Every day, I get a snarky, angry, even nasty bunches of tweets from people furious that I don't call the Russian-backed separatists fighting in Ukraine "terorists" — yet call the Chechen or Dagestani insurgents fighting in the North Caucasus "terrorists".

This response has been going on for months with Russia's war on Ukraine, but became more acute since the recent terrorist attack in Grozny.

Let me point out — to the many haters who don't seem to know anything about my background — that I worked intensively on human rights in Chechnya through increasing crackdowns and then two Chechen Wars, first for Human Rights Project Group (a joint group with Sergei Kovalev and other Russian human rights activists in Moscow) from 1990-1996; then with Committee to Protect Journalists (1995-1997), then with the International League for Human Rights, which I directed from 1997-2002. 

I was even a member of the much-maligned American Committee for Peace in Chechnya — a not-for-profit group based first at Jamestown Foundation then later at Freedom House which is now defunct, that Soviet and then Russian intelligence agencies spew hysterical disinformation about — although I'm here to testify that Brzezinski only endorsed it with his name, not his actual presence; it didn't accomplish much; and it certainly didn't support any terrorists or militants, but focused on public awareness, situation and human rights reports, and efforts at peace talks. This was certainly the right thing to do given the mass crimes against humanity committed by the Soviets and then Russians.

One of the things I did over the years working on the issue of human rights in Chechnya was meet personally with Sérgio Vieira de Mello and his staff to convey lists of refugees and urgent reports from the office of Ruslan Aushev, who was then president of Ingushetia and was trying to cope with more than 100,000 Chechen refugees who fled into his republic.  To his credit, de Mello instantly responded and in those days — the UN was a different kind of place — there were even staff people specifically assigned to Chechnya and the North Caucasus, as there were in OSCE's ODIHR — and staff with operational capacity and offices in the region.

Another thing I did was accompany as a witness the foreign minister of the Maskhadov government when he entered the UN to try to lodge the signed instruments of international treaties, including human rights agreements, with the UN in a bid for statehood. He was expelled by the chief of security. Say what you will about Chechens and Maskhadov — did the Palestinians emphatically sign the human rights treaties in their bid for statehood? I'm not aware that they did. (Update: I'm told that they signed all the conventions and they must have signed these, too, but never heard it.)

So excuse me if I feel I have a little credibility here on this issue of usage of the word terrorism.

The answer is easy:

When was the last time you saw Givi or Motorola, infamous Russian separatist commanders, bomb a bus with civilians in it or a discoteque with teenagers in it or a market place with old ladies in it *deliberately*? With remotely-detonated bombs or suicide belts, as distinct from accidental mortar?

Answer: never.

Marketplaces, buses, and cafes have all been hit in southeastern Ukraine, but not by bombs, but by artillery shells, and by both sides in the conflict. No evidence has been supplied that either side does this deliberately, i.e. as a planned tactic. Lots of evidence has been put forth by both sides that civilians are targeted, but no persuasive proof has been provided.

When was the last time you saw a Russian separatist fighter tie a suicide belt or vest on himself and lurch on to a bus or into a restaurant or school? Answer: never.

When did the separatists ever take over a school, take parents and children and hostages, and kill them one by one as their demands were not met, forcing a Ukrainian military response which led to everyone getting killed?

Answer: never.

So you get the idea. These Russian-backed separatists are nasty-assed individuals who take hostages like journalists and Ukrainian supporters and kill them, who storm buildings, and sometimes in the process, may kill people; they may even kill their own people for disloyalty. All of this is Bolshevism; all of it is Stalinism or Leninism. But it's not terrorism like the Chechens and Dagestanis and others practice.

Example:

Doku Umarov, head of the Caucasus Emirates assassinated earlier this year apparently finally for real by Russian forces claimed responsibility for:

o the 2010 Moscow Metro bombing in which 40 were killed and 100 injured;

o the Nevsky Express bombing in 2009 in which 27 were killed and 95 injured;

o the Domodedevo bombing in 2011 which killed 37 and wounded 180;

Then there are the Volgograd bombings, killing more than 40, and of course the most horrible terrorist attack of Russia, Beslan, in which 385 people, mainly children were killed when 1,100 people were taken hostage by terrorist Shamil Basayev, and the Russian riot police storming ended up killing, not saving people.

If you want to use the word "terrorism" — it's like the word genocide, you have to use it precisely, and not over-use it for everything you don't like, or it loses its meaning and you lose the ability the differentiate between levels of evil — which is worth doing, especially as because that's how you tailor your response.

So I'm for using the word "terrorist" to describe someone who blows up the metro and kills dozens of people, not for somebody who takes a gun and takes over a building – unless that person is in fact part of a previously-recognized terrorist group that announces that it is taking credit for that building take-over. That's the difference between Slavyansk in April and Grozny now. If you don't appreciate the difference, if you are somehow still indignant that the Russian government behind all this (and in part responsible for unleashing worsening terrorism over the years), I feel for you.

