Saturday, April 20, 2013

The pain and hell in Boston

It is nothing but sadness and incomprehension to watch from afar what has happened in Boston in these last days. The city which has more Irish than in Ireland.

Among the dead a little boy, his sister and Mum maimed. Over 170 injured, many losing limbs. A policeman dead and another injured.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an alledged perpetrator, dead, and his brother, Dzhokhar, captured and wounded. Twenty-six and 19. Not long since they were children.

All this in the United States of America. The two men were born in Chechnya, which has a long violent history with Russia.

Stalin accused all Chechens of collaboration with the German invaders and the entire Chechen nation, more than 400,000 people, were expelled or killed. They were loaded into freight trains and transported to the bleak and freezing steppes of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Some, very few fought with the Soviet Army.

Maybe the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of these men, of the little boy, were caught up in the terror of either Stalin or Hitler.

Why?

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