Hundreds die at Chechnya school: What is responsible?

by Gerry Foley

The world has been horrified by a drama of ruthless cruelty at the Russian middle school in Beslan, Northern Ossetia. Although, sadly, there is no lack of sadistic slaughter in the world, it is hard to imagine any scenes more shocking than the violent deaths of so many children, a lot of them only infants or toddlers, who had gathered with their parents for a school holiday and were deliberately chosen as hostages and victims.

The atrocity was an index of a disastrous decline in human values. Although the attackers identified themselves with the Chechen resistance and Islam, they were almost universally condemned by the Chechen fighters and even Islamists who themselves are ruthless enough, like the Palestinian organization Hamas.

In an interview in the Sept. 6 issue of the Paris daily Liberation, Akhmet Zakaiev, a Chechen leader living in exile in Britain, said: “President Maskhadov, [the elected president of Chechnya forced into hiding by the Russian occupiers] and his team absolutely condemn this horrible act. As soon as the news was known, he demanded the immediate release of the hostages and the children, without any condition. When we think of all the deaths and mourning in Chechnya, that has touched families, neighborhoods, parents over 10 years, in horrible conditions, how can we tolerate this kind of act?

“The Russian president Putin, more than anyone, needs such terrorists, since many Russians oppose him. This enables him to identify himself with a great international war against terrorism, to expurge the memory of his crimes in Chechnya.”

The Russian authorities claim that the attackers were organized by a radical wing of the Chechen fighters led by Shamil Basayev. A captured guerrilla who has been presented to the Russian press claims that the group was commanded both by Basayev and Maskhadov, which is hardly likely. This guerrilla, by his own admission, is eager to save his life, and so will say anything his captors tell him.

The international press did report some arguments on alleged Chechen websites apparently trying to minimize the atrocity in Beslan by comparing it to the wholesale slaughter of Chechens by the Russian occupiers. One claimed that 42,000 Chechen children have been killed and hundreds of thousands of adults, amounting to a fourth of the total Chechen population.

There is no doubt that the Russian reconquest of Chechnya has involved mass slaughter and that continuous terror is being employed to maintain the occupation. The Western governments and human rights organizations are well aware of it. But since 9/11, they have not said much about it because of the so-called alliance against terrorism with Russia and the indications of a certain overlap between the Chechen resistance and Al Qaeda.

Nonetheless, no rational person would try to justify the Beslan massacre as revenge for the crimes of the Russian government in Chechnya. Revenge against whom? Polls show that a majority of Russians are now opposed to the war against the Chechens. And the Chechens are a small nation, about a million. If the conflict is put in terms of a war of all Russians against all Chechens, the smaller nation would have no chance.

It is true that Islamists are typically little concerned about the political effects of their attacks. They justify them as a religious imperative. But no Islamist attacks have ever involved such ruthless cruelty. Hamas, for example, said that it does not target children, although children are sometimes killed in its suicide bombings.

The Russian authorities have claimed that Arabs are among the hostage takers. That is possible, although it is in Putin’s interest to claim that and so far they have not presented any evidence of it. There are some foreign Islamic volunteers fighting with the Chechen resistance, whose role is reinforced by financial aid coming from the U.S. client state of Saudi Arabia. But no informed observer has claimed that there are more than a few.

The real problem is that where and terror and slaughter become widespread, the result is a brutalization that affects both the perpetrators and the victims. While no one can defend what the Beslan hostage takers did, it is clear that the ultimate responsibility for this atrocity falls on the Russian government, which has created nightmare conditions in Chechnya.

Moreover, Putin’s response was to compound the crime. He did not decry the threat to human values that the Beslan atrocity reveals but coldly claimed that the danger was to Russian unity. Thereby he signaled an increase of terror against Chechens and probably other peoples of Muslim tradition living in the Russian Federation. He said that the problem was that Russia had become “weak” and weak people are “beaten,” an argument like Hitler’s.

While the crisis exposed the weakness of the Russian state institutions, this weakness does not arise from the toleration of the national aspirations of the oppressed peoples in the Russian Federation. It arises from the general breakdown of the society that has resulted from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s attempts to restore capitalism. That is what has demoralized the population and produced an infestation of thievery in line with the best principles of “enrich yourself.” In this context, Russian police and military may be cruel and ruthless, but their total corruption makes them unreliable for any task. That also explains why the atrocity against Russian people in Beslan has not produced Russian national unity but rather a crisis, because the population knows that it cannot trust its government.

They know they are ruled by thieves and liars, even when they are not yet ready to understand that they are also ruled by murderers who kill in their name but only in order to preserve their ability to rob them. The robber rulers of Russia today are the heirs of the counterrevolutionary Stalin. Today, they are openly reversing the heritage of the socialist revolution with regard to the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination, along with reversing the gains and promises of the revolution for working people.

The national liberation program of the Bolsheviks made the Chechens allies, not enemies. It remains the only solution for the national conflicts in the Russian Federation, and is intimately intertwined with the struggle of working people to win back control of a state that was built in their name. This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.