By Olli Kivinen
Helsingin Sanomat (Finland)

Chechnya and Palestine are among the many parts of the world where ruthless violence is taking place in the name of the post-September 11 "War Against Terrorism". Events in the Israeli-occupied West Bank are the focus of daily media attention, even though there is no precise information on the details. On the other hand, Chechnya has been forgotten, just like Chinese-occupied Tibet.

When shocking events of great magnitude take place, it is easy for people to remember where they were and what they did when it happened. However, it is more difficult in the case of sequences of events which take years to unfold. However, Chechnya has turned into an arena of such senseless inhumane brutality, that certainly someday in the future it will cross the minds of many people to think where they were and what they were doing when Chechnya was destroyed.

Chechnya has become an exceptionally obvious example of political realism, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has managed to play his cards very skilfully, although his policy in Chechnya has been a comple failure. He immediately latched on to the US-declared war against terrorism, and turned it to his advantage. Criticism from the West was silenced, even though the situation in Chechnya has become even more awful than before.

NATO and the European Union raised cooperation with Russia to such an important position that Moscow was given completely free hands. In the background there was also the question of the exploitation of the oil and gas reserves of Russia and the Caucasus. The West has latched on to the use of these reserves with its policy of friendship, in addition to which American forces are already deployed in several southern former Soviet republics. Oil has always played a key role in the policy of US President George W. Bush, because he is one of his country's oil men.

Consequently the Western countries decided to close their eyes to everything that happens in Chechnya. Even many non-governmental organisations which frequently thunder on about peace are not very active. Perhaps a good illustration of the attitudes is in a sarcastic letter to the editor of Helsingin Sanomat (April 5. 2002) by Leo Salo from the city of Pori: "Let's just be quiet over here. What does it matter that people are being killed in Chechnya, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and elsewhere. What is most important is that nobody disturbs my peace with frightening peace marches."

In today's information world it is impossible to take refuge in ignorance. Human rights organisations both in Russia and elsewhere are churning out information about the barbaric events in Chechnya at a steady pace. The overwhelming majority of the atrocities are committed by Russian soldiers, who number in the tens of thousands against the few hundreds or a few thousand guerrillas.

During the past years a change has taken place in the violence. Originally what was involved was the ordinary way that Russians waged war, in which bombs and artillery played the main role. The cities and villages of an area that the Russians considered their own were bombed relentlessly, and countless civilians were killed at the same time.

Now the behaviour of the Russian army has turned into blatant looting and blackmail. On the web site of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (www.iwpr.net) Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya gives a detailed account of "clean-up operations" in which soldiers, in addition to perpetrating violence, have managed to extort cold hard cash for themselves. Soldiers who break into homes threaten women with rape and men with transfers to "filtration points". There are constant reports of torture taking place at those points. The only alternative is to give the soldiers cash, jewellery, and precious metals (see link below).

The prestigious human rights organisation Amnesty International has also taken issue with these clean-up operations, and the arbitrary arrests and unreasonable use of force against civilians, in the organisation's recent statement to the UN Human Rights Committee. Amnesty tells about human rights crimes, and violations of international humanitarian standards committed by both sides.

According to Amnesty, misdeeds committed by the Russian forces include "arbitrary arrests, keeping people detained in unofficial and secret locations, torture, assault, and extrajudicial executions". The Chechens, for their part, have also tortured and killed Russian soldiers they have captured.

The attitude taken toward human rights abuses both in Chechnya and other parts of the world deprive most Western countries and their leaders of the right to speak on human rights issues. They certainly will continue to speak about them in a loud voice, but the words will have an increasingly hollow ring.

This especially applies to the United States - a country whose military doctrine speaks of the spreading of American values and democracy around the world. Now it has been seen again that anyone is an acceptable ally in the war against terrorism, and in efforts to secure oil supplies; by saying that they oppose terror, they redeem for themselves the right to terrorise their own people as much as they please. This is just a new version of the "we know he's a son-of-a- bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch" way of thinking, that the great powers have used from time immemorial to defend their relationships with bloody dictators or other less desirable friends.

The same applies to EU member states, including Finland, who follow the old rule of Realpolitik that states, that if you criticise anyone for human rights violations, choose a small country as many thousands of kilometres away as possible.

The problem is that the attitude of the West is promoting a move to a period of neo-brutalism and hard violence, of which the events of Chechnya and the territories occupied by Israel are naked evidence.