Observers have often cited evidence of a divide within the ranks of the Chechen resistance, as evidenced by Field Commander Shamil Basayev’s adoption of various operations that targeted civilians as a belligerent reprisal to Russian atrocities, versus Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov’s denunciation of those same operations. Russia finds it convenient to lump them together. However, it is not unlikely that a group unaffiliated with either Basayev or Maskhadov may have been involved in Beslan.

Basayev’s contempt for international public opinion is not unique; it has become the norm in a society brutalized by a decade of war. It is a cynicism engendered by years of Western silence and complicity in Russia’s genocide against the Chechens. Hence, while condemning the Beslan hostage taking and concurring with the UN Security Council’s denunciation thereof, CRI President Maskhadov noted with some bitterness that no one had seen fit to mention Putin’s responsibility for the deaths of some 40,000 Chechen children.

Russia has gone ahead and placed a $10 million bounty on both Basayev and Maskhadov, in a nod to US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is however extremely doubtful that the Russians have evidence linking either of them to the school attack. The bounty is more likely a cynical attempt to milk the tragedy for all it’s worth, as was the Moscow rally organized in the wake of the attack; a cheap publicity stunt that had been organized prior to Beslan, in response to earlier attacks in Moscow.

The hostage taking has also reignited old ethnic hatreds, and there are fears that there could be a repeat of the 1992 war between Ingushetia and North Ossetia over the Prigorodnyi region. Tensions between the Ingush and Ossetians have risen visibly in the aftermath of Beslan. The British Guardian quoted Osettian individuals as expressing a willingness to enlist to fight the Ingush again. In that sense, the attack may indeed act as a catalyst for the further destabilization of the Caucasus, a situation the Russians cannot afford. The region is crucial for Russia’s energy infrastructure, both existing and planned, as it is currently scrambling for a stake in the Caspian’s oil riches, which necessitates firm control over Chechnya and Dagestan. Politically, Putin has made it adequately clear that his Stalin-esque vision for the future of Russia does not allow for a further loss of territorial integrity or a reduction of its sphere of influence. Judging by the number of children he allowed to die in Beslan, these are aims for which Putin is obviously willing to pay any cost.

The crackdown on the press that coincided with the hostage taking also speaks volumes about the lengths to which Putin is willing to go to prevent interference in his scheming. The Beslan drama saw the arrest of a Georgian television crew and the Al-Arabiyya Moscow bureau chief, (the latter after a bullet was planted in his belongings). Furthermore, two of Russia’s most prominent reporters (and the most critical of the government) appear to have been deliberately targeted to prevent them reaching Beslan. One was arrested in what appears to have been a calculated provocation, the other was poisoned on the flight to the Caucasus and suffered liver and kidney damage. The latter, Anna Politkovskaya went on to point the finger of blame at Putin’s FSB, the successors to the KGB. A third journalist, a Georgian, was drugged while in Russian custody and passed out for 24 hours. The editor of one of Russia’s most prominent dailies, Izvestia, was fired for the newspaper’s “negative” coverage of the crisis. The paper was the first to publish an accurate estimate of the number of hostages, which was around three times more than what the Russian government was willing to admit. Other television channels were ordered to cut parts of their footage of the hostage taking.

Various questions about the bloody end to the hostage taking remain unanswered. As has been pointed out by various analysts, incompetence was the name of the game. Families of the victims were allowed dangerously close to the building, rather than being held behind a cordon at a suitable distance. When the exodus of children began from the school, hysterical and armed family members rushed towards the school in the chaos of the battle to confront the hostage takers, possibly opening firing and injuring their own children.

Chechen civilians killed during the Russian invasion

It appears that the Russian Spetsnaz special forces had been ordered to storm the school, belying official assurances that nothing would be done to place the hostages at risk. However, events suggest that the Spetznaz attempted to bring down a wall with explosives to force an entry into the school, possibly triggering the explosives laid down by the militants and almost certainly contributing to the massive death toll. The Spetsnaz unit also seems to have used the cover of an emergency services vehicle collecting bodies outside the school to initiate the assault. Being a predictable tactic, it is almost certain that the militants were prepared for it. This seems the most feasible explanation, as there appears to be no reason why the Chechens would have started detonating the bombs, and judging by the great disparity in official accounts of the chain of events that culminated in the death of hundreds of children.

