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To the Heart of a Conflict
W. W. Norton
November 2004
131 pages ISBN: 0393327329 Trade Size
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Political
Andrew's Meier riveting portrait of Chechnya, a land ravaged
by indescribable carnage, enables us to understand the
origins of this brutal conflict like no other recent work. The barbaric, terrorist siege in the summer of 2004 that
resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent children in
Beslan did not begin either there or in the take-over of a
Moscow theatre in 2002. As Andrew Meier explains in this
utterly compelling account, the most recent Chechen war
actually broke out on New Year's Eve in 1994 when Boris
Yeltsin sent hundreds of tanks to the center of the city of
Grozny in an effort to quell popular demands for
independence from Russia. Six years later, Meier, braving
great personal danger, traveled to the scene of one of the
largest civilian massacres carried out by Russian troops,
reporting on the carnage in which over 60 Chechen
civilians—including a pregnant woman and many elderly—were
brutally slaughtered in one of the war's most horrific
"mop-up" operations. Days after a Chechen woman became the
conflict's first female suicide bomber, Meier visited this
war-torn province, encountering, among others, kidnappers,
Wahhabi Islamists aligned with the Taliban, and a stream of
Russian mothers arriving at the morgue to identify their
fallen soldier sons. Chechnya is Meier's stunning report
from a region where the death toll has already exceeded
100,000 people, and a book that attempts to comprehend what
compels men to shoot children in the back.
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