Unintended Consequences

Chechnya: 'War on terror' legends debunked A war of unintended consequences

*Has Chechnya really become a `front in the war in terror' as President Vladimir Putin repeatedly claims, or have ten years of Russian brutality and intransigence driven this tiny republic into the arms of its own radical Islamists? Leading regional expert Thomas de Waal considers an under-reported reality in an under-reported war.*

On the afternoon of 3 September, when the worst of the shooting had stopped, and the terrible aftermath of the Beslan school siege was only just beginning, I was sitting in a BBC World television studio talking live with a Russian analyst. A news flash came up on the wire agencies: the Russian security services said that among the dead hostage-takers they had found nine Arabs and one `black' (the Russian word, still used without embarrassment, is negr ). My fellow analyst and I both agreed that, if this was true, this had a significant bearing on the nature of this horrible event: it meant Beslan had been attacked by a group with a clear link to the Middle East and the wider front of `international terror'.

The next day, President Vladimir Putin delivered his address to the Russian people about Beslan. In a pained speech Putin told his nation that it was at war. He put his words in a strongly historical and international framework, appealing to nostalgia for the strong Soviet state and warning that Russia's enemies wanted to break up the country. The language was often obscure but the message was unmistakeable: the threat emanated from outside Russia's borders. `This is an attack on our country,' Putin said. The word `Chechnya' was not mentioned once.

Slowly however, a more inevitable truth began to emerge from Beslan: almost all the hostage-takers were from the North Caucasus. First,Russian officials admitted that the so-called ` negr ' was mistaken for such because his face had been coated in ash from the fire in the school. Then they started to draw back from their claims about the so-called dead Arabs. Later the notorious Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who claimed to have planned the raid, said there were 31 hostage-takers, of whom only two had been Arabs.

The obvious truth was also, in its way, more terrible. It meant that the group of men and women who rigged up explosives in the gym of School No 1 in Beslan and then presided over up to 400 deaths, half of them children, were almost all locals, who had a common language and culture with their hostages. Despite what Putin might say, despite some links with international jihadis , this conflict remains very much Russia's home-grown problem: its horrors have been bred locally.

Read the rest here.

(via Chechnya-SL)