In other words, Russian officials deliberately ignored the inevitability of the massive loss of civilian life that would result in the case of an assault on the school. It was understood that a forced entry, besides probably killing multiple hostages through the actual demolition of the wall, would almost certainly start a chain-reaction of explosions. A reporter from the Observer noted that all the bodies he saw had died of the blasts, rather than gun fire, though one wonders if the Spetsnaz could possibly have avoided gunning down children in the smoke-filled havoc of the storming.

Russian propaganda in the aftermath of the crisis was predictable, though occasionally it was more colorful than usual (the hostage takers were alleged to Ingush, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Arab “mercenaries”… and Koreans.) Putin predictably lashed out at foreign journalists who suggested that a reexamination of the policies that generated hatred enough to target children en masse was in order. He self-righteously declared that no one had the moral right to question Russia’s war on terror, despite the fact that Putin himself seems to be responsible for more Russian deaths than the militants.

Putin adopted Bush’s rhethoric of “You’re either with us, or you are with the terrorists,” immediately after September 11, but it was never more evident – or more dangerous – than in the aftermath of Beslan. The indignation, the utilization of terror as a moral cudgel to beat opponents into line, and the deliberate attempt to deny the existence of motivation or grievances that led to the carnage are the hallmark of United States and Israeli policy.

Much is at stake here, not least the lives of the already traumatized Chechens, who’ve lived years under what is probably one of the most brutal occupation regimes in the world. Putin looks like he’s gearing up for an intensification of the zachistki or “cleaning operations” that have left thousands of Chechens dead, raped or maimed. Thousands more disappear into the notorious “filtration camps,” where they are tortured and killed. According to Memorial, a Russian human rights NGO, the statistics on disappearances in Chechnya closely resemble those of Russia at the peak of the Stalinist purges: 43 disappearances in every 10,000 in the former compared to 44 in the latter.

The atrocities inflicted on Chechnya have been buried far too long.

While Putin has lectured at length on the dangers of “Wahhabism” and Islamic militancy in the Caucasus, one would be hard pressed to think of anything that would fuel militancy as effectively as his rampantly anti-Islamic and horrifically brutal policies have. His co-optation of the religious authorities in the Muslim republics has alienated the people from the scholars affiliated with the government. The Russian “muftis” statements condemning and “ex-communicating” people left, right and center in the aftermath of Beslan therefore suffer from serious credibility problems, given that these are the same “scholars” who have remained suspiciously silent about the Islamic perspective on Russia’s genocide of the Caucasian Muslims. Their shameful tailoring of their fatwas, or jurisprudential rulings, to suit Putin’s policies, their petty internal power struggles, and their suspect credentials have cost them all Islamic standing, reducing them to Islamically-garbed mouthpieces for the Russian government. It would seem that Putin’s Islamic puppets, much like his proxy governments in Chechnya and its neighboring republics, enjoy neither credibility nor legitimacy.

Additionally, talk of increased Israeli-Russian cooperation makes it considerably easier to portray Putin’s campaigns as anti-Islamic, prompting increasing resentment of Russia among Muslims around the world. It is this belief that has prompted some Muslims to travel to Chechnya to fight the Russian occupation, Muslims Russia then brands as “mercenaries,” despite the fact that there is little material gain to be made in the freezing wastelands of the Caucasus and almost nothing to spend it on, coupled with the fact that a trip to Chechnya is a one-way ticket from which even survivors cannot return, as they would face arrest and prosecution almost anywhere in the world now.

Zakaiev’s dire warning rings true. As long as the world chooses to hypocritically disregard the plight of the Chechens, to ignore Russia’s genocide against that tiny nation and its occupation and repression of the Muslim republics of the Caucasus, there will always be men and women desperate enough to commit such terrible acts of violence against civilians. Appeals to humanity, pleas in the name of a child’s innocence fall on deaf ears when addressed to those who have lost their children, their brothers and sisters, their entire families and seen their country laid to waste around them.

It is tragic that it takes the deaths of 300 innocents to make the world pay attention to the death of 200,000 innocents. The international media’s fickle, cynical coverage has made the Chechens’ cries worth noting only if they come drenched in Russian blood.

The atrocities inflicted on Chechnya have been buried far too long. It is time the world took a long, hard look at what their friends in the Kremlin have been doing in the Caucasus.

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Azizuddin El-Kaissouni is a graduate of the American University in Cairo. He holds a BA in Political Science with a specialization in International Law. You can reach him at azizuddin@islamonline.net

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