Russian School Taken Hostage

[Nakharar]

That was some article. I hope that hypocrites take note.

[Stormig]

I can't speak for the case of Beslan, but as far as the Moscow theatre incident is concerned, there is no ambiguity there - the civilians that died didn't die from shots in the back of the head from the hijackers or from detonated bombs as was the threat - they, the majority, if not all, died from whatever gas it was that the Russian authorities used. Anyone remember the picture of a Chechen woman terrorist in black covers sitting in a seat with her mouth wide open, passed out/dead? Now who do you blame for handling things the way they were? For days people went on and on about how carelessly the operation was carried out, adding to deaths when victims were not stripped of their clothes while rushed to the hospital, poisoning them further?

[Stormig]

I wonder if some of you have ever met a Chechen. Just look into his eyes and you will have nightmares for a week.

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Oh, and what BS. I know at least two Chechen families, great folks, although indeed a bit too uninhibited.

[gurgen]

I can't speak for the case of Beslan, but as far as the Moscow theatre incident is concerned, there is no ambiguity there - the civilians that died didn't die from shots in the back of the head from the hijackers or from detonated bombs as was the threat - they, the majority, if not all, died from whatever gas it was that the Russian authorities used. Anyone remember the picture of a Chechen woman terrorist in black covers sitting in a seat with her mouth wide open, passed out/dead? Now who do you blame for handling things the way they were? For days people went on and on about how carelessly the operation was carried out, adding to deaths when victims were not stripped of their clothes while rushed to the hospital, poisoning them further?

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What was the reason such an operation had to be carried out in the first place?

[Armat]

This is not the first time the Russians showed their incompetence notice incompetence which has very little to do with “Russians loving their children too.”

Historically Russians have been careless about human lives. During WW2 the Russian generals would send thousands of soldiers into the battle without necessary plans or stragity. Millions died unnecessarily including tens of thousands of Armenians. What’s got to do with Beslan? Same incompetence

[Armat]

Some cut and pastes worth reading.

 

From evidence released from Soviet archives since the mid-1980's, scholars have learned, for example, that Soviet deaths numbered nearly 50 million, two and half times the original estimate; that the Red Army raped two million German women during their occupation to wreak revenge; and that an astonishing 40 percent of Soviet wartime battles were for decades lost to history.

Speaking from his house in Carlisle, Pa., near the United States Army War College, Colonel Glantz marveled that close to one-half of wartime Soviet operations — including major battles involving hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers — are simply "missing from history," either neglected or covered up.

For example, in November and December of 1942 the celebrated Soviet Field Marshal G. K. Zhukov orchestrated a gigantic offensive ("Operation Mars") involving seven Soviet armies with 83 divisions, 817,000 men and 2,352 tanks. The failed operation cost the Red Army nearly 350,000 dead, missing and wounded men, and 1,700 tanks, yet it was methodically concealed in Soviet historiography, in large part to preserve Zhukov's reputation.

The Red Army ultimately prevailed not because it was skillful, but because it was so large.

[Armen]

Some brilliant gems from people - for Armenia to exist today, the Russian had to descend to the Caucasus and fool around with not just Chechens but literally a score of other nations. It's like thanking Europeans, justifying their actions, for annihilating Native Americans so that America could exist today.

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There is a more correct example of that: USA in Middle East for Israel and oil.

However, you forget that Russians liberated Georgia (which Georgians now forget). You also forget that Osetians and Abkhazians are pro-Russian in this situation. Degestanies are not at all anti-Russian. Does this make it "only-Armenia" Stormy? Actually, I find very difficult to understand this position of yours. So if it was to chose among Armenians and Chechens, whome would you chose?

[Armen]

The reason I side with Russian government in this situation is that I know exactly why did Bolsheviks prevent the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917 (that would actually create a healthy Russian and an independent Chechnia among others) and why they want its collapse at present.

[Armen]

The Chechens' American friends

The Washington neocons' commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own

 

John Laughland

Wednesday September 8, 2004

 

The Guardian

 

An enormous head of steam has built up behind the view that President Putin is somehow the main culprit in the grisly events in North Ossetia. Soundbites and headlines such as "Grief turns to anger", "Harsh words for government", and "Criticism mounting against Putin" have abounded, while TV and radio correspondents in Beslan have been pressed on air to say that the people there blame Moscow as much as the terrorists. There have been numerous editorials encouraging us to understand - to quote the Sunday Times - the "underlying causes" of Chechen terrorism (usually Russian authoritarianism), while the widespread use of the word "rebels" to describe people who shoot children shows a surprising indulgence in the face of extreme brutality.

