Meanwhile, In Russia's Afghanistan...

While the US government condemns the sham trial and sentencing of Burmese politician and activist Aung San Suu Kyi, the Obama administration is notably silent on the continuing human rights crisis in Chechnya. In the past two weeks, two more activists were killed when a gang of armed men, some dressed in police uniforms, kidnapped and murdered the head of a children’s charity and her husband.

So many social justice and human rights workers have been killed in Chechnya in the past few months that a local radio station in Grozny, the Chechen capital, couldn’t find anyone to interview about the recent killings. Scanning down a list of Chechen charities revealed that every single one of the station’s contacts had been murdered.

The Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, is widely considered to be the man to blame for these killings. Kadyrov, a former Chechen separatist, gave up the cause to be Vladimir Putin’s man in Grozny. He was the compromise candidate who was supposed to bring stability to Chechnya; now Human Rights Watch blames him for running death squads that have murdered dozens of activists and journalists. Stability, apparently, comes at a steep price.

Yet Kadyrov is quick to point the finger at Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that Moscow wants to discredit him and destabilize his government. It’s an absurd charge, given that Russia has fought multiple wars in Chechnya in the last decade, and is struggling to put down separatist, Islamic uprisings in Chechnya’s neighboring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan. The last thing Putin wants is to topple Kadyrov’s government.

Kadyrov is obviously working with Putin’s blessing to suppress any and all forms of dissent in Chechnya, even when that dissent falls into the category of peaceful work on behalf of orphaned children. Kadyrov believes that Putin (so fond of his own bloodthirsty reputation) can stand a bit more slander, as long as it diverts the UN and the international media from the truth.

So far the US media has been happy to oblige, as long as US presidents are willing to shake Putin’s hand at international forums. A picture is worth more than a thousand words.