Special report: Beslan and after. Terror’s new depths

The web of conflicts in the northern Caucasus, and Russia's incompetent efforts to solve them, mean that the Beslan tragedy could be repeated

IT IS an utterly ordinary sight: a boy and two girls, aged maybe 11 or 12, laughing together as they scuttle down the street. But in this place it makes the heart stop, even an outsider's heart. To a parent who has just lost a child, or several children, to bullets and shrapnel, the reminder that someone else's children are still alive must be excruciating. Add to that pain the anguish of dozens of relatives and friends. Mix in ethnic hatred, anger at official bungling, and the fear born of not comprehending why the horror happened but realising that nobody knows how to stop it happening again. Now multiply those feelings several hundred times. This is Beslan.

The usual cliches of misfortune are too feeble. It is “a town in mourning“ - as was Columbine. But Beslan, only slightly bigger than the place where America's worst school shooting claimed 15 lives, is mourning a loss that, once the missing have been added to the dead, may be over 30 times as great. In the central district near the charred wreckage of Middle School Number One, where terrorists held over 1,100 people hostage in the gym for 52 hours before blowing it up, there are blocks of flats that have lost two dozen residents, and coffin lids and wreaths fill the entrances to the stairwells. On the streets every huddle of people is a wake, every line of cars a burial cavalcade; keening and crying sounds float out of one door after another.

The funerals are simply too many. On the road to the main cemetery, rain-soaked policemen flail their batons at delivery trucks co-opted as hearses. Neither is up to their new task. The road is choked with traffic and littered with fallen flowers. Nobody is in the cemetery: there is no room for the dead, let alone the living. It is in a neighbouring field that crowds of men race to dig the earth up fast enough to receive the bodies. The only people not at funerals are those still trying to find enough of a body to hold a funeral for.

The bodies ... never mind. Others have described every charred and dismembered limb. They can be buried. What defies both description and disposal is the grief. It hangs in the air so thickly that it makes passers-by sigh without knowing why. It is noticeable too by its absence; those who have not lost anyone look like foreigners, uneasy and out of place.

The worst thing, however, seems to be not knowing: not knowing whether loved ones have survived, and not knowing how or why the dead were killed. All the town is searching for answers.

A timetable of terror

September 1st was the opening day of the school year. Children were leaving their classrooms to gather in the courtyard. Many had their parents with them. It was a festive day, and some remember thinking that the first gunshots were balloons exploding - until the automatic gunfire began. They were rounded up, herded into the gym - “piled up like walruses”, says one 11-year-old, giggling - and told to sit and wait. A few who disobeyed were killed on the spot. Their attackers taped home-made bombs on to wires strung between the basketball hoops and in a line along the floor, all connected to a detonator. Pre-empting an assault with paralysing gas, like the one that ended the hostage crisis in a Moscow theatre in 2002, they shot out the windows.

At first the hostages were allowed water and visits to the toilet, but as time went by their privileges were cut. By the third morning, in the soaring temperatures of the packed hall, people were drinking urine, using their shoes as receptacles. By now the parched children were crying and complaining uncontrollably, and the terrorists were increasingly nervous. Their warning bursts of gunfire into the ceiling silenced their captives for no more than a few moments. On the morning of September 3rd, after agreeing to let emergency workers into the school yard to collect the bodies of dead hostages, the attackers became convinced that there would be a rescue attempt. They began to re-hang the explosives along the window ledges.

Shortly after 1pm, as the emergency workers were coming in, one of the bombs blew up, apparently by accident. Dazed hostages began escaping; panicked terrorists began shooting; and the security forces around the school began firing back. Ruslan Aushev, a former president of Ingushetia who had briefly negotiated with the hostage-takers, told a Russian newspaper later that they had called him asking for a ceasefire. It was ordered.

But in the conflict-ridden northern Caucasus, many civilians have their own guns. “There are groups of us that the security forces trust to handle weapons,” explains Timur Murtazov, a former special-forces soldier who now drives a taxi. They must regret that now. The hundreds of armed relatives around the school ignored the ceasefire order. Convinced that an all-out assault was in progress, the terrorists detonated the rest of their bombs and carried on firing indiscriminately, shooting many of the fleeing hostages in the back.