On closer inspection, it turns out that this so-called "mounting criticism" is in fact being driven by a specific group in the Russian political spectrum - and by its American supporters. The leading Russian critics of Putin's handling of the Beslan crisis are the pro-US politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov - men associated with the extreme neoliberal market reforms which so devastated the Russian economy under the west's beloved Boris Yeltsin - and the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Centre. Funded by its New York head office, this influential thinktank - which operates in tandem with the military-political Rand Corporation, for instance in producing policy papers on Russia's role in helping the US restructure the "Greater Middle East" - has been quoted repeatedly in recent days blaming Putin for the Chechen atrocities. The centre has also been assiduous over recent months in arguing against Moscow's claims that there is a link between the Chechens and al-Qaida.

 

These people peddle essentially the same line as that expressed by Chechen leaders themselves, such as Ahmed Zakaev, the London exile who wrote in these pages yesterday. Other prominent figures who use the Chechen rebellion as a stick with which to beat Putin include Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who, like Zakaev, was granted political asylum in this country, although the Russian authorities want him on numerous charges. Moscow has often accused Berezovsky of funding Chechen rebels in the past.

 

By the same token, the BBC and other media sources are putting it about that Russian TV played down the Beslan crisis, while only western channels reported live, the implication being that Putin's Russia remains a highly controlled police state. But this view of the Russian media is precisely the opposite of the impression I gained while watching both CNN and Russian TV over the past week: the Russian channels had far better information and images from Beslan than their western competitors. This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled "distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

 

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

 

The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasising the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable "Muslim" causes, Bosnia and Kosovo - implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilise the situation there. In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.

 

Although the White House issued a condemnation of the Beslan hostage-takers, its official view remains that the Chechen conflict must be solved politically. According to ACPC member Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins University, US pressure will now increase on Moscow to achieve a political, rather than military, solution - in other words to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the US resolutely rejects elsewhere.

 

Allegations are even being made in Russia that the west itself is somehow behind the Chechen rebellion, and that the purpose of such support is to weaken Russia, and to drive her out of the Caucasus. The fact that the Chechens are believed to use as a base the Pankisi gorge in neighbouring Georgia - a country which aspires to join Nato, has an extremely pro-American government, and where the US already has a significant military presence - only encourages such speculation. Putin himself even seemed to lend credence to the idea in his interview with foreign journalists on Monday.

 

Proof of any such western involvement would be difficult to obtain, but is it any wonder Russians are asking themselves such questions when the same people in Washington who demand the deployment of overwhelming military force against the US's so-called terrorist enemies also insist that Russia capitulate to hers?

[gamavor]

NINE ARMENIANS DEATH IN BESLAN SCHOOL SIEGE CONFIRMED

 

ROSTOV ON DON, SEPTEMBER 8, ARMENPRESS: According to the latest information from Armenian consul general in the southern Russia, Ararat Gomtsian, at least nine of the hostages killed by the terrorists in Beslan school siege were ethnic Armenians. Five of them were children. He said all Armenians who suffered in the crisis were taken to hospitals in Moscow and one, Mariam Simonian, to a hospital IN Rostov-on-Don city. All in all 33 ethnic Armenians were among the hostages, seven of them are reported missing. Another official of the Armenian consulate general said the figures were not final and could change any minute.

 

At least 335 people, most of them children, have been officially confirmed dead since Russian special forces stormed a secondary school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan seized by Islamist militants fighting for neighboring Chechnya's secession from Russia.

 

http://www.armenpress.am/eng/news/polit.htm

[gamavor]

After school carnage, Europe mourns with Russia

 

Agence France Presse -- English

September 6, 2004 Monday 8:10 PM GMT

 

ROME Sept 6 -- >>From silent marches to flags at half-mast and candles

flickering in the window, across Europe people of all ages honoured

Monday the victims of the bloody Russian school siege.

 

Up to 150,000 people joined a torchlit procession through the Italian

capital in a silent tribute to the hundreds of men, women and children

killed in Beslan in North Ossetia.

 

A group of children led the way under a banner reading "Rome with

the children of Beslan. They will not murder our future", filing in

absolute silence from the Capitol to the Colosseum, two of the city's

ancient landmarks.

 

"From Rome comes a message of great hope after the horror and

atrocities," mayor Walter Veltroni, one of a group of politicians

who called for the march, said as it got under way.

 

On Capitol square, candles were laid in the shape of two giant hearts,

with between them the inscription "Good Bye Angels".