But you won't be able to emotionally blackmail me into using this term because your grandmother died.  I believe in being precise in language, and it's not about "Christians" in one case and "Muslims" in another; the icon-kissing Russian-backed "Novorossiya" commanders bear only the slightest relationship to Christianity and there are Muslims who wage armed warfare even against other Muslims — say, the Janjawid against the Darfurians — without being called "terrorists" by even their worst critics.

To be sure, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, which is why we're having this debate. There is no international definition in treaties for what "terrorism" means, although the UN Security Council keeps a list of international terrorists it cooperates in sanctioning anyway, because ultimately people can agree on what it means for an individual (rather than as a defined act) when it rises to a certain threshold.

I remember September 12, 2001, when a group of leaders of human rights organizations in New York City had an emergency telephone conference call to discuss what to say and do. Human Rights Watch was literally getting bomb scares and had to evacuate the high floors of the Empire State Building. I remember the British staff were nimble about getting the hell out of there, with their historic memories of the air raids of World War II. I made record time down those stairs — I was at a meeting there for one scare — even in high heels, because I had been following the wars in Chechnya and Tajikistan and saw first-hand the vicious hatred and justification of violence from the Palestinians and their supporters at the Durban World Conference on Racism.

Ken Roth and others were less alacritous because they thought they were merely copy-cat scares — and they were. Nothing happened to the Empire State Building — although we could see it right from our window, and when we heard there was a bomb scare one night, I remember trying to call and email a friend inside because I wasn't sure she got the news. My daughter, then 7, looked out the window at this huge building, that might topple on our apartment. She asked me if we were going to be hit.

"No, they only bomb symbols, and our building isn't a symbol," I explained.

It didn't take long for her, even at age 7, to ask me, "Am I a symbol?"

Indeed, that's the question for Americans to ask, because any American can be targeted by the vicious hatred of brainwashed and "mobilized" people, especially in a place where the terrorist group has been reified as a "democratically-elected government." ('The entire population is mobilized," is how a US journalist once explained the phenomenon of Palestinian teachers being willing, despite supposed ethics in teaching children, to put posters glorifying suicide-bombers on their classroom walls.)

And in that September 12 meeting, Aryeh Neier, then the president of the Open Society Foundations, cut short the arguments begun about definitions of terrorism by Mike Posner, then of Human Rights First, and other leaders, by saying simply, "Terrorism is when you attack people who are unrelated to the beef you have with someone else."

This short, very New York explanation really sums up years of international wrangling. Attacking people unrelated to an actual conflict. Civilians. Innocents.

Though Neier wouldn't appreciate the similarity — Ken Roth would, as he clerked for Guiliani — Mayor Rudy Guiliani got on television at a news conference and also said very bluntly, when attacks on some mosques and Muslims (or Sikhs, whom people took for Muslims mistakenly) began in New York:

"We're not going to have what they had down there. We're not going to have group hate."

And what he meant by "down there" was the World Trade Center twin towers in smoking ruins with 3,000 people killed by suicide bombers who attacked innocents unrelated to their beef, even their fellow Muslims, because they didn't like US troops in Saudi Arabia or US support of Israel occupying Palestine. For their troubles, they got the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and here we all are.

And we didn't have the group hate. My neighbours surrounded a mosque on the lower east side and pledged to keep it from attacks. The Sikh cab drivers bedecked their cabs with American flags and badges — a famous New Yorker cover after the attack illustrated this – but there weren't attacks. Civility held. There were actually more attacks and fears outside of New York City.

The Russian separatists, as deeply suspect and despicable as they are — the "insurgency" would not likely exist if it weren't for the Kremlin's political cover and advocacy in the world, cash, official assistance, weapons, tanks, and troops – are not killing people unrelated to their alleged beef. Let's say at least some of these fighters genuinely believe they are protecting their homeland and their Soviet way of life — some of them give interviews and seem genuine. They are manipulated, but they see themselves as a "self-defense" force.

We don't call them that; we call them *Russian* backed rebels because that's what they are.

But they aren't terrorists. They do not commit suicide bombings; they do not commit attacks deliberately on civilians as a matter of policy. To be sure, there is some evidence that they have engineered shellings to frame Ukrainians — I believe that they do this. But I don't know if there is solid enough data to show that this is a deliberate, ordered policy with multiple examples.

In any event, the Chechen case is clear. Why do I call the people who stormed the Press House as terrorists? Because they are, and called themselves as such.

A video was put out explaining the nature and purpose of the attack in Grozny, and saying it was under orders of two people in the Caucasus Emirate, a commander and the very head, Emir Ali Abu Mukhammad.

The Caucasus Emirate is declared a terrorist group by the UN and the US State Department, and rightly so; it took responsibility for those attacks I just enumerated. They took responsibility for this one.

This attack was not one like the Slavyansk OGA [Regional State Administration Building], where thugs with guns took over buildings, and took some people hostage. It's not like the Lugansk OGA, where thugs with guns took over the building and then drew an air attack from the Ukrainian military, which had just seen Russian-backed forces overrun and kill its border troops at a nearby border station. That attack killed civilians for which Putin and the "Lugansk People's Republic" bear full blame.  Everybody wants Ukraine to stop air attacks or shelling of civilian areas — fair enough. Then bring your pressure on the people who overrun borders and supply thugs with guns to take over administrative buildings and put civilians in harm's way.

