Pakistan Tribune, Pakistan
Sept 9 2004

The Crime at Beslan

Anwaar Hussain

Is it possible that a people who have lost everything may think they
have nothing more to live for, that a parent, who sees his children
blown to smithereens, loses love for others’ too? That it is blood
revenge, however unpardonable, that governs this mindless violence
rather than any thing else.

Let us state the obvious from the start without mincing any words.
The horrifying and tragic death of hundreds of blameless human beings
in the Beslan school tragedy, most of whom were innocent children, is
barbaric, unparalleled, inhuman and unpardonable. It is a crime of
heinous proportions and defies religion as equally as it does logic
and rationality.

Nothing, repeat nothing, justifies this despicable act of certain
individuals whatever their validation. Nor does it advance whatever
cause the militants are fighting for. Like the senseless killings in
Iraq, where innocent people – Muslim and non-Muslim – are being
murdered without a qualm, the crime at Beslan, too, will be viewed
with utter revulsion by the rest of the world. Any man, with even a
modicum of humanity, must condemn this horrendous act
unconditionally, categorically and unreservedly.

One does wonder though, as any thinking mind should, as to what
propelled the perpetrators to inflict a pain such as this? What led
them to take this horrendous leave from reason to commit an offence
that is as unpardonable as it is unthinkable? Could it be that they
themselves have been victims of similar atrocities? Or is it just a
one-time malfunction of their thinking faculties? Is it their
religion that exhorts them to indulge in some satanic rituals
offering human sacrifices to satiate the blood lust of their deity?
Or more unbelievably still, killing children is a pleasure pursuit in
which the Chechens indulge from time to time? I do not know.

What I do know is that the story of Chechen suffering is a long one.
In the early 19th century, independent Chechnya was conquered by
Russia after a long and bloody war. The heroic struggle of the
Chechen religious leader Imam Shamil and the inhuman conduct of the
Russian forces compelled the young Leo Tolstoy, who served in the
Russian Imperial Army in Chechnya in the 1840s, to resign in disgust
and write stories praising the Chechen leader.

What I do know is that in the 20th century Josef Stalin, the “Great
Father of the Nation” sought to purge the scourge in one go with the
religious and ethnic cleansing of the Northern Caucasus. He ordered
the deportation of an entire people on Feb. 23, 1944. This event is
to Chechens what the Holocaust is to the Jews or the genocide is to
the Armenians.

What I do know is that on that day, when Stalin packed the Chechen
population of 1 million into cattle cars and shipped them to the
wastes of Siberia and Central Asia, an indelible mark was forever
engraved on the collective memory of the Chechens.

What I do know is that blood-curdling stories of people crowded into
cattle cars without food, water, or bathrooms; corpses traveling with
children; the killing of protesters at the railway stations by KGB
guards, haunt the Chechens to this day. One-third of the population
died on the journey. Many others perished under the ruthless
conditions of exile.

What I do know is that more recently Chechnya was devastated by the
war in 1994-6, which left more than 80,000 dead. It watched in horror
as its basic infrastructures were again systematically destroyed.
Since September 1999, more than a third of the local population –
around 200,000 people – have been forced to flee the fighting and
seek a humiliating refuge in neighboring Ingushetia.

What I do know is that the world’s conscience was collectively
hibernating when a 12-year-old Chechen girl died of internal injuries
after being raped repeatedly by vodka guzzling Russian soldiers; when
a young pregnant woman had her body split open by machine gun fire
simply to check the effectiveness of that weapon from a certain
range, when an 84-year-old man had his throat slashed and was left to
die by the roadside, when a one-year old Chechen baby was impaled
with an AK-47’s bayonet as his mother was forced to watch on.

What I do know is that Chechnya has been reduced to a wasteland of
death and destruction. That the Chechen capital of Grozny does not
have a single building left intact after heavy bombing in a campaign
Russia dubbed as “the liberation of Grozny.” That human rights
violation are tremendous, as evidenced by many television broadcasts
that showed grisly footage of Russian soldiers piling mutilated
Chechen bodies into mass graves and that this is only the tip of the
iceberg.

What I do know is that countless villages in southern Chechnya have
been completely razed to the ground and the economy of Chechnya is
non-existent, that the Russian army is intent upon ridding Chechnya
of all its civilians and completely taking over the land once and for
all.

What I do know is that when a people declare its independence, a
central state can either let them go or beat them into submission.
But in the case of Chechnya, and adjacent Ingushetia, we have seen
some of both.

What I do know is that the Kremlin has done a brilliant job of
convincing the world that Chechens are bandits and terrorists despite
the fact that Putin’s own predecessors have gone down in history as
the biggest mass murderers of their own citizens. Stalin and Lenin
together caused the death of more than 30 million Russian citizens in
the first half of the 20th century alone.

What I do know is that with the misery it visited upon humanity, the
political creed of his forefathers is known as the most dreadful
thing ever to have hit the human race, without exception, even worse
than both world wars, the slave trade and bubonic plague all put
together.

What I do know, and with a sense of ominous foreboding, is that the
recent threats that Putin is hurling all around are bringing back
ghastly images from the past when horrific concentration camps had
been built in Russia aimed at imprisoning all Chechen males between
15-60 years of ages.

What I do know is that an international correspondent Eric Margolis
did once write, “We begin the 21st century watching silently as a
brutish Russia, which knows neither shame nor mercy crushes the life
out of a tiny but heroic people who refuse to bend their knees to
Moscow’s tyranny.”

Is it possible that a people who have lost everything may think they
have nothing more to live for, that a parent, who sees his children
blown to smithereens, loses love for others’ too? That it is blood
revenge, however unpardonable, that governs this mindless violence
rather than any thing else.

I do not know but I wonder.