 

The flags of Russia and the 44 other members of the Council of

Europe were lowered in the French city of Strasbourg where Russia's

ambassador, Alexander Orlov, was among those who joined a minute's

silence.

 

He used the occasion to reject criticism of Moscow for the savage

climax to the three-day hostage-taking siege which left at least 335

dead, according to an official toll.

 

"The slanderous allegations are offensive to the memory of the victims,

to the memory of those who saved the lives of children at the cost

of their own," he said.

 

Speaking at the same ceremony, European Commissioner for Human Rights

Alvaro Gil-Robles said that "when terror tries to destroy our values,

we must be firm, not on the basis of revenge but of justice."

 

Elsewhere across Europe, the messages of solidarity were less political

and more spontaneous.

 

In Brussels, the European Commission observed a minute's silence in

memory of the dead. So did the Hungarian parliament, where Speaker

Katalin Szili said the events at the school in Beslan, southern Russia,

had "shaken our faith in humanity".

 

In Berlin, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer led some 220 German

ambassadors and officials starting a four-day diplomatic conference

in Berlin in a similar tribute.

 

The victims in Beslan included more than 150 children, who had been

herded into the school gymnasium with their parents and teachers

by armed gunmen who demanded independence for the nearby republic

of Chechnya.

 

In Chechnya itself, up to 400 employees of the pro-Russian

administration gathered in the capital Grozny in a tribute to the

victims.

 

The deputy head of the Chechen administration, Taus Jabrailov, said

his staff had agreed to donate a day's salary to the families bereaved

by the tragedy.

 

Children throughout Poland, many dressed in black, stood in silence

for one minute before school classes began, following instructions

from the education ministry.

 

Polish radio stations fell silent for a minute. Prime Minister Marek

Belka told a radio interviewer: "On this day of tragedy in North

Ossetia, we are all Russians, we are all Ossetians."

 

He added that "terrorism is a scourge, gangrene eating away our world,

and we must all fight it".

 

Many Poles at the weekend lit candles outside the Russian embassy in

Warsaw and at Russian consulates. Passers-by also placed flowers and

candles outside the Russian embassy in Berlin.

 

The first ladies of Armenia and Poland together laid wreathes of

flowers and lit candles outside the embassy, as Armenian President

Robert Kocharian held talks with his Polish counterpart Aleksander

Kwasniewksi.

 

Candles were also placed in the windows of thousands of homes across

Italy, in response to a text-message chain passed by mobile telephone,

while the city of Naples flew flags at half-mast.

 

In France, children and teenagers chatting online on the MSN network,

also responding to a message, put a red rose next to their name.

 

On Saturday, the Saint Petersburg Philarmonic Orchestra dedicated

a concert it gave in the Swiss city of Lucerne to victims of the

tragedy. The organisers said the musicians were donating their

evening's wages to the families.

 

Elsewhere Israeli military radio reported that the nation's flower

growers had donated 500 wreaths to be flown to Beslan, now burying

its dead.

 

 

http://groong.usc.edu/news/msg92854.html

[Stormig]

What was the reason such an operation had to be carried out in the first place? 

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I am not discussing the necessity of the operation - merely that it was not the terrorists who killed the civilians, even if the threat was that they would have blown up the whole place and killed everyone else along with themselves.

[Stormig]

There is  a more correct example of that: USA in Middle East for Israel and oil.

However, you forget that Russians liberated Georgia (which Georgians now forget). You also forget that Osetians and Abkhazians are pro-Russian in this situation. Degestanies are not at all anti-Russian. Does this make it "only-Armenia" Stormy? Actually, I find very difficult to understand this position of yours. So if it was to chose among Armenians and Chechens, whome would you chose?

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It is not MY position, Armen.

[Armen]

It is not MY position, Armen.

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Sorry Stormy if I understood it wrong. But whose opinion is it? Can't quite get it...

[Accelerated]

For example, in November and December of 1942 the celebrated Soviet Field Marshal G. K. Zhukov orchestrated a gigantic offensive ("Operation Mars") involving seven Soviet armies with 83 divisions, 817,000 men and 2,352 tanks. The failed operation cost the Red Army nearly 350,000 dead, missing and wounded men, and 1,700 tanks, yet it was methodically concealed in Soviet historiography, in large part to preserve Zhukov's reputation.

 

....desperate times call for desperate measures, and besides if you want to read about military incompetence on a grand scale you should get your hands on something detailing the WW1 battles on the Western Front.

 

From evidence released from Soviet archives since the mid-1980's, scholars have learned, for example, that Soviet deaths numbered nearly 50 million,

 

Majority of whom were civilians not Red Army soldiers and were therefore killed as a result of the German occupation and bombing not military incompetence.