As the mix of troops and civilians caused havoc in the fighting around the school, so the clogged streets nearby - there was no effective security cordon - blocked rescue vehicles. But the rescuers were also unprepared for the size of the task; the authorities had claimed that there were only 354 hostages. Their mendacity infuriated the relatives. “Three classes in each grade, up to 30 children in each class, 12 grades, and all the parents and relatives who were there for the opening day - we knew they were lying to us,” says one parent.

But Russian officialdom's love of secrecy is all-pervasive. Adhering to reporting restrictions introduced after the theatre siege two years ago, the main state television channels stopped live broadcasts when the explosions began and resumed only an hour later. The editor of the newspaper Izvestia, Raf Shakirov, resigned over the paper's critical coverage of Beslan, reportedly on the Kremlin's orders (the paper is owned by Vladimir Potanin, the media magnate most loyal to Mr Putin). Two Russian journalists noted for their reporting on Chechnya, Andrei Babitsky and Anna Politkovskaya, were turned back on the way to Beslan - he arrested after a staged scuffle, she mysteriously poisoned. Even your correspondent's interview with one family of survivors was cut short by a neighbour who was also an agent for the FSB, the Russian security service. “They've told you everything,” he said, though they certainly had not. “Come back another time. Maybe in a month. No, you can't have the phone number.”

Not even the exact number of terrorists is clear: estimates of 26, 28, 30, 32 and 35 have all been quoted by different official sources. Nor is much known about how they got to Beslan in the first place. In several previous terrorist attacks, bribes got the attackers through checkpoints. “Forbidden” in Russia usually just means “It will cost you”. Even in the hours after the Beslan siege, when North Ossetia's border was supposedly tightly sealed, it took just $50 to get a car with three journalists through without so much as an identity check or a glance in the boot.

The full truth of how Beslan came about will probably never be known to the public. President Vladimir Putin has ordered an inquiry, but it will be an internal one. What creates men and women capable of the barbarity at Beslan, though, does not need an inquiry to discover. It is visible just across the border.

The Chechen racket

There was nothing unusual about the car that Ingush police stopped at a checkpoint on one of the main roads into Chechnya on June 17th - except for the man they found tied up in the boot. Adam Medov told them he was being kidnapped. His kidnappers showed the identity papers of officers in the FSB, based in Chechnya. Challenged further, they sent away to headquarters for a permit allowing them to arrest Mr Medov.

So the police let them go. Mr Medov's wife, Zalina, wrote to the authorities, and got replies: one from Ingush prosecutors giving the names and ranks of the four officers who took her husband, and one from the FSB stating that not only did it not have him, but that the officers named did not exist. At the end of July a man came to see her who said he had spent three weeks in a cell next to Mr Medov's at the Khankala military base near Grozny, Chechnya's capital. Both of them were frequently beaten. The man's relatives managed to buy his freedom, he said, for $20,000.

In Chechnya, stories like this occur every day. The conflict was never simply a high-minded fight for independence - Chechen separatism was born among the debris of the Soviet Union as a power struggle for the republic's oil wealth - but now it has become a pure racket in which the army, the rebels and the militia loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of the Chechen president killed in May, slug it out for money and blood.

The sources of enrichment are many: not just ransoms, but checkpoint bribes, illicit oil wells, arms smuggling (rebel leaders have boasted of getting most of their weapons from the army), grants from Islamic extremists, and the diversion of federal funds aimed at reconstruction and compensation. When Mr Putin flew over Grozny in May, shortly after Akhmad Kadyrov's assassination, he was noticeably shocked at the bombed-out state of the city, as if realising that the billions of dollars poured into Chechnya had gone nowhere.

But Ingushetia, whose people are ethnically and linguistically close to the Chechens, used to be fairly free of such terror. Hundreds of thousands of war refugees took shelter there. Unfortunately, so did Chechen rebels. Murat Zyazikov, the republic's president, began a campaign to root them out. That brought to Ingushetia the brutal tactics used by security forces in Chechnya. Mr Medov told the police that his kidnappers had tried to get him to admit taking part in an assassination attempt on Mr Zyazikov in April.

