O, My God, Lolo Ferrari is also dead... :0(

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20000306/en/mdf55639.html

Monday, 6 March, 2000, 18:06 GMT
Eyewitness: Grozny's
ruined lives

Grozny survivors have almost nothing left
By Moscow correspondent Robert Parsons

The officer from Russia's interior ministry
troops pulled me aside into a small cold room.

A gun-metal blue fur-hat perched on his head
at a raffish angle and he looked at me slightly
askance. A faint smile played beneath a
yellowing moustache and the
space between us filled with
the unmistakable fruity-sour
smell of early-morning vodka.

I wanted to travel with an
interior ministry unit to the Chechen capital
Grozny, an ambitious request as the presence
of foreign journalists in Chechnya is barely
tolerated by the Russian Government.

The officer wagged his finger beneath my chin.


"Give me one good reason why we would take
you to Grozny. All you foreigners write about is
ruined houses, destruction and suffering. And
we all know what that leads to. The West will
say poor Chechnya, to hell with Russia, no
more money, no more loans," he told me.

He had a point, or at least, half a point. I
would write about the wanton devastation of
innocent people's lives.

But he should not have worried too much
about Western aid.

The finger paused and pointed at me.

"Phone me tomorrow and I¿ll give you an
answer."

Pitiless

I had been to Grozny on a short,
government-organised trip a few days before. I
had already witnessed the consequences of
Russia's pitiless bombardment of its own
citizens.

The city has become a
phantasmagoria of
charred ruins - mile
upon mile of creaking,
groaning constructs of
shattered brick and
concrete.

Apartment blocks that
once teemed with life
now stand still and
deserted, their bellies
bulging and spilling on
to the streets.

Ceilings and floors sag at crazy angles, spent
cartridge casings and shrapnel carpet the
ground.

At Minutka Square in the centre of Grozny,
scene of some of the most vicious and
close-quarters fighting of the war, I stood for
a while and watched a flurry of snowflakes fall
on the abandoned living rooms of people's
lives.

Such complete silence, such absolute stillness.


I turned slowly through 360 degrees of
desolation, my vision drifting over a vast
expanse of empty space.

The high-rise apartments, shops and scruffy
cafes of the city centre have been reduced to
mounds of rubble.

Then, far away, I caught a movement, the flap
of a coat, a solitary dark figure pushing a pram
loaded with a few desultory belongings - all
that was left of a life.

Beyond belief

Grozny was once a city of half a million people.
Now it is torn down, crushed and violated.

Of the hundreds of thousands of people who
once lived here, but a handful remain, eking
out a perilous existence in the fetid basements
of crumbling housing blocs.

What they have endured is beyond belief.

At the height of the
shelling of Sarajevo,
the Bosnian Serbs
poured 3,500 shells on
the city a day. By
contrast, during the
siege of Grozny in the
last Chechen war,
4,000 Russian shells
detonated every hour.

And yet the survivors
of this most recent
assault describe that
as a play-school. It is thought as many as
40,000 people may have still been in the city
at the height of the inferno. How many of
them were incinerated, crushed by falling
masonry or shredded by shrapnel nobody yet
knows.

Moscow excused itself the trouble of worrying
about such details by equating those who
stayed on with terrorists.

Anyone who remained in Grozny, the military
warned in its infamous instruction of 11
December, would be destroyed along with
what it called the Chechen bandits.

The choice was theirs. They had a week to
get out or submit to the Kremlin's fury.

But it was no choice at all. Many were too old,
too sick or too weak to move. Some never saw
the leaflets telling them to leave and others
did not want to go. Grozny was their only
home.

Why should they go? By what right was the
Russian army forcing them from their homes?
So Russia could destroy what it itself dismissed
as a handful of terrorists?

Ashes and dust

On 1 March, the military authorities began
permitting refugees from Grozny to return to
inspect what is left of their property.

For a week, I shared a
house with five
refugees in the town of
Mozdok near the
Chechen border.

Alla and her daughters
returned to find their
home reduced to ashes
and dust.

Alla's mother was only
slightly more fortunate.
Her flat was mostly
intact but the structure of the building of
which it was part was no longer safe.

Theirs is a typical tale. At least two-thirds of
Grozny's housing has either been destroyed or
faces demolition.

Great swathes of the city are a wasteland of
domestic debris, unexploded ordnance and
mines.

Little remains of the infrastructure that once
supported the population: the drainage system
is smashed, the water table polluted by rotting
corpses and oil spills, the electricity stations
stripped by thieves and the roads no more
than muddy tracks.

I rang the Interior Ministry press centre again
the following morning. I thought there was still
a glimmer of hope they might take me.

I explained that I wanted to focus not on the
destruction but on reconstruction and the
organisation and distribution of humanitarian
aid. Was anything being done?

In the press office, someone else answered
the phone.

"No, no trip. The press centre has no
transport."

By All American ( - 194.170.2.30) on Monday, March 6, 2000 - 03:15 am:

>Antonio

>"The USA commits wholesale genocide on its
>own people"

>When did this happen.

This happens every year in abortion chambers around U.S. occupied territory from Maine to San Diego.


>"The U.S. stood by and did nothing while the
>Indonesian Mohamedan regime butchered the
>East Timorese Christians."

>We sent the Australians instead.

