Chechnya

[Rodion Romanovich]

Just curious about what people think of the conflict in Chechnya, and what other conflicts they think the Chechnya conflict is comparable to. A few suggestions:
- Indochina wars - trying to prevent an ideology and political movement from spreading, by attacking the latest faction to adopt the political ideology
- North Ireland - fighting an independence movement that is considered terrorists by some, freedom fighters by others. There are motives for independence, but also a few motives for preventing separation
- the Basque - as North Ireland, adding that many of the Basque separatist movements also have communist ideologies which the local population doesn't support
- Iraq - a war to secure oil industry, covered in political motives

Some figures on death tolls in these conflicts:
- Chechnya - 7,500 Russian military, 4,000 Chechen combatants, and no less than 35,000 civilians—a minimum total of 46,500 dead. Others have cited figures in the range 80,000 to 100,000
- French Indochina war - French 94,581 dead, 78,127 wounded, 40,000 captured. Vietnamese: 300,000+ dead, 500,000+ wounded, 100,000 captured
- Vietnam War - south Vietnamese 230,000 dead, 300,000 wounded, U.S. 58,246 dead, 153,490 wounded. VC 1,100,000 dead, 600,000 wounded. Other: 6,612 dead, 17,600 wounded. Civilian dead (total Vietnamese): 900,000–4,000,000.
- North Ireland - 1318 combattants, 80 civilians, 40,000 people injured.
- the Basque - by ETA: around 900 dead by terrorist attacks, and dozens of kidnappings. More than 500 ETA militants held in prison in Spain and France.
- Gulf war - US 378 dead, 1,000 wounded. Iraq 250,000 dead, 75,000 wounded.
- Iraq war - Total deaths/wounded (all Iraqis) Johns Hopkins: 392,979 - 942,636 dead, 1,296,830 wounded. War-related & criminal violence deaths (all Iraqis) Iraq Health Minister: 100,000-150,000. War-related & criminal violence deaths (civilians) Iraq Body Count-english language media only: 56102-61816. None of these figures count the casualties of the at least 100,000 US hired mercenaries.

My questions are:
1. which conflicts do you think the Chechnya conflict is comparable to in terms of motives?
2. which conflicts do you think the Chechnya conflict is comparable to in death tolls and suffering for civilians?
3. can the Chechnyan combattants be classified as terrorists, or should they be called freedom fighters?
4. are the Russian actions in Chechnya war crimes?
5. should countries with democratic constitutions be proud over seeing democratic countries being guilty of worse civilian massdeath and atrocies than a country that is in western media depicted as a dictatorship? What errors are present in our constitutions to repeatedly allow PMs and Presidents who wish to carry out such actions to win, while more peaceful candidates are ridiculed? Do we have a culture that makes people who have peaceful solutions look weak and violent loose cannons look cool? Or is it the fact that we have two-party systems and the constitutional crises that follow upon that? How can we solve the two-party system problem before it causes more massdeath?
6. what do you think should be done in Chechnya instead of what is done today?
7. could we (western world) also learn something from the answers we give to question no. 6 above?