Yet neither of these acts are terrorism — *deliberately* harming people unrelated to their beef.

But wait, isn't the clumsy takeover of the Press House and the school by the Caucasus Emirate members just like the separatists taking over the OGA in Ukraine?

No, because they come from a pre-existing designated terrorist group with a string of deliberate terrorist attacks. That's why you call it "a terrorist group" and "terrorists" in it — definitions have meanings, this is legitimate. When not only the US but the UN call a group "terrorist," it's more than fine to accept that it really is a terrorist group with the aim of bombing civilians unrelated to its beef to make a point.

Taking over the Press House strikes me as a kind of suicide bombing simply because the people who did this only had guns, didn't seem to have a plan for how they'd keep control of the building given that they'd immediately be overwhelmed by riot police and the FSB. They didn't even have any fertilizer home-made explosives. The entire building collapsed under artillery fire, killing the terrorists and one innocent civilian, a Russian businessman unrelated to Kadyrov and merely trying to go about normal life. And that's the idea of terrorists: to prevent normal life.

Kadyrov reacted with overkill and is methodically going through and making sure even these peoples' relatives are going to be arrested even if unrelated, and warning that all relatives of terrorists will be automatically expelled from the republic (where will they go?) and their properties confiscated. Kadyrov has run a murderous policy, methodically arresting and killing hundreds of people. When a performer at his birthday lost her cell phone, a thousand guests were detained and interrogated until the phone was found. Insane.

So sorry, as bad as the "Novorossiya" gang is — and I spend much of every waking hour reporting on how bad they and their masters are — I'm going to save the word "terrorist" for those who take hostages in theaters and schools and get themselves and their hostages killed; I'm going to save the word "terrorist" for those who blow up metros, trains, and airports and kill hundreds of people unrelated to their beef, which is against the Kremlin, not ordinary people. Their notion that the Kremlin should feel the pain on its civilians that they feel on theirs doesn't justify violence. Nothing justifies terrorism, nothing.

And nothing justifies the Russian-backed separatist armed conflict, either. It's the Kremlin's war on Ukraine; it's wrong, and that's why there are international sanctions, even more than there were in the Soviet era.

Now here's an additional point of discussion. Recently I signed a petition to have Russia declared a sponsor of state terrorism for what it was doing in Ukraine. It garnered more than 100,000 signatures and forced a response from the Obama Administration, which has said it will answer any petition that gets more than 100,000 signatures. It's not going to declare its fell0w UN Security Council members Russia a "state terrorist" any time soon.

So why did I sign this position when I am not willing to use this term "Terro-Russians"?

Easy: I wanted the Obama administration to think of their response to Russia.

To some extent, the Kremlin *is* using state terror on Ukraine. That is, launching a "hybrid war" of this nature — by which people mean part-military, part-intelligence cover operation with certain methods like disinformation — they are using terrorism on Ukraine. Nothing in any dispute with Ukraine deserves war or terrorism. I think using covert forces — writ large — which use a large variety of methods — is a kind of state terrorism.

To be sure, it's a lesser form than the state terrorism of Iran, which arms and orders terrorist groups to attack civilians in Iraq and kill them in large numbers, i.e. at schools, employment lines or marketplaces. That's just an order of magnitude greater than the Kremlin.

The Kremlin has had terror as its method ever since day one of Lenin and his comrades' communist struggle, and it lasted for 75 years and still hasn't gone away. Some attribute the apartment bombings to Putin or his associates or supporters in the FSB.
But some of the people inside the movement instigated and manipulated by the Kremlin are authentic in their beliefs — it's not just a cynical operation for all of them, certainly — and  I come back to this: the Novorossiya thugs, as awful as they are, do not blow up marketplaces as a tactic deliberatelly, i.e. with set bombs or suicide belts as distinct from accidental shelling.

I notice that most of the people who make this demand of me:

1. Don't speak or read Russian. So they don't see much nuance in this situation.

2. Don't really follow the situation closely on the ground, so they see no nuances.

3. Are extremist in their views.

4. Want simple answers and categories to things.

5. Aren't capable of reasoned debate on this subject.

None of these categories of people are going to change my mind.

The terrorists who took over the Press House likely with no expectation of survival hoped to accomplish one thing: publicity. The journalists, even the state journalists heavily under control, are now fearful even to go to their workplace. Any other association in that space — like the Association of Young Entrpreneurs — will be fearful as well. The point was to make a huge publicity splash on the eve of Putin's "state of the union" speech to the Federal Assembly, and on the 20th anniversary of the start of the first Chechen war. Mission accomplished. That mission was terrorism, not insurgency.

Nearly all of the terrorist attacks in Chechnya and many in Dagestan have had that element — bombing of cars, bombing of marketplaces, bombing of a state holiday (the last incident). They aren't bombing of police stations, checkpoints, border posts, the way we have seen, say, in the insurgent attacks by armed rebels who have a notion of only attacking symbols of law-enforcement or government, not ordinary people.