Foreign Editor Eric Margolis in Toronto Sun, 23 January, 2000

Look at Grozny and you see a second Warsaw Ghetto. Like the valiant Jewish defenders who held off the might of the Nazi SS, Chechens, another forgotten people facing extermination, are fighting to the death against impossible odds.

I have been a combat soldier and have covered 12 high-intensity wars from the front, but I have never seen anything that equals the heroism and boundless courage of the Chechen mujahedin. For the past four months, 5,000 lightly-armed Chechen warriors fighting on flat, open terrain that favours air, armour and artillery, have held off 160,000 Russian troops, backed by regiments of heavy guns and rockets, helicopter gunships, ground attack aircraft, and thousands of tanks and armoured vehicles. Russia's generals have repeatedly vowed to "exterminate" the Chechen. All Chechen males from 6-65 are being thrown into concentration camps.

Chechen mujahedin, most without any formal military training, have no heavy weapons and are chronically short of radios, anti-tank rockets and even small-arms ammunition. There is almost no medicine or morphine for their wounded, and no shelter from massive Russian bombardment that includes banned fuel air explosives, toxic gas, and napalm. If taken alive by the Russians, they will be tortured, then executed ...

Grozny - which Russian generals vowed to storm by early December, and President Vladimir Putin promised to take by New Year's - still holds out ...

Mujahedin are defending every ruined building and mined street while some 40,000 civilians cower in cellars under non-stop Russian shelling. Still, overwhelming Russian numbers and firepower must eventually prevail. Losses are high on both sides - about one Chechen for every four Russians ..

So 1.5 million Chechen defy 146 million Russians as these Caucasian mountaineers have done for the past 250 years. The Chechens who today defend Grozny are the children of a nation that three times nearly has been exterminated by Russian genocide - in the 18th, 19t and 20th centuries, the last when Stalin had tens of thousands should and the remainder of the Chechen people deported to Siberian concentration camps.

In the first Chechen war, 1994-96, Russia killed 100,000 Chechen civilians, razed much of the small country, and, in an act of monumental terrorism, scattered 17 million anti-personnel land mines across the tiny nation.

Russia was driven from Chechenya in 1996, but its hard-liners and communists vowed to "exterminate the Chechen bandits". Their man Putin's first act as president was to declare a crusade - blessed by the Russian  Orthodox  against Chechenya. Moscow demanded revenge for 1996 ...

The Clinton administration, which is largely financing Church Russia's genocide in Chechenya, supplied Russian attack helicopters with advanced U.S. night-vision devices - "to combat terrorism", says the White House ...

If the West's response to Russia's Mongol-like behaviour in Chechenya has been shameful and hypocritical, the (Muslim) world's reaction is even more disgraceful. Important Muslim (States) - like Egypt, Malaysia, and Iran - are negotiating arms and aircraft deals with Russia. No Muslim state has dared challenge Russian brutality or anti-Muslim racism ... China, which oppresses its own Muslim peoples and Tibetans, loudly applauded Russia's final solution in the Caucasus.

Those who (see) a monstrous crime and do nothing share guilt for it. We begin the 21s century watching silently as a brutish Russia, which knows neither shame nor mercy, crushes the life out of a tiny but heroic people who refuse to bend their knees to Moscow's tyranny.