous western media and its biased reporting in its place.
Moral of the story:
The India government would do well to heed one remark Putin made in his public address after the seige ended.
We demonstrated our weakness, and the weak are beaten
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