Another siege ends in bloodshed

My comment on this bloody "terroristic incident":


The struggle of a falling empire trying to regain its status and the trust of  its people.The paying back of its jingoism of the Scar and Soviet-era.What goes around comes around.


The following are some excerpts of a news report from www.economist.com


 


From The Economist Global Agenda


Russian forces have stormed a school where hundreds of children and adults were being held by rebels demanding Chechen independence. Over 300 hostages have reportedly been killed—more victims of a war without any end in sight.


AMID scenes of pandemonium, with naked, bleeding children being carried to safety while machinegun-fire and explosions echoed around them, the three-day siege of a school at Beslan, in southern Russia, ended on Friday September 3rd. The Russian authorities had been insisting they would not storm the school. But the confused reports from the scene suggest that the final confrontation was triggered when the rebels opened fire on children trying to flee after an accidental explosion. This made the Russian special forces return fire and storm the building; later, they battled on with escaping remnants of the rebel band, in the school’s grounds and in a nearby house.


Some world leaders have, unwisely, encouraged Mr Putin in his claims to be fighting a war on international terror and his equally questionable claims to be seeking a political solution in Chechnya. He won warm support when he met the leaders of France and Germany this week: President Jacques Chirac insisted that Russia was “completely open to any discussions about a political solution”. Mr Bush offered his Russian counterpart “support in any form” to end the hostage crisis.


Yet so far Russia has avoided looking for a real political solution. The carte blanche given to Russian security forces to abduct, torture and kill young Chechens suspected of rebel ties spawned the “black widow” phenomenon. And it is no longer confined to Chechnya: the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia, which used to be fairly free of the arbitrary kidnappings that are common in Chechnya, has suffered at least 50 of them since the start of 2003, according to Memorial, a human-rights group. And incompetence and corruption have rendered the security forces incapable of tackling the rebels: an appalling example was the raid carried out by Chechen rebels in Ingushetia in June, which claimed dozens of lives. The terrorists apparently bribed their way through a series of checkpoints, while (according to some reports) federal troops mysteriously took about ten hours to come to the aid of besieged local forces.


While it is not yet clear to what extent mistakes by the security forces contributed to the school siege’s bloody end, it is obvious that the second Chechen war has no greater prospect of success than the first. The willingness of foreign leaders to endorse Mr Putin’s claims and to turn a blind eye to the abuses in Chechnya can only contribute to making it worse.
5.9.04 11:46