Memorial, a human-rights organisation, estimates that Ingushetia saw some 50 kidnappings from January 2003 to July 2004. Galina Gubina, a local official who survived a car-bomb attack last May, claimed that there had been 25 kidnappings in the previous three months. For many, the new climate of fear explains why witnesses reported a large number of Ingush as well as Chechens among the rebels who attacked Nazran in June, as well as among the Beslan raiders.

The instability threatens to leak further. Kabardino-Balkarskaya is turning into what Ingushetia used to be, a calm place where rebels can escape to recover. Shamil Basayev, the most extreme Chechen rebel leader, believed to be the mastermind of Beslan and previous hostage-takings, has reportedly been sighted there in recent months. Last month the republic saw a big army operation against a suspected rebel gang. In Dagestan, on the other side of Chechnya, the run-up to the presidential election in 2006 is turning into a struggle between two ethnic groups, the Avars and Dargins. An old power-sharing arrangement between the two groups has been upset, partly because Chechen war refugees have flooded into the Avar stronghold of Khasavyurt, shifting the balance of power. Slowly but surely, Chechnya's conflict is sowing seeds elsewhere.

It has also infected the general fabric of Russian society in less obvious ways. State spending on the war is secret, but it is a huge drain on the budget, made worse by the fact that so much is stolen. The number of Chechen civilians killed is simply unknown, though plausible estimates range up to 70,000. Official figures for military losses run at about one-third of those from the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, a nationwide group that helps families track down missing sons. But those who survive are a brutalised generation. Perhaps half a million have passed through military service there. Many come back alcoholic, criminal or unemployable; some find the only work they can in the police, where, report human-rights groups, they apply torture methods first developed in Chechnya.

But the horror of Beslan is unlikely to jolt Russians into thinking differently about dealing with terrorism. Many newspapers, even usually pro-Kremlin ones, criticised the handling of the siege, and many people felt that Mr Putin should have made a public statement sooner. But his speech the day after, in which he lamented the breakdown of Soviet greatness, blamed Russia's woes on the corruption and mismanagement that followed, and called for unity and an overhaul of security measures, seems to have pulled off the trick he usually manages in times of crisis: to look like a good, strong leader surrounded by incompetence and graft.

A bounty of $10m has been placed on the head of Mr Basayev and another rebel. Russia's top general, Yuri Baluyevsky, has also declared that his men “will carry out all measures to liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world”. There have been rallies across Russia against terrorism, described as “totally spontaneous“ - though at a meeting in Moscow on September 7th, everything spoke of careful and expensive organisation. Even in Beslan itself, people who rage at the local authorities - North Ossetia's president promised to resign after a big demonstration in the capital, Vladikavkaz - change tone when asked about Mr Putin. “He needs our help and support,” says Valentina, who is searching for news of a relative. “He only has one pair of hands, one pair of eyes. He can't manage it alone.”

A tradition of blood

In the Caucasus, traditions are strong. One is hospitality. The hordes of journalists who descended to feast on Beslan's tragedy were received with astonishing warmth. Families whose children had been blown to pieces housed and fed entire film crews for days, endured their non-stop schedules, gave them material for their reports, and adamantly refused to take any payment. It was humbling.

Another tradition, though, is the blood feud. When asked what will happen next, many in Beslan mention Vitali Kaloyev, the Ossetian who in February murdered an air-traffic controller who had allowed a Russian passenger jet to collide with a cargo plane over Switzerland in 2002.

Now their anger focuses on their neighbours, the Ingush. Relations have been strained for decades. The chopping and changing of borders that followed the Soviet collapse caused a brief but bloody civil war in 1992. Since then, both peoples have treated parts of each other's republics as no-go areas. But some mixed communities also live in peace.

That may change. The news that Ingush as well as Chechens were among the hostage-takers has poisoned the air. One hears the same stories all over Beslan: that it was Ingush workmen who scouted out the school for the terrorists during the summer, and laid weapons for them beneath the floorboards; that all the Ingush in Beslan left suddenly the day before the siege. “There was an Ingush boy in my class,” says Zarina, a student at the agricultural institute, by way of proof, “and he didn't come to the lecture that day.” In a tinderbox like the Caucasus, such are the comments that make wars begin anew.

The web of conflict in the northern Caucasus, and Russia's incompetent efforts to solve them, mean that the Beslan tragedy could be repeated,

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