Yet as far as I know, Chechenya used to be a country before it was invaded in the times of the tzars, and has been treated like trout since then. As far as I know.
Well, I am biased because I live in Spain, and in Catalonia, another sector of the country that has a lot of independentists.shadow nexus i'd be intrested to hear your opinion on the basque situation?
Basque terrorism is also a natural reaction to opression during Franco's time. ETA, now the terrorist group, was initially founded as a cultural group, to defend the expression of basque culture. Yes, cultural group, they exposed books and stuff and defended publishing of books in euskera, a language banned by the dictatorship. Are you against that? I am certainly not. However, this group was non violent yet it got highly repressed, getting some members jailed and tortured. This moved them to political action, trying to be more combative without using violence (Other than some people in demonstration, thats preety understandable considering the situation). The repression got higher and vasque independentists were chased, so they decided to fight back with violence, something I don't agree with yet I can somehow understand given the circumstances of the country back then. This moved to the kale borroka, street violence against material property of the goverment, and got to the first attack against a life, it was in 1971 (or was it 73?) when they killed Carrero Blanco, a member of the goverment that was quite a son of a bitch. They blew up his car and thus started to work as a serious terrorist group. As for my opinion on this assasination, well, I never agreed with such means and I don't agree now: I don't think killing Blanco was good, yet I can't say I feel sorry for such a person.
Well, in 1975 Franco died, in 1978 the constitution was done, in 1981 the Communist Party was legalized, the basque were recognized as a "historical zone" (Meaning they have a more or less autonomous goverment) and so on. Does opression still exist? Well, there have been several cases of police brutality (Several many) against independentists and not necesarily terrorists. Also, the goverment many times attempts to opress certain iniciatives of pro-basque political action. On the past term, before the elections this year, the right-winged party moved into the illegalization of the group Batasuna, a vasque independentist party that was recognized as the political arm of ETA, yet this relation is not toal, and such ilegalization is for me like breaking another posibility of dialoge and peace, because even if I think Batasuna is a filthy group, ilegalization leads to more hate. However, the closing of a newspaper because it was supposedly economically supporing ETA (Again, blurry evidence) got me preety pissed, because that was clear censorip.
As for me...well, I think ETA is a remaning factor of radical violent independentism that dosen't make much sense in our more-or-less suposed banana democracy. If they exist, it is because of the past dictatorship, so the State is against the one I blame for the existance of terrorism. I think ETA will eventually dissapear in a few generations because now a political fight in such issues is possible without a need of violence. However, to make it end it soon, the politicians should be ready for dialoge, and yes, I believe it is possible. I think a better educative system would help to prevent new generations from being terrorists too.
So yeah, they are a bunch of asassins creatred by scars of the past, but I believe an intelligent acting may stop them. However, terrorism is very good for the elections, and in the end and again, the fight against them is done in a very superficial way, attacking the terrorists but never acting against the problem from the root.