…BACKLASH TO CLEANSING OPERATIONS…

During a visit to Chechnya to investigate recent “cleansing operations” conducted in the villages of Mesker-Yurt (in May) and Chechen-Aul (in June), the well-known Russian war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya also touched upon the theme of children. She talked with a Chechen mother whose eight-year-old son, Islam, had forbidden her to listen to Russian-language radio programs. “I looked at the boy,” Politkovskaya wrote, “he was standing behind my back without moving, with hatred drilling his eyes into the back of a nationality which is hostile to him…. One can explain nothing in words to a child whose father, in front of his eyes, was abducted from his home and whose corpse was then returned with its nose sliced off. Today scores of adolescent Chechens are, as it is said here, ‘leaving for the forest'” (Novaya Gazeta, July 1).