Li Ying's 5 paragraph Reflection

Li Ying Lu
Period 3
6/8/07
Reflection for the Russia and the case of Chechnya Blog


Before starting this blog with my other group members for part of the history final, I didn’t even know about the case of Chechnya, or rather I didn’t even know what it was. Like Lauren said in the introduction of our blog, “Many people are oblivious to the many wars around us.” I really agree with that statement because I guess, like most other schools in the United States, we are taught about the 2 World Wars, the Civil War, the Revolutionary and etc., but few people have heard of the cases of human rights that we have been discussing recently in class. Also, not a lot of people know that there are human rights issues all over the world that are happening recently through the 1900s. I do not understand how every person on this planet is human but they can treat each other as less superior or unwilling to grant a country’s independence and shed blood. I think that this is a good way to help us get ready for the essay on the history final.

Countries go to war for many reasons but mainly for independence from another country. Chechnya was one of them. It is a small federal subject of Russia but it has not gained independence yet although they do have their own president and an unofficial capital. In some ways, I thought that this war is a little bit like our current war and others among history. During this war leaders used terrorist attacks on Russian cities and civilians. The war that we are fighting with Iraq right now also the result of terrorist attacks on 9/11. Chechnya leaders also used guerilla tactics much like people did in other wars such as Charles De Gaulle. He led the Free French movement against the Vichy regime. I feel that most wars are similar in tactics/strategies but I think that it is wrong to use guerilla or terrorist attacks on any nation in order to gain independence. Many innocent people were killed during the First and Second Chechen Wars and also including the Moscow theater siege and the Beslan School siege.

This was basically a research project. I liked the idea of doing a blog because I also keep a blog and xanga online and post daily. I thought it was really cool posting information to a blog that is linked to the school’s website so that anyone who accesses it can see the human rights situations that our history classes have been working on. Also, anyone is free to comment so we can know about their own opinions and ideas, even the posters on the blog themselves. I thought that Russia and the Case of Chechnya was a completely random “topic” because I mostly heard of the other topics but not this one. The research part was OK, but the group project is really nice because it is definitely easier for 5 people to do one final project than for one person to do one final project. One difficult thing was that people had trouble posting the things onto the blog. Also this project was done online and similar to a website and I really like it.

Yesterday when I was posting on the blog, another group had posted their pictures and I thought it was interesting that President Bush was very strong allies with the Russian president Putin. I thought that the United States and Russia were probably still on edges about World War 2 and the Cold War so I was surprised that the 2 leaders of the 2 different countries were allies with each other. I thought that our country supported the idea of independence because we had wars over it to free ourselves from Great Britain a very long time ago and help another country gain its independence instead of helping a country that kind of turned its back on us.

One thing that has been bothering me while doing this project was seeing Andrea’s post on the blog just now. Like every war, civilians are the innocent people that are caught in the crossfire when the leaders of the country made the decisions. There was a picture that was drawn by a refugee’s child during the war in Chechnya. It is shocking to say that the human rights of life ,equality and government were denied from the Chechnya people. In conlcusion, I thought this project was fun but it was a little disturbing to find out more is happening in the real world that we do not know about.