Chechnya Research Paper

Chechnya is a region in southern Russia that, like many other regions in Russia, is home to a non-Caucasian ethnic group. As in many other ethnic struggles, the Chechens want freedom from Russia. The main reason the Russian government is reluctant to give up the land in Chechnya is because of a very valuable natural resource that is located in the region. That resource is oil, which is rapidly becoming one of the world's most valuable substances, due to the fear that the world could run out of it in the near future. There are numerous pipelines that run through Chechnya and if the Chechens were granted autonomy Russia fears that it would lose the control over those pipelines. In fact Chechens have already started refining the oil and selling it on the street. Russia occupied Chechnya under the guise of fighting terrorism and human rights violations. The war is even losing the support of native Russians, who are beginning to notice the various cruel tactics performed by the
Russian military. "…The ‘great gamesters'---their faces anonymous and their greed unexposed by the media they own---proceed to play their obsessive profit board game for the international monopoly of black gold, undeterred by the human blood cost of their contemptible and destructive goals." That was a quote of "The heart of the matter: Oil and Chechnya" by Luciana Bohne.
In this article she exposes the Russian government for being heartless and uncaring toward their own people as they pursue their own goals. In Crying Wolf: The Return of War to Chechnya author Venora Bennett states that one of the terrorist attacks that was used, as a justification for the occupation of Chechnya, may not have even been carried out by Chechens. While we do not know if it was carried out by Chechens or not, what we do know is that the Russian government didn't care if they were or not because they did not take the time to check the facts of their intelligence, and that for the Russian leaders the ends justify the
means. "Among the explicit advocates of deliberate killing of civilians is Lieutenant General Vladimir Shamanov, whom Boris Yeltsin awarded the "Hero of Russia: medal for commanding the ‘Hero of Russia' medal for commanding the Western group during the second Chechen War." That quote was by Matthew Evangelista in his book The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? This quote shows that the Russian leadership gives support to the killing of civilians. This means that the Russian military is guilty of human rights violations, which is ironic because one of the main justifications for military action in Chechnya is that the Chechen separatists are violating human rights. The Russian public seems to have picked up on this cruelty because the support for the war dropped from 53% to 30% from 2001 to 2002. This drop may also be attributed to the fact that more and more Russian soldiers are dying in Chechnya and the public is dismayed by that fact. The Russian government used the fact that there is a fair amount of terrorist activity in Chechnya as their main reason for going to war. This seems unethical because the Russian government has exaggerated the amount of terrorism in Chechnya and many of the Chechen separatists were forced to turn to terrorist tactics because there was no other way for them to fight for their freedom from the oppressive Russian military that has invaded their homeland.