Rupen Savoulian
According to the Russian government, about 330 people, one-third of them school children, were found dead after Russian special forces (Spetsnaz) stormed a school gymnasium in the North Ossetian town of Beslan on September 3. How they died and whether all of them were killed during the assault on the hostage takers are unclear.
Initially, the Russian authorities said that 16 armed men and women were responsible for holding 1200 children and their relatives hostage in the school gymnasium. Then, different officials cited numbers ranging from 29 to 34 hostage-takers, saying all had been killed, except for three who were captured.
Nine of the hostage-takers were said to be Arabs, and a 10th was reported to be African. The Kremlin initially claimed that there were Chechens, Ingushes, Uzbeks and Arabs among the hostage-takers. Moscow has offered no proof to back up these claims, however.
Many media reports described the hostage-takers as Chechen nationalists demanding independence for Chechnya but, according to the Itar-Tass news agency, the hostage-takers demanded the release of fighters who had been captured in the course of assaults on police stations in the republic of Ingushetia, which lies between Chechnya and North Ossetia.
According to the North Ossetia interior minister Kazbek Dzantiyev, the hostage-takers were "Ossetians, Ingushetians, Chechens and Russians".
The Russian authorities say it was never their intention to storm the school and end the siege by force. They say the assault by the Spetsnaz troops came as a last-minute decision when the hostage-takers began shooting at ambulance drivers who had come to collect the bodies of dead hostages on September 3. At that moment, another group of hostages managed to escape from the gymnasium. Shooting and explosions broke out, forcing the commandos to act.
But the source of the explosions still remains unclear. Did the hostage-takers unwittingly set off booby traps they had planted throughout the building, as some have suggested, or did Russian commandos disguised as medical personnel initiate hostilities by firing a rocket-propelled grenade or other weapon, as other versions have it?
Kremlin lies
Independent Russian defence analyst Pavel Felgenhauer has disputed the official version of events as presented by the government. He told Radio Free Europe on September 6 that the idea that Russian military commanders decided to break the siege at the last minute in reaction to the hostage-takers' actions is a fabrication meant to cover up the disastrous outcome of what he believes was a planned assault. Just as in the hostage-taking drama at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow in October 2002, he accuses the authorities of hiding the truth from the Russian public.
From the very start, Felgenhauer notes, the authorities downplayed the magnitude of the crisis, saying some 300 hostages had been seized in Beslan, when the real number was more than 1000.
"It is perfectly clear that from the very start, from September 1, when the hostages were seized, the Russian authorities and the special services lied", Felgenhauer told RFE. "They lied intentionally about what was happening. They misled everyone about how many hostages there were, intentionally minimising their number several times over. They lied, saying that the hostage-takers had refused to conduct negotiations when, in fact, it was the Russian authorities who refused to hold talks from the very start, just as in the Dubrovka case, when they also refused to conduct negotiations. They lied, saying that the hostage-takers had no demands when, in fact, they had demanded that President [Vladimir] Putin sign a decree withdrawing Russian forces from Chechnya."
Felgenhauer says the idea that the Spetsnaz mounted a last-minute, spontaneous attack is not believable, as the assault was backed up by attack helicopters, proving advance coordination. "Although there is an air base near Beslan", he said, "I know how much time it takes to transmit instructions to pilots. Even if the helicopter was fueled, armed, and waiting, and the pilots were already suited up — if it had been a spontaneous decision — they would have had to wait for instructions. An order would have had to be given. They would have had to get aboard, to warm up the engine. They could not have made it to the school in less than half an hour or even more."
Questions have also been raised about the lack of involvement of the local authorities in North Ossetia in defusing the hostage crisis as it progressed. Former Ingushetia president Ruslan Aushev was the only noted northern Caucasus figure who played any prominent role in trying to peacefully end the stand-off.
Rebel leaders deny involvement
A man identified by Russian authorities as a detained hostage-taker said on Russian state TV on September 7 that he was told Chechen rebel commander Shamil Basayev and former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov were behind the attack.
