Shrugging off the worst terrorist attack since 9/11
The bloody school siege in Beslan provoked horror and outrage in the West. But the reaction in Russia was strangely muted, discovers John Hinton
4 April 2008

A memorial to the victims of Beslan

It was a bright morning on September 1, 2004, the first day of the new school year at School Number One in the town of Beslan in the North Caucasus Region of the Russian Federation.

Not a beautiful school, but a happy school where, a few minutes after 9 am, the new first-year intake started to descend the steps into the schoolyard. There to greet them were more than a thousand teachers, relatives and fellow pupils preparing for the headmistress's speech and traditional celebrations to begin the new term. Then, in hideous contrast to the happy expectations, a nightmare began as men in camouflage started running towards them from the railway line, firing machine guns.

As one horrified parent reported: "At first I had no idea what was happening. I thought some criminals must have escaped from prison and run into the schoolyard. Then they took off their masks and shouted, 'You are under siege,' continuing to fire their guns."

All who had looked forward to that happy day, were herded - 1,200 of them - into the school gymnasium to begin three days of unimaginable terror and suffering.

The attackers, it turned out, were demanding an end to the Second Chechen War and were prepared to cause the deaths of 334 civilians, including 156 children, to make their demands heard.

Did the wholesale slaughter cause moral outrage in Russia? It deeply saddened many in the West. Yet Timothy Phillips, the author of this new study of the siege, is a seasoned traveller in Russia and translator and his findings may come as a surprise.

In his researches, he had expected to find among ordinary Russians a sense of shock about the school siege; instead he found little or no interest from the pallid people he met living in their prefabricated tower blocks that teetered, ready to collapse. Some seemed to even resent his questions as they equally resent their mundane lives in a built environment which creaks from lack of care.

"Russia is a hard place to live in," he says. "The people are more battered and bruised by life than people in the West. It has been this way for as long as they can remember. It is why the newly rich in Moscow and St Petersburg try their hardest to avoid the realities of the cities they live in. Nothing about their lives is made in Russia. Their foreign cars whiz down the middle of main streets at such speed that other Russians and their homemade cars fade to a blur. For the rest, the daily grind goes on, often interrupted only by aspirational soap operas and increasingly terminated by a premature death."

Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev took responsibility for the hostage-taking which moved into a second day with the hostage-takers proving unsuccessful in their negotiations. The authorities refused to allow food, water and medicines to be taken in for the hostages or for the bodies of the dead to be removed as President Putin promised that everything would be done to save the lives and health of the hostages. Meanwhile, Basayev demanded recognition of "formal independence for Chechnya".

The lack of food and water took its toll on the children, many of them forced to stand for long periods in the hot, tightly-packed gym. When an explosion and gun battle began the next day, many of them were so fatigued that they could not flee from the resulting carnage.

The chaotic and bloody end to the siege on the third day of what has been called "the worst terrorist attack since September 11" left scores of questions, many still unanswered, about the hostage-taking. These included manipulation of the media, the responsibility for the bloody outcome and the government's use of excessive force. The siege clearly led to the strengthening of the central power of President Putin, including the scrapping of regional governors.

The reaction from far afield was that Beslan was for a time deluged with help from overseas charitable agencies, all with the best of intentions but, as Phillips points out, "the generosity has been focused almost exclusively on the survivors of the siege. Beslan's other inhabitants have been excluded from these benefits and come to feel like second-class citizens. Their lives have continued to be as hard as ever and jealousy has set in among some of them." The bullets and bombs have long stopped in Beslan but the memories of the siege have left scars that won't heal. As the author points out, there may be hope that a new generation of children will forget, "but many of the survivors have simply given up trying to understand the truth of what happened to them".


Beslan: The Tragedy of School No 1 by Timothy Phillips, Granta £6.99