Russia on the brink

The facts speak for themselves. Left alone, they usually do – it is what we do to them that distorts. So let us start with the terrible facts.

At least 338 died at the denouement of the hostage crisis at the school in Beslan, in the obscure Russian republic of North Ossetia. Almost half of them were children. A further 700 were injured, many of them critically. 180 people are missing. The final death toll may well exceed 500.
As one reporter put it, only the ashes remained.
The detail of what happened will be pored over in weeks to come. It matters little now. The big facts are enough. A group of terrorists took over the school. They held women and children hostage.
Their demands were essentially the same as those of others before them: for example when Chechens took over a Moscow theatre and held the audience captive.
And this is merely the latest in a long list of atrocities perpetrated by Chechen terrorists. Others include suicide bombings on commuter trains, attacks on border villages, religious festivals, government offices, hospitals and apartment blocks.
Last summer fifteen people were killed at a rock concert in Moscow when two women blew themselves up. In August of this year two passenger planes were blown up. All-in-all, the death toll runs to thousands. And that’s before you count those killed by Russian forces in their brutal repression of Chechen nationalism.
The trigger for the terror is nationalist secessionism. Historically, the Chechens hated the Russians. They have always wanted some measure of independence, and given what we know of the nature of Soviet Rule, it would be hard to quibble with that aspiration.
But in the last decade a radical Islamic overtone has entered Chechen nationalism. This may derive from involvement by radicals in the Afghan mujahideen movement. Now, a link with Al-Qaeda is alleged.
The apparent willingness of Chechen nationalists to commit suicide in pursuit of their ends sets them apart from earlier Euro-Asian independence movements and associates them more closely with the Islamic Jihad movements of the Middle East and particularly Palestine, Lebanon and more recently Iraq.
It is one of many unattractive outcomes of the collapse of the USSR. Time was that the Soviet Union was held together by an iron rule, implemented by greatly feared security forces. That’s no longer true. Furthermore, the armed forces of Russia appear to be out-of-date and out-of-touch.
And so, in different ways, we are into a new and more dangerous era. It used to be, for example, that negotiators in a hostage situation could work from the assumption that the hostage-takers wanted to stay alive. They could plan a strategy accordingly. No more. Now they actually want to die. How do you deal with that?
The Russians want to present this as part of the ‘war on terror’. They want the Chechens to be defined as Muslim fanatics. They want as few questions asked about their tactics as possible.
Others see it as part of the great global war for control of oil. Chechnya is opil rich, which is why it is of such economic importance to Russia. They will not relinquish control easily.The hidden hand of Al-Qaeda may well be in the mix: their strategists also understand the value of Crude. And then there’s those who see this as part of the growing confrontation between Islam and the West.
None of these interpretations, on their own, are entirely true. They’re part of the inevitable spinning and speculation that follows when bad comes to worse and the gore is so deep that no one remains untouched.
One thing we can say with certainty is that the wider world is beginning to waken up to the potential of the Russian ‘federation’ as a potential powder keg, a Balkans for the noughties that may prove even bloodier and more intractable than the territories of the former Yugoslavia.
The other thing we can say with certainty is that it takes a special determination and callousness to booby-trap a school and blow up school-children. The perpetrators happen to be Muslims, almost certainly. If so, and especially if they are followers of the Wahhabi sect that guides Al-Qaeda, they died believing that they would directly enter paradise having died in what they see as a jihad or holy war.
But what paradise could allow the murderers of innocent people, and of children in particular, through its gates? Before we get too righteous about that thought, we would do well to pause.
The question, in fact, has a special resonance for us in this country and especially for those old enough to remember the carnage deliberately perpetrated by Irish nationalist terrorists, in the La Mon restaurant, in Enniskillen and in Omagh, among others.
In general, the IRA murderers weren’t enthusiastic about getting killed themselves but their actions were just as cold and ruthless and terrible for the victims. Bombing a shopping street rather than a school involves a difference in shade, not in essence. You’re still going to kill the innocent, as they did repeatedly.
Which is why I found myself getting queasy, listening to the nicely-modulated tones of Sinn Fein marketing icon Mary-Lou McDonald, as she told Rodney Rice on Radio One, that one’s first thoughts were for the victims and so on.
Yeah. Well, maybe she’s just too young to remember the worst excesses of the republican movement. And maybe this is how history gets rewritten. The facts we don’t like are slowly and surely excised. But time was when people wrote of the IRA much as they now write of the Chechens and others.
I suppose that therein lies a kernel of hope. If one band of terrorists can see the profit in moving away from war to another kind of political engagement, why not another?
But it’s small comfort to the dead and grieving.