Russians mourn 380 school hostage deaths

[michele cryer]

Following on from the incident of the plane crashes in Moscow recently, we now have the terrible murders of so many young children...Who are the real terrorists here? rebels or capitalist governments? How can we prevent these sorts of atrocities from occurring in the future...

Russians mourn 380 school hostage deaths
Posted by **Long Tall Sally** on Sep 5, 2004 at 2:28:04 PM:


I'm really surprised to come here, and no one is talking about this. It's so horrible.

The Associated Press
Updated: 1:18 p.m. ET Sept. 5, 2004
BESLAN, Russia -

Wails of mourning echoed through the streets of this southern Russian town on Sunday, and the region's top police officer reportedly resigned in the wake of the school hostage-taking that left more than 380 people dead — nearly half of them children.

A shaken President Vladimir Putin went on national television Saturday to make a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness in the face of an "all-out war" by terrorists. He said Russians must mobilize against terrorism and promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and purge corruption.

"We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten," he said in a speech aimed at addressing the grief, shock and anger felt by many after a string of terrorist attacks that have killed some 480 people in the past two weeks, apparently in connection with the war in Chechnya.

Grim task

Dozens of men dug graves in a football field-sized tract next to the Beslan cemetery on Sunday morning, while surveyors across the road marked out new plots with wooden stakes and string. Coffin lids stood outside the entrances to apartment buildings, along with wooden planks bearing the names of victims who were to be buried in funerals beginning later Sunday. Wailing could be heard from courtyards where families were preparing ritual meals.


Viktor Korotayev / Reuters
Relatives examine a list of released hostages who were delivered to a hospital after Russian troops stormed a school seized by heavily armed militants in the town of Beslan, near Chechnya, on Saturday.

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The regional health ministry said 180 people were missing after the three-day ordeal, which ended in a bloody wave of explosions and gunfire Friday when militants set off bombs rigged in the school gymnasium and commandos stormed the building.

Russian media speculated that some of the missing could be among the wounded who were brought to various hospitals in the southern Russian region.

Outside the shattered gymnasium on Sunday, Svetlana Debloyeva, 42, clutched a picture of her 11-year-old son Zaur, one of those unaccounted for.

"I lost my boy," she cried as she approached the building, where she had been squeezed in among the more than 1,100 hostages.

A duty officer at the North Ossetian health ministry said Sunday that 350 victims had been killed. More than 540 people were wounded -- mostly children. Medical officials said 423 people remained hospitalized Sunday, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5881958/

story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040907/ap_on_re_eu/russia_school_seizure&cid=518&ncid=716

[michele cryer]

A little background on the Chechen situation...

Silent Screams..
Posted by **Hazel Weatherfield** on Sep 4, 2004 at 1:51:18 PM:


Silent screams

Our self-righteous prime minister is complicit in the endless atrocities in Chechnya

James Meek
Saturday December 14, 2002
The Guardian

The corpse of someone you do not know is not necessarily a frightening or moving sight, unless some detail brings it home that this stranger was a breathing, thinking, laughing being.
It was like that at a common grave for civilians killed in the Russian bombardment of Grozny in early 1995. When I visited, on VE Day, there were about 700 dead already buried. A dozen bodies were being dug out of the rubble each day, and a Russian policeman was carrying out instant postmortems.

The victims were mainly elderly, wrapped up against the cold in clothes that were already ragged even before the dust and blood caked them. They were grey all over, lumpy, anonymised. I don't know why, but when the policeman, Dima, thrust his gloved forefinger into one of the dead men's mouths and pulled it aside to look at the teeth, the corpse became human again, and the shame and sadness of Russia's state murder of its own people burned in the heart.

It was eight years ago last week that Boris Yeltsin and his ministers ordered the Russian army to restore Moscow's control over Chechnya, a region incorporated into the Tsarist empire by force in the 19th century and mercilessly scoured by Stalin. The army failed in 1994. It is failing now. In the course of this failure, tens of thousands of civilians have been slaughtered, crippled, raped or robbed, and young chancers on both sides have come to hallow terrorism, kidnapping and murder with the cause of nationalism and religion.

There is something else which has not changed: the failure of western governments - the British government prominent among them - to treat Russia's Chechen crimes as the hideous charge sheet against Yeltsin and his successor, Vladimir Putin, that they are. It seemed vile enough back on VE Day 1995 - the 50th anniversary of the end of the second world war - when Bill Clinton and John Major were jollying with Yeltsin in Moscow while the corpses were stacking up in mass graves in Grozny. That was a mere five months into Moscow's struggle with Chechnya. Now, eight years on, Britain has a leader unparalleled in self-righteousness where the oppressed of the world are concerned - in Kosovo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. On Chechnya, he is worse than silent: he is complicit in the horror by his effusive, superfluous warmth towards Putin.