 

The Soviet military disasters of 41-42 were a direct result of Stalins purges and directives, otherwise in many ways the Red Army was better equipped/supported in comparison to the Germans, including in the crucial area of tanks.

[skhara]

The world turned blind eye to Armenian Genocide for political reasons. To this day USA, UK and Turkey (the holy trinity) are opposing any measures acknowledging the gruesome past of our ancestors.

 

You forgot the most important entity Israel.

[gamavor]

Otto Bismarck once said that people lie most before elections, during war times and after hunting season.

 

No, I didn't! Only trinities are holy! Do you remember the latest intelligence scandal that tried to link Israelis and the leak of information with the decision-making about Iraq? Someone desperately needs fake excuses.

[skhara]

No, I didn't! Only trinities are holy! Do you remember the latest intelligence scandal that tried to link Israelis and the leak of information with the decision-making about Iraq? Someone desperately needs fake excuses.

 

It sounds famliar, I don't recall much details. So do you believe that Israel is/was not involved with the Iraq war? We were talking about genocide recognition and not Iraq intelligence weren't we? And Israel absolutely refuses to even talk about it, although a lot of Jews know dam well what happenned to our people. So to keep your holy trinity you could drop UK and add Israel perhaps. But I see five countries as part of the holy quintumplety: Germany, UK, Israel, USA, Turkey.

[gamavor]

Can't do that! I respect Brits as much as I respect Turks!

[gamavor]

Sorry Stormy if I understood it wrong. But whose opinion is it? Can't quite get it...

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This is the Anglo-Saxons opinion. They support Chechen terrorist because that fits their agenda for Caucasus and it perfectly shows the ugly face of the Anglo-Americans. If we apply the same principle of self-government and the right to self-determination on a broader national or ethnic base, that would mean that Turkey should do the same. Laz population at the Black Sea, Kurds in the South East, Arabs along the Syrian border and probably few more that can claim to be native of the land before the arrival of the Seljuk Turks from Central Asia. Apparently such approach can only bring disaster, not because these people provided they want to be independent do not deserve it, but because their intentions will run contra to the plan designated for them by somebody else.

[nairi]

Sorry to reopen this topic, but I'm still wondering about something: why Beslan? Why North Ossetia? So far all the attacks had been on Moscow (correct me if I'm wrong), which is more or less logical: capital city, city of the Russian government etc. So why this town in the middle of nowhere in the Caucasus? What does Chechnya have with North Ossetia?

 

My guess for a primary school is a wake-up call, a shock, to tell the world that these people are serious about what they want. Maybe also revenge for all the Chechen children killed during Russia's occupation.

 

But again, why Ossetia? Why not Russia if it is the Russian government they were targeting? Does anyone have an idea?

[shiner]

I think Beslan was really close to the Chechen border.

[Armen]

There are number of reasons:

- Osetians have historically strong ties with Russians

- Osetia's territory is the only link between Russia and South Caucasus through Georgia (hense the trasport crisis between Armenia and Russia)

- Osetians are mostly Christian

- Rumours were spread that there were Ingushes among the terrorists, which will eventually bring to a revenge from Osetian's to Ingushes. This will involves Chechens and pther Vinakhs on Ingush sides, Cossacs on Osetian side and you have a all Caucasus war.

Edited October 10, 2004 by Armen

[nairi]

Armen, I speculated these points as well (believe it or not!), but I was thinking something else. Since the attackers demanded Russia to leave Chechnya so as to give it independence, there should be no reason for them to attack a school in Beslan. Were they perhaps testing out Russia? Seeing if it would try to rescue Beslan? And if so... good reason to prove that Russia is two-faced. On the one hand, rescuing Ossetians, yet on the other hand waging war in Chechnya. Just speculating here, but I'm really wondering. I'm left with more questions at the end of the day than answers..

[Armen]

Nairi, the questions you asked are more than valid for the situation and difficult to answer. Clearly, they had a carefully designed and selected short term and long term political goal, target and time. Also, as you noticed their political goals were mutiple. It's already clearly seen that the transport crisis between Armenia, Georgia and Russia started after and because of the Beslan act. It perfectly suites the geopolitical dinamics in the region.

One more thing. It brought Putin's popularity to its lowest point in last years. He was forced to make a "murderor's decision" during the crisis and had to toughen the central government's control and is being criticised from the West for this.

One more this kind of thing and his government is going to face a credibility crisis.

Edited October 10, 2004 by Armen