Eight days after the Beslan school siege that left more than 300 people dead (half of whom were children), the world’s newspapers and TV screens were filled with pictures of students, cowering in front of heavily armed Chechen militants. For many, the graphic images compounded initial feelings of outrage.
Some journalists likened the siege to Pearl Harbor and September 11. ‘We have to ask whether the hostage-taking of the schoolchildren of Beslan on September 1, 2004, the 65th anniversary of the outbreak of the World War II, was another of these historic tragedies’, wrote The Times commentator, William Rees-Mogg.
‘There is a blank horror about what they did to the young children that, fortunately, has few parallels in the history of evil’, he added. Yet these distressing images of students, parents and teachers crammed into the suffocating school gym, of the ‘black widow’ holding a Makarov pistol close to her obscured face, or the masked ‘terrorist’ wiring a bomb, do not provide the full picture of the Chechen conflict.
Since 1999, Russia’s authorities have severely restricted access to the war zone. Fears for journalists’ safety in a region disfigured by kidnappings have created a near total blackout on reporting the war. Further, as the head of the human rights organisation Memorial, Oleg Olov explains, post September 11: ‘Russia’s participation in the worldwide anti-terror coalition has given Moscow political cover for continuing the military operation’.
The picture emerging from Chechnya is terrifying. Despite the official end to hostilities in 2001, the US State Department says the situation is worsening. Chechnya’s population is estimated at 734,000, down from 1.2 million in 1989. Hundreds of thousands have fled to refugee camps abroad, or are displaced throughout the country. Thousands have been detained in jails where torture and killings are commonplace, or in ‘filtration camps’ set up to sift Chechen militants from the general population.
‘Here people are massacred. You should hear their screams, howls of strong men in whom everything that can be broken is being broken.’ This comes from a letter allegedly written by a Russian soldier that Le Monde published in 2000. Only seven of the 700 Chechens detained in the camp, the soldier estimated, were militants. Most were arrested because of irregular papers, or after ducking out for a cigarette during a curfew. ‘I have trouble expressing in writing the exotic ways in which a man can be broken, or turned into an