Tony Blair's reluctance to make an issue of Russia's barbarous treatment of people it claims as its own has a cynical logic: that there has always been a more important concession to wring from Moscow, whether over cooperation on the UN security council or British oil interests in Siberia, than that they treat the Chechens better. In the past, what this has meant is Russia getting a free hand to abuse non-combatants of Chechnya in exchange for falling in line beyond its borders.

Besides being immoral, the supposed logic is false. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, western governments have overestimated the ability and willingness of Russia to act up to its great power rhetoric in obstructing western projects. The original explanations for Russia's determination to prosecute the Chechen war no longer make sense. There are no other Russian regions interested in independence, and Chechnya's role in the geostrategic manoeuvring for Central Asian oil is marginal.

Like Israel, Russia has benefited from Washington and London's visceral post-September 11 hostility towards any movement which in any way involves Islam and resistance to an established order. It is true that Russia, and the civilians of Chechnya, have suffered at the hands of armed Islamist groups and Chechnya-based criminals - but the cure is proving far worse than the disease. Russia's attempt to cast itself in Chechnya as a fighter in the war against terror long before George Bush employed the term fails to stand up. The recent hostage-taking in Moscow showed two things: first, how Russia is turning the minority criminal-Islamist element in Chechnya to increasingly desperate and dangerous acts; second, the callousness of the Russian authorities towards their own citizens. The fatal lack of care for hostages in the aftermath of the gas attack used to end the siege echoed the careless use of deadly force against citizens in Chechnya. The Chechen war looks increasingly like might for might's sake.

The reason Blair sees no problem in cosying up to Putin is that he knows he can get away with it. The public, media and politicians never moved into a mutual spiral of outrage over Chechnya in the way they did over Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet catalogued objectively, the crimes for which Yeltsin and Putin bear ultimate responsibility mean that when Major and Blair supped with them, they dined with men very like Slobodan Milosevic.

No reliable estimate of the number of dead in the two wars has been made. Tom de Waal, of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, says that since 1994 between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians have been killed in Chechnya, in addition to 13,000-20,000 combatants - shocking numbers in a territory whose overall population is about a million.

There has been some coverage of the individual atrocities by Russian troops. But there is a strange resistance by western public consciousness to accept the scale of the indiscriminate artillery, aerial and rocket bombardment of Grozny in 1995 and 1999-2000. In each case, tens of thousands of civilians, mainly elderly and infirm, were trapped in the city.

Fred Cuny, a US aid worker later killed in Chechnya, wrote after the first bombardment: "The highest level of firing recorded in Sarajevo was 3,500 heavy detonations per day. In Grozny in early February, a colleague of mine counted 4,000 detonations per hour."

The pattern was repeated in 1999-2000. A single rocket strike on Grozny's market killed almost 120 people. Putin even sanctioned the use of Scud missiles against Grozny - the first and, so far, only time a ruler has fired long-range guided missiles against one of his own cities.

The mass bombardment is over for now, but Chechnya remains a place of terror, where military death squads roam by night and civilians are unprotected. Since the theatre hostage-taking, several hundred Chechen males have been abducted by the security forces. More than 100,000 refugees are still living outside the region, and are struggling against Russian attempts to force them back; a similar number are displaced inside Chechnya. In a letter to Blair in October, the US organisation Human Rights Watch said that over the last year sweep operations by Russian troops had resulted in torture, summary executions and large-scale extortion and looting. The brutality has failed to end armed resistance. Chechen fighters continue to kill Russian soldiers at an average rate, some estimates suggest, of five to 10 a day.

The British judiciary now has a chance to send Russia a signal by refusing to extradite the Chechen separatist Akhmed Zakayev; sending him to Moscow would, as the writer Sebastian Smith has pointed out, be like handing a KLA leader over to Belgrade at the height of the Kosovo crisis.

Blair may not know much about Chechnya. But he knows the British public knows little about Chechnya too, and he exploits this, without shame, to maintain his grotesque love affair with Putin. Blair has always been skilled at making it appear he is providing moral leadership when, in fact, he is responding to external pressure. A true test of moral leadership would be to take a stand on Chechnya, when neither the public, nor the media, nor the White House is really asking him to.


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Before anyone pounces on me, I am not rationalising anything. Just attempting to understand the issue from both sides.

[michele cryer]

An editorial from the New York Times..

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Cult of Death
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: September 7, 2004
NY Times
E-mail: [e-mail]

We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.

We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, that trains kindergartners to become bombs, that fetishizes death, that sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.

We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.

Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.

Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?

They're still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.