The Fathers of Beslan and the Silver Mercedes Jeep

In Yezhednevnyi Zhurnal there's a new and quite long article by Yulia Latynina on the subject of Beslan. It's entitled The Fathers of Beslan and the Silver Mercedes Jeep ("Gelaendewagen"). Here is a very quick translation of the first page. If I can get time, I'll translate some more of this important text:

The Fathers of Beslan and the Silver Merecedes

Garry Kasparov's trip to the south of Russia was crowned with success. In Daghestan they promised to kill him (knowing Daghestan, I can testify: they meant it), in Beslan they threw eggs at him, in Stavropol' they turned off the lights in the building where he was going to speak, and they forbade him to stay at the hotel, while in Rostov and completely they had no scruples at all about flooding the building, where he was supposed to appear, with water.

Any fool can come and gather a couple of hundred people around him. But to cause a gigantic coordinated campaign of this kind! (And it’s also being said that the vertical of power in our country has come unstuck.) They obviously gave away something to Kasparov in advance. He is not yet not a serious rival of the authorities. On the other hand, one must assume that it’s more pleasant to fight Kasparov than to fight the terrorists.

But I don’t want to talk about Kasparov. I want to talk about Beslan, where the angry fathers of the murdered children threw eggs at the visitors, as the state TV channels reported.

I can testify: there was at least one father. His name is Igor Kozyrev, his child perished in School No 1.

This injured father first shouted to Kasparov that he did not want to listen to him, and then, when the infuriated Ossetian women told him to leave, ran off to a silver Merecedes jeep from which some more men with brick-red faces jumped out, and began to throw eggs. The mothers of Beslan rushed towards him - Kozyrev ran away. After this, the mothers of the murdered children began to wail and apologize to the visitor, and one of them – this was later –had a heart attack. This was a most terrible thing: she just sat down right there on the asphalt and lost consciousness. But the injured father was observing us from the silver Merecedes jeep.

Afterwards it was explained to me why this shaven-headed brickred faced Igor did not beat the women up in front of everyone. Since the events at Beslan he had been given a conditional sentence,and so he couldn’t do any killing in public. According to all the rules, he should have been in jail, but he had been let off. He was a very necessary person in the team: they have plenty of brick-red faces, but injured fathers are hard to come by.

For his freedom, like his Mercedes jeep, Igor Kozyrev is most likely obliged to Tamerlan Dzabiyev (he is known as “Tamik”) - the right-hand man of Taymuraz Mamsurov and the probable future mayor of Beslan. Dzabiyev is a man of authority in the republic. His friends say that when in the early 1990s fortunes were made out of kidnapping people (the buyers were mainly Chechens and ingush), Dzabiyev mediated in the ransoms. His enemies say that he was actually a seller.

When Dzasokhov took power in the republic, where were the only fortunes made were criminal ones - in the trade of vodka, narcotics or human beings, he cleared the place with Mamsurov’s help, and Mamsurov relied on the support of men like Dzabiyev.

This is what is most terrible. What did Kasparov lose? He got some officially sanctioned eggs thrown at him and left. But the mothers of Beslan remained.