As the country is still reeling from the threats by President Muhammadu Buhari to employ genocide against the South East region in dealing with hoodlums alleged to be members of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB who attack government facilities, a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Rivers State has asked Buhari to employ the Putin model in Chechnya, which translates to mass murder, abduction and extra-judicial killings in dealing with the separatists.
Chris Finebone, a former publicity secretary of the APC in a now-deleted post on Facebook wrote “Just adopt the Putin style in Chechnya…Infiltration, midnight disappearances and sanity returns.
Chechnya is the former breakaway Islamic republic of Russia that was brutally reconquered by the Russian army in the early 2000s after two wars.
Vladimir Putin began his first term as Russia’s president with a heavy-handed invasion of Chechnya, which had been outside Moscow’s control since the Soviet Union’s breakup in 1991.
Wanting to avoid urban combat, Russian airpower flattened Grozny, generating tens of thousands of refugees from what the UN, in 2002, described as “the most destroyed city on Earth.” Russian forces then pursued retreating rebels into the mountains, rooting out their strongholds as the conflict shifted to asymmetric warfare.
Today, Chechnya is a police state, likely the most brutal anywhere in Europe, that rules through extreme repression. Torture, assassinations, collective punishment and arbitrary arrests are commonplace. Unemployment is estimated at around half the population, while the territory is entirely dependent on federal subsidies, which comprise 85 per cent of the budget.
Chechnya continues to produce more refugees than anywhere else in Europe, with over 100 Chechens attempting to flee to the European Union every day.
When he cautioned about his anti-democratic take in handling issues concerning agitations in the South East, the Opobo-born politician deleted the post but not before it was screenshotted.
