The Humanitarian Crisis in Chechnya

‘The war in Darfur” is an armed conflict in the Sudan Darfur region that began in 2003 and is still ongoing, and in 2005 it was later declared as a civil war against Chad and Central African Republic.

Jusef Komunyakaa’s poem “You and I Are Disappearing” is about an experience in which the author was helplessly looking at a village girl getting devoured by flames that were caused by a firebomb called napalm. Within the context of the gruesome of war, the author puts down in words the vivid images of both the civilian and the soldier during the Vietnam War. While the village girl was engulfed by the flames, causing her physical pain, the soldier was also powerless in watching her burn. Years after the war, the speaker recalls how he still sees “a girl burning in his head” (Komunyakaa 2). A truth claim that can be drawn from this poem is that both the civilians and the soldiers are victims of war. I

De Waal, T. (2002). Greetings from Gozny. Fighting for Chechnya: Is Islam a factor? Retrieved

Hated has always been part of human nature, it is an inevitable emotion that can consumes the souls of men. The genocide in Ukraine during the early 1900s caused incredible suffering. Referred to as Holodomor which translates to killing by hunger, the Ukrainian starvation was a man made famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Ukraine and the traditional Cossack territories starved to death due to Stalin’s government seizing of crops resulting in the countries denial of the genocide and even cannibalism.

During this time, Civilians were forced to leave the only place they knew as home. As Serbian police force Albanians out of their homes, Priština, Kosovo’s capital is being drained of its ethnic identity. One refugee being forced to move to the Macedonia border said, “Then at two o’clock we were in the train. So many people it was difficult to survive. Very difficult. I thought I saw death with my eyes” (BBC news). These series of events depict the issues and struggles Albanians endure during the Kosovo War. Albanians fear is being able to create a safety environment for their own families. A main concern as well was if these Albanian families will ever return to their homes. The war for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was already in progress. Furthermore, Serbians would also be put in a difficult decision, whether to end the war within Kosovo or to endure inescapable NATO air strikes.

Chechens, who had lived as members of the Soviet Union, were also relocated during World War II. Prior to the formation of the Soviet Union, Chechens had been under Russian rule for two centuries. The North Caucasus came under tsarist rule in the early nineteenth century but fighting between tribes and the Russian army had occurred for much of that time as the tsar attempted to assert his dominance over the region. In 1865, there was a rebellion against the tsarist regime in response to forced resettlement to Turkey. After the October Revolution, Chechnya declared independence from Russia, but were forcibly absorbed into the newly formed Soviet Union after intervention by the Red Army. In 1934, Chechnya joined Ingushetiya to form the

Nikolai Litvin recalls his experiences from his tenure as a Red Army soldier in his memoir 800 Days on the Eastern Front. Litvin transcribed his memories of the war seventeen years after he left the military, which provided him ample time to process his experiences and formulate complete thoughts on what happened. Using a concise writing style, Litvin packs his memoir with vivid details of military operations and offers subtle details about Stalinist thinking and Soviet life. The memoir contains some significant Soviet bias, and Litvin’s point of view is clearly impacted by the unique experiences of a Red Army soldier. To truly understand 800 Days on the Eastern Front, the reader must decipher how Litvin understands his experiences, the impacts of internalized Stalinist thoughts and how Litvin reflects them, and how Litvin reveals the truths he believes about the war.

he rise in foreign fighters over the past twenty-five years is a result of an amalgamation of issues relating to globalisation. The breakdown of nations following world war two and the nationalist conflicts that have circulated, culminated in a collapse of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union continued nationalist and ideological struggles into new territories. Afghan veterans joined movements in Bosnia and Saudi Arabian fighters moved into Chechnya, mobilising to defend what they saw as nationalist or ideological struggles. These struggles have resulted in a commonality across a wider spectrum due to chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide across the globe where groups feeling left behind faced deepening economic

The destruction of war causes so much pain in most people’s hearts. When people picture the destruction of cities and landscapes from wars it’s a lost feeling inside of hopelessness. War has an emotional and physical devastation that cannot be rivaled. In the poem “Facing It” by Yusef Konmunyakaa shows more of an emotional side of wars compared to “Six National Guards Blown Up Together” by Peg Lauber shows more of a physical and emotional side. This writer is contrasting both of the poems based on the imagery of the destruction of human life.

During the second Chechen war, Fred Cuny, a disaster-relief specialist and his three colleagues had disappeared, leaving friends and family clueless. For twenty-five years through the harsh obstacles, he had managed to go to different cities and take care of those who needed aid. Putting other’s lives before his, he worked.passionately, rescuing those in broken buildings and rape camps, until he vanished without a trace.

Following the Second World War and the gradual acceptance of the Holocaust, the historiographical field devoted decades to the analysis of the causes, motives, perpetrators, and consequences of the worst genocide the world had seen. While thousands of scholarly articles and books have been published on the matter, Snyder veered from the Holocaust trend and focused on a particular geographical area, one he would come to call the “bloodlands”, after the fourteen million civilians who were “victims of murderous policy”. His book captures the horrors of systematic and targeted killings, ranging from mass shootings to induced starvation, through the lens of state policies and children’s naïve hopes for survival. The decision to move away from Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps and focus instead on the impact the Soviet Union and Third Reich had on the lives of men, women and children in the occupied zones of Eastern Europe sheds light on a region and a time that had unfortunately been largely reduced to a few notable locations. Snyder’s methodological research and vivid anecdotal injections allow for a striking comparison between Hitler’s Nazi regime and Stalin’s “political” action in the bloodlands, but ultimately the distinguishing feature between the two campaigns of atrocity was the relationship between ideology and practical circumstance.

Tolstoy's emphasizes deeply with the Chechen people as he details their suffering at the hands of

To rid the world of the horrid people that the Young Turks were, a small number of the remaining survivors of the Armenian genocide took it into their hands to kill the Turks in retaliation and to further prevent them from killing again. From 1920 to 1922, a group of Armenian men carried out Operation Nemesis, tasked with killing the Turks who had escaped to Germany in hopes of surviving the wrath that would be waiting for them in Armenia. Starting on May 28, 1918, the Armenian National Council declared the independence of Armenia. Hovhannes Kachaznuni and Alexander Khatisyan, both members of the ARF, moved to Yerevan, Armenia to issue the announcement of Armenian independence on May 30, 1918. Yerevan then became the capital city in Armenia.

This area has been subject to genocide since the Second World War. Chechnya is a small region in the Northern Caucasus mountain range in southwest Russia. (“Chechnya”).

I am a refugee. I came to this country when I was 10 years old, after having seen my own country disintegrate in front of my eyes. Regardless, I never forgot. The first time it happened was on February 2009, we were in my English class, probably learning some silly new verb, when we heard a sound that crept up my back. I still remember that eerie melody with an unforgettable macabre rhythm. I remember how our naïve gazes followed the sound to the window. I never truly forgot how everything felt straight out of an action movie, with the masked men shooting at each other and the soldiers running around helping the kids, even the gray sky matched the mood. That day changed me- it ripped my childhood away. Nevertheless, I didn’t cry, not a single tear fell from my eyes that day. Almost everyone