HUMAN RIGHTS INFORMATION AGENCY "EXPRESS-CHRONICLE"

ENGLISH WEEKLY NEWS DIGEST

17 May 1997

BY ALEKSANDR PODRABINEK

Kirbasova, Alekseyeva and Ponomaryov are fighting for a professional army on a contract basis. And their motives? That there is anarchy in the army, that our sons are dying, that the army is being looted and corrupted. Pity our army, pity our sons.

Good motives! But who is forcing our sons to go into the army, that 'school of slavery and criminality'? Already now the alternative to the army is not prison, as earlier, but (excuse the pun) alternative service. True, whilst it does not exist, conscientious objectors neither perform service, nor sit in prison.

'Our boys in peacetime are perishing in the existing army,' write the authors of the declaration. But who is 'ours'? Those who are enlisted from Moscow, Petersburg, Omsk or Vladivostok? Of those who are called up from Grozny, for example - whose are they? Where for human rights activists is the border between 'ours' and 'not ours'? At the state borders? Russians are 'ours,' and the Chechens are 'not ours'? Or 'ours' are those who join the army under the knout, whilst those who voluntarily go to defend their region from Russian expansionism are foreign?

Should the army be pitied? It loses battles, it loses wars, it decays from theft. What a bitter picture! The flood of tears must evoke the thought that the poor Russian army lost a noble war in Chechnya, or suffers losses in Tajikistan defending the communist regime there from the Islamic-Democratic Opposition. And how many more of 'our' sons will be lost by our poor army in the next aggressive wars?

The Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, the Moscow Helsinki Group and 'Democratic Russia' have either not finished speaking, or they have not reached the end of their train of thought. Behind general phases about the necessity of the transfer of the army to a contract basis, one can detect a carefully concealed 'state' approach. Indeed, at one point they say: 'Russia must gain a strong professional army.' This is a bone, tossed to the state: you don't touch our sons, and we won't object to a strong army.

There is, however, a need to reflect on the past, whilst trying to look at the future. Behind us is the destruction of Chechnya, the burning of the villages of Afghanistan, the suppression of Czechoslovakia by tanks and many heroics by the 'legendary and invincible' [army]. All this is the work of our army. Unprofessional, recognising no limits, criminal. Does one require great imagine to conceive the outcome of the war in Chechnya if our army was really professional, knew how to conduct military operations with minimal losses for itself and maximum losses for its enemy? What would remain of Chechnya and of the Chechen people, if Yeltsin's imperial plans were implemented not by the chatterbox Grachev, but by a literate military specialist and a professional army subordinate to him? Yes, 'our sons' will not be killed, the Soldiers' Mothers, MHG and 'Demrossiya' will not need to worry about that. But there remains such 'small change' as the sons who are 'not ours,' who defend their freedom from Russian aggress

ion. Do the rights-defenders not pity them? Is it not obvious to the initiators of the referendum that a strong and professional army in the hands of an adventurist and incompetent political leadership is a serious threat not only to our nearest neighbours, but to the entire world?

Now let us try to look forward. Let us suppose that the referendum ends successfully for its initiators and that within a certain period a professional army is created. But there is no civil society. Democracy is rudimentary, like at present, or worse. Or for example, God forbid, Zyuganov or Zhirinovsky broke through to the presidency. One needs to defend Russians in the Baltic states, the other needs to rinse boo to launch declarations with the opening slogan 'Enough deaths of our sons!' As if they do not pity all the others.