However, Ahmed Zakayev, a London-based spokesperson for Maskhadov, denied any involvement in the attack on the Beslan school. "The claims of President Maskhadov's involvement in the terrorist act are part of a well thought-out disinformation campaign, which also includes officials' statements about the presence of Arab and African fighters and foreign mercenaries among the terrorists", Zakayev said in a statement faxed to the British media on September 8.
In a separate statement, Maskhadov, said: "There cannot be any justification for people who raise their hand against what is most sacred to us — the life of defenceless children! And there are no words able to express the full depth of our indignation at what happened."
Despite no credible evidence of the Chechen rebel leaders' involvement in the Beslan attack, the Kremlin has accused them of masterminding the siege, and on September 8 offered US $10 million for information leading to their capture or killing.
At the same time, in an obvious attempt to gain Western governments' support for its bloody decade-old counterinsurgency war against Chechen independence fighters, the Kremlin has claimed that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network was behind the Beslan school attack.
While there are indications that a majority of Chechens are willing to accept Russian authority, the Kremlin will not be able to utilise this underlying support unless it abandons its savage repression and massive violence in Chechnya.
Existing Kremlin policies are failing to win the hearts and minds not only of Chechens but of other north Caucasus residents — the key to ending the violence in the region. The local population in Ingushetia is opposed to war, and those in Chechnya are undoubtedly war weary. Nevertheless, the region appears headed for an upswing in violence, given the Kremlin's reliance on the use of miliary force to secure its control over the region, which is both a significant source of oil and a conduit for the transportation of oil from Azerbaijan.
The Kremlin's military repression also cultivates the development of religious movements and opposition groups as avenues for popular expression. Chechen residents — frustrated with a Russian-installed government that neither protects nor respects them — are tending to sympathise with rebel groups, and may establish safe havens for the separatist militants.
In addition, as frustration mounts, the number of recruits flowing into the fanatical Islamist camp seems to grow. Reports from the region indicate that up to 10% of the Chechen population now support armed Islamist groups.
In the north Caucasus, the lines separating political and military/security leaders are becoming increasingly blurred. One of the chief instruments of Russian policy has been to appoint regional leaders who are closely linked to either regional or federal security services after sham elections.
In Ingushetia, the Kremlin installed Murat Zyazikov, a former Federal Security Service general, as the republic's president in 2002. Last month's election of Alu Alkhanov, who previously served as Chechnya's interior minister, as the republic's president offers further evidence of the Kremlin's increasing reliance on security services personnel.
The Beslan siege will undoubtedly be used by President Putin to escalate the war in Chechnya.
Putin and the Chechnya war
An obscure former KGB officer who was appointed Russia's prime minister by then-president Boris Yeltsin in 1999, Putin has consolidated its grip on political power by taking a harsh stand against the Chechen independence movement. In October 1999, he ordered Russian troops to reoccupy Chechnya, after Yeltsin had ended his regime's two-year war there in 1996. Putin was elected Russia's president in 2000 on a platform of Russian national hysteria against Chechen "terrorism".
In Chechnya itself, Moscow has installed a regime based on naked terror. One tactic the Russian military frequently uses in its war against Chechnya is hostage-taking — Russian soldiers kidnap and hold hostage the relatives of real and suspected rebels.
Both Amnesty International and the US-based Human Rights Watch say Russian military forces seize Chechen civilians almost daily, then dump the bodies bearing marks of torture. The troops are rarely investigated or punished.
Casualty figures in Chechnya vary widely, though many estimates say about 80,000 civilians — 40% of them children — died in the 1994-96 war. Countless more have been killed sincePutin relaunched the war in 1999.
"Why is the armed group that seized the school [in Beslan] ... supposed to be 'crossed off the list of the human race' while the maniacs and slaughterers of Chechen children, who killed 42,000 Chechen children of school age ... are being received in European capitals?" asked the website Kavkaz-Center, considered a voice for Basayev's rebel forces.
"The parents of killed children resort to extreme measures and seize the children of murderers, while demanding to stop the murders of their children", the website observed on September 9. "Do they have the right to do it? Our answer is no, they do not. But could it be anticipated that something like this would ever happen? Our answer is yes, it could, and the way the events are unfolding is quite natural."
From Green Left Weekly, September 15, 2004.
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