Putin shameless at levers of propaganda machine

Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, was a flashpoint in both of the Chechen separatist wars with Russia that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Street battles, artillery shelling and aerial bombardment in the mid-1990s, and again in 1999 and 2000, leveled the city. /Image via historyofrussia.org

I have lived in and around Boston for nearly all of my adult life, so I have nothing but scorn and disdain for the ethnic Chechen Tsarnaev brothers' attack on the Boston Marathon.

But Vladimir Putin's claim that the marathon bombing vindicates Russian actions in the North Caucasus, particularly his crackdown on Chechnya, is shamelessly self-serving propaganda. Speaking at an annual question-and-answer session on April 25, Putin said, "I was always appalled when our Western partners and the Western media called the terrorists, who did bloody crimes in our country, 'insurgents,' and almost never ‘terrorists.'"

Moscow has had a literally tortured relationship with Chechnya over the past 70 years, bookended by Stalin's deadly winter 1944 forced deportation of about 400,000 people from Chechnya and the brutal warfare Putin launched on the Chechens in 1999. There's a long history littered with the deaths of innocents that has turned Chechnya into a hotbed for terrorism.

Chechnya has been a blot on Russia's human rights record for the past 20 years. The U.S. State Department's 2012 annual survey on human rights released last month is highly critical of Russia's record in the North Caucasus:

• Rule of law was particularly deficient in the North Caucasus, where conflict among government forces, insurgents, Islamist militants, and criminal forces led to numerous human rights abuses, including killings, torture, physical abuse, and politically motivated abductions.
• There continued to be reports that security forces used indiscriminate force resulting in numerous deaths and that the perpetrators were not prosecuted.
• Armed forces and police units reportedly abused and tortured both rebels and civilians in holding facilities. Human rights groups noted that physical abuse of women was becoming increasingly common in the region.
• Government personnel, rebels, and criminal elements continued to engage in abductions in the North Caucasus.
• Burning the homes of suspected rebels reportedly continued. Memorial (a leading Russian human rights group) reported that on April 22, two days after a special operation in the village of Komsomolskoye in the Gudermes District of Chechnya, armed men in camouflage burned the house belonging to the grandparents of Akhmed Bantaev, one of the men killed in the special operation.

Acting President Vladimir Putin signs autographs for Russian troops outside Grozny in January 2000. Boris Yeltsin had resigned the presidency the day before. /AFP image