SILENCE AIDS OBLITERATION OF CHECHNYA/Commentary by Alexander Cockburn

-Why isn't anyone in Washington protesting or applying political pressure?

As a brief truce collapsed Sunday and Russian tankk and planes started battering the Chechen capital of Grozny the following day, the head of Russia's paratroop forces reached for a rural image. "Now that we have upset the hive, we have to catch all the bees," said Gen Yevgeny Podgolzin.

In counterinsurgency terms, this means unrelenting pursuit of the Chechen freedom fighters, plus vicious sanctions against villages and towns suspected of harboring them or of being sympathetic to their cause.

Thus far, according to one Russian human-rights official in a town in neighboring Ingushetia where many refugees have fled, between 22,000 and 25,000 Chechens have died in the war since the start of this year.

In the face of this ghastly bloodshed, the Clinton administration has let out a few timid bleats to the effect that it hopes a political solution record of U.S. encouragement for Boris Yeltsin that survived his coup and his bombardment of the Russian Parliament is given yet another lease on life.

Clinton can sit on his hands and keep his mouth shut because there is not any great political pressure on him to do otherwise. Repubblicans, lion-like in the past in their espousal of the cause of captive nations behind the Iron Curtain, don't give a fig for Chechnya and neither do the liberals who hve stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Bob Dole in calling for U.S. intervention on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims.

In fact, there is a far stronger case for making an uproar about Chechnya and for threatening a suspension of all aid to Russia unless it istantly declares a ceasefire.

Bosnia was part of the Yugoslav federation, a partnership into which it entered freely at the end of World War II. The Bosnian Muslims declared independence with no heed for the views of the Serbian third of the territory's population. The Bosnian Serbs behaved barbarously, but they have had legitimate grievances about the behavior of the Muslims and of the Western powers that have recognized the latter's hastily declared independence.

The Chechens are a people colonized by the czars and they have been conducting a struggle against Russian aggression in the 18th Century and under Khazi-Mollah and Shamyl in the 19th Century as well. The tyranny of the czars gave way o that of Stalin, who killed and deported them in huge umbers. Now it has been Yeltsin's turn to assume the role of jackboot oppressor of this defiant nation.

The racist myths put about by Russians are parroted by many Americans. A fellow next to me on the plane the other day said without any shame at all, "The Chechens are all criminals. Yeltsin should just get rid of him [the Chechen leader, Dzokhar Dudayev]."

Maybe this is why both Democrats and Repubblicans, engulfed in the crime-wave hysteria here, are giving Yeltsin the green light. If crime is Russia's No.1 problem and if the Chechens supposedly run all organized crime in Russia, then the way for Yeltsin to fight crime is to wipe out the Chechens. His answer to the crime bill.

Why have the liberals non made more of an issue of Chechnya? Grozny is farther away than Sarajevo, it's true. Sarajevo has suffered from a blockade and occasional bombardment from the air. Grozny has been virtually reduced tu rubble.

Maybe the operative factor here is the bipartisan American canonization of Yeltsin, still supposedly battling hard-liners and taking a leave of absence for surgery on his nose when he might otherwise have been forced to identify himself publicly with the onslaught on Grozny deplored by so many of his countrymen.

The Chechens who rallied behind Dudayev say they will fight on, just as they have been doing since the days of Daoud Beg and since Count Leo Tolstoy described the czar's campaign against them in the Eastern Caucasus.

In Europe, Chancellor Helmut Kohl has been forced by German public opinion to send a tough message to Yeltsin. It is to our shame that the U.S. government feels it politically safe to sit idly by and, in effect, lend air and comfort to Yeltsin in his war to obliterate what should by all criteria be a free nation.

(Alexander Cockburn writes for the Nation and other pubblications)