Too little too late. It was the intention all along for the U.S. to set up the East Timorese to be butchered after an independence referendum that the U.S. regime knew would pass. Why did the U.S. Air Force not bomb Jakarta with B-2s and B-52s like it did Belgrade and Baghdad? Why has the U.S. Navy not sent Tomahawk missiles on Indonesian military forces? Why has not the U.S. regime imposed economic sanctions and arms blockades on Indonesia? Why has the U.S. regime continued to sell weapons to and do business with the Indonesian regime? Why is the U.S. regime and western media ignoring the rapes, ethnic cleansing and genocide against Christians taking place in West Timor? You dirty evil hypocrites!

>"The U.S. butchered Serbs and continues to
>support terrorist KLA ethnic cleansing campaign
>against Kosovo Serbs"

>What goes around comes around.

The Serbs did nothing to the Albanians. The allegations of Serb attrocities against poor Albanians in Kosovo were a U.S. and British regime and western media fabricated hoax. Albanians didn't start dying en masse until U.S./NATO warplanes started bombing them.

>"The U.S. aided and abetted the Khmer Rouge
>genocide in Cambodia."

>LOL??

So the murder of 1 million Cambodians by the U.S allys the Khmer Rouge Communists is a laughing matter to you, eh? Just goes to show how callous and barbaric Americans are.

>"Yes, the U.S. regime is the world's premier
>outlaw criminal terrorist regime."

>A very deserving conclusion to the rest of the
>nonsense. Sorry!

I wouldn't have expected an all-American to be able to make sense out of truth, so fond are you of lies.

d-chan,,,

yes i quite understand this whole 'matching numbers' routine. find me one from bosna that matches any of this 'fag' stuff. fine w/me if you're correct, but i think, in the order that that stuff occurred the last 2 days, it was mr. FAKE.
for that matter, this was ADDER21's approach when he went loony....vulgar impersonations...
i'll trust my own interpretation of writing styles; god, this is like poking a piece of shite on the ground w/a couple sticks.
==
what's up w/bacon day trading on the board? his search for the most irrelevant irrelevance (to the subject on the board) goes on.
===
antonio,
dont be more of a dolt than usual, mkay? all-American is some screwball from the UAE. so save your stab at americans for an actual american. but maybe now you can become 'antonio the fag' (eyeroll)
ps> it's all a plot.
===

d-chan:
...which aint to say there couldnt be more than
one impersonator...

Russia got Chechen OIL, that's all that matters. Everytime you get gas for your car, you give some % of money to Russians to KILL Chechens. Shame on you! Post Scriptum: BUY MORE GASOLINE!

How come my favourite news network CNN (Clinton's News Network) didn't report about 73 mujahideen who gave themselves up? They were under Khattab.

I see that you are quite eager and very enthusiastic young man but it is obvious that you are inexperienced in matters of the world.

1) You can't say having abortion clinics is committing genocide. You just can't! Can't
Explain it to you, but if you don't understand this then you have much bigger issue to deal with. And what does "occupied territory from Maine to San Diego" mean Occupied by who? Pls. don't say it...

2) Bomb Indonesia; on what basis. Just because a minority wants to separate and form it's own nation we should go in and help them. Can you imagine the precedence you are setting. Very dangerous!

3) Yeah but Serbs butchered the Bosnians and Croats.

4) The last time I checked we fought a 7 year war, lost over 50,000 lives, spent billions of dollars, strained our relations with China and USSR, faced domestic unrest all to defeat the Khmer Rouge . With friends like these who needs enemies! LOL.

Antonio, I am sorry I was so harsh on you, but you still have a lot of growing up to do - don't you think?

We all know the U.S. will not police the world for the sake of right and wrong. A little interest goes a long way too. It would hardly make any sense if we just picked up and stuck our noses in some remote conflict with no significance to our interests or us. Then again why should we? Who's paying the bill? Who's going to tell mothers her child has died and the reasons?

Some common sense needs application Chief.

Hey brother allamerican.

>>>>Bomb Indonesia; on what basis. Just because a minority wants to separate and form it's own nation we should go in and help them. Can you imagine the precedence you are setting. Very dangerous!<<<<

DAMN RIGHT, WE AMERICANS ARE PICKY!

We only bomb were the oil is! And not already ours. In Indonesia all oil is pretty much ours, who knows of separatists will allow us to have our oil.

THIS GUY ALWAYS RUINS THE GOOD NEWS.

The BBC once again had been had by the Chechen rebels, who handed it an unrelated video clip claiming it to be the recording of the recent attack against the OMON convoy in Grozny. On the video, televised yesterday by the BBC World News and available on the BBC's official web site, one can see Chechen rebels attacking a "Ural" military truck and capturing several Russian soldiers. What is claimed to be a Russian APC is shown burning in the background. It can be immediately seen from the video that the Russian soldiers captured by the rebels are regular army conscripts and not OMON policemen. Their age and uniforms speak for themselves. Furthermore, only one truck is shown, while the OMON convoy consisted of nine such vehicles and did not have any APC escort. No Russian troops were captured by the rebels during the recent attack. The rebels on the video shown by the BBC are dressed unseasonably warm. Interestingly enough the rebels have the characteristic "wahhabite" beards -- something no Chechen rebel in his right mind would wear while trying to hide in Grozny posing as a civilian. Several Russian newspapers already mentioned a possibility that this video was taken during the 1994-1996 war in Chechnya.

Sore-Knees L'menexe

Your fantasy crushed in an instance.

If you think I would take the time and effort to insult you under any name other than mine then you are dumber than I thought. LOL.

So long to feeling good about yourself.

http://www.antiwar.com/szamuely/sz-col.html