There are two reasons why yesterday’s school siege in the North Ossetian Russian town of Beslan ended so bloodily. The first is that the terrorists who seized over 1,200 children, parents and teachers were from the start quite prepared to shed any amount of innocent blood in pursuit of their demands. The second is that, unlike in 1974 when a Chechen gang shot its way into in the quiet southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk and took hundreds of patients and staff hostage, the man on the other side is not Boris Yeltsin, who was a politician and, consequently, one who believed in compromise, negotiations, give and take.
Vladimir Putin is a different kind of man. The clampdown in Chechnya is his initiative. Every instinct in the Russian president’s body is against giving in to terrorist blackmail. He was brought up in the tough school of the KGB. He was a servant of state dictatorship and control. In his book, there is only one way to deal with those who refuse to come to heel — elimination.
However, even if Putin had been willing to give talks a chance, by the time the hostage drama began to unfold, that option had been taken out of his hands by the series of terror attacks in recent weeks. The destruction of two civilian aircraft in mid-flight and the explosion on the Moscow underground had shaken the faith of the Russian people in their president’s ability to ensure their security. He had been elected and re-elected on his tough-man image. He could not afford to lose that.
And the Chechens, with the choice of their targets, had put themselves in a position where no one would shed tears when the punishment came. They reached a new low when they chose toddlers as bargaining chips. True, they had lost thousands of their own children of all ages to artillery fire, land mines, aerial bombing, starvation and diseases in the war Putin unleashed on them. The world sympathized with them.
But no one believed that those deaths in a war situation gave them the right to do what they did in Beslan. What the people of the world, most of whom supporters of their cause, thought while the siege was on was of the children who were held up for two days in a gym and of the anguish of their parents. If the Chechens had set out deliberately to shame and defeat a noble cause — and there is no cause nobler than that of freedom — they could not have done any better.
In which direction will Putin move now? If his call for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to get international backing for his handling of the Chechen situation can be taken as a sign of his willingness to concede a role for the international community in dealing with the crisis, it is a welcome sign. While the terrorists who were involved in the hostage-taking deserved no mercy, their action does not justify the indiscriminate murder of Chechens.
Inflicting further suffering on them will prove Putin’s toughness. But it will not give his people better security.
