The North Ossetian town of Beslan is beginning three days of mourning to mark the ninth anniversary of a school hostage taking that left 334 people -- including 186 children -- dead.
Most of the hostages that died were killed when Russian security forces stormed the school and ended the siege, which began on the first day of the new school year.
from Ingushetiya.org [my tr.]:
Ella Kesayeva, co-chair of the Voice of Beslan NGO [representing the interests of the victims of the Beslan attack], has made a statement about the identity of the terrorists who four years ago seized a school in a North Ossetian town. According to her, “the so-called Beslan terrorists were agents of our special services – UBOP [Unit for Fighting Organized Crime] and FSB.” Kesayeva says that this is attested to by the details of the biographies of individual participants in the school seizure which were published in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper on Thursday.
According to the official investigation, which is now in its fifth year, the terrorist group consisted of 32 fighters. The case file on the Beslan terrorist attack contains information on each identified terrorist. The identities of most of the terrorists were established by means of their fingerprints. All of them had at different times been registered with the North Caucasian regional UBOP and UFSB, were on the federal wanted list, had been detained, arrested, and some even convicted.
However, Kesyaeva notes that in the column marked “Conviction” all the Beslan terrorists are for some reason entered as «Not convicted on the basis off Clause 1, Article ch.1. 24 CC RF “. “This means that either a deliberate decision was taken not to institute criminal proceedings against these people or that such proceedings were terminated. Both on the same pretext –- “no crime has been committed”, she says.
"Thus, the criminals who really should have been held in a pre-trial detention centre or served time in prison, were in August 2004 able freely to form an armed gang and commit the attack on the Beslan school," the Voice of Beslan representative believes.
She says that there can be only one explanation for what took place: the so-called Beslan terrorists were actually agents of the Russian special services -- UBOP and FSB. This is attested to by the details of their biographies which have been published in Novaya Gazeta.
According to her, the people who are in a position to explain the matter are Deputy Interior Minister General Mikhail Pankov, and former deputy director of the Federal Security Service, General Vladimir Anisimov. Both of these men, says Kesayeva, took an active part in the counter-terrorist operation in Beslan as a senior “consultants”, and both oversaw the creation of the intelligence network in the Caucasus.
However, despite the insistence of the victims of the Beslan terrorist attack, neither has been summoned to court to testify.
Via AFP:
The remembrance ceremonies climax Wednesday, exactly four years after a battle between besieging Russian special forces and hostage-takers demanding withdrawal of troops from nearby Chechnya.
But anguish mixed with anger at the authorities in Moscow and here in North Ossetia, a mountainous region bordering Georgia's South Ossetia province, which Russian troops occupied last month.
The head of the survivors' group Voice of Beslan, Ella Kesayeva, said a petition had been filed with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to try to force out the truth.
Survivors want to know why no-one, other than the one surviving hostage taker, has been punished for the episode in which more than 1,000 people were held for three days inside the school.
A handful of police were tried for negligence in allowing a heavily armed group to reach the school on September 1, but they were either cleared or amnestied.
An official enquiry has cleared the security services of blame in the disastrous battle where heavy weapons were used to crush fierce resistance by hostage-takers inside the packed school building.
Many believe there has been a cover-up.
Via kasparov.ru, a remarkable and highly intelligent documentary film (with English subtitles) about the last few years in the life of Anna Politkovskaya. The director is Masha Novikova, and the film features many sequences in which Politkovskaya herself explains the nature of her work as a journalist who was really a soldier in the struggle for truth and civil society in Russia. Although it was the focus of her activity, Chechnya was only one of the elements in the central task she aspired to: the bringing of truth, reconciliation and justice to Russian society as a whole. As one participant in the film points out, it was her willingness to name culprits that led to her death by assassination.
The film contains many harrowing scenes of violence and brutality, together with interviews with victims and their relatives, and documents some of the worst of the crimes committed by Russian federal forces and their commanders during the second Chechen war. What it underlines most of all, however, is the fact that in some ways Politkovskaya's aims have been fulfilled, at least in terms of international comprehension: for the evidence of the crimes that were sanctioned and authorized by Russia's leaders is now so detailed and so extensive that those leaders cannot present themselves to the civilized world and expect to be received as part of it. They are international pariahs.
As Mr Putin prepares to hand over power, Beslan is still suffocating in a pall of tears and anger. For Mr Nazarov, as for many in this town of 35,000 people, voting for Mr Medvedev on Sunday is unthinkable. "I would not vote for anyone who was recommended by Putin," he says. Hanging the picture of Mr Putin and his heir among the photographs of victims is his way of saying what he believes the political course of Mr Putin and his heir-apparent leads to.
Nur-Pashi Kulayev, the sole surviving hostage-taker, was jailed for life in 2006 but, for Mr Nazarov and other victims' relatives, many questions about the events of 2004 remain unanswered. How were the terrorists able to take School No 1 hostage without any resistance, who ordered the special forces to storm the building, and was the blaze which engulfed the gymnasium and killed so many started by rockets fired by the Russian troops?
Via Maidan
Remember your very first day at school? Perhaps you remember your children’s. So do the members of the civic organization “Voice of Beslan”. They remember three days from the 1st to the 3rd of September 2004 which ended in carnage, tanks and the death of their children.The “First Bell” is a major event for families throughout the Russian Federation. In Beslan parents and grandparents came. There were over 1100 people in the school on 1 September although the authorities there and in Moscow insisted to the world that there were 364 hostages. This was only one of many discrepancies.
“Voice of Beslan” was formed by survivors of Beslan for one purpose only: to find out the truth. How many terrorists were there and who helped them smuggle so many weapons into a school? Why were there conflicting stories as to whether the terrorists were ready to negotiate, and over their demands? Why were tanks and flamethrowers used? What provoked the chaos which took the lives of 331 people, over half of them children, given the evidence that the first explosions did not come from inside the school? They want to know why their children died.
Over the last months, the organization has been facing concentrated efforts to stifle its voice. The latest is the call by the Prosecutor to have an appeal which dates from November 2005 (!), (http://www.khpg.org.ua/en/index.php?id=1200015650 ) declared “extremist”. The letter of appeal asks the world community to help them establish what happened. The authorities’ response: an application from the Prosecutor claiming “extremism” over accusations directed against President Putin.Yes, they accuse Mr Putin of aiding and abetting terrorists. We would, however, remind the Russian Federation authorities of a much better method of fighting wrongful accusations. Prove them wrong by finding the truth. “Voice of Beslan” asks no more.
YOU CAN HELPPlease write a simple message of solidarity to “Voice of Beslan” at golosbeslana@mail.ru
Tell them that you support their efforts to learn the truth and that seeking the truth does not constitute extremism in any free country.Please also copy your letters to ourvoicescarry@gmail.com.
TOGETHER WE CAN HELP TO ENSURE THEIR VOICE IS HEARD.
Halya Coynash Yevhen Zakharov, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection GroupVyacheslav Khavrus Oleksandr Pylypenko, “Maidan” Alliance
A group of women whose relatives were killed in the Beslan school siege are to go on trial in Russia today after they accused President Vladimir Putin of complicity in the deaths.The UK Times newspaper also has a report here, and the Financial Times covers the item here.
The Voice of Beslan group has been charged with "extremism" over an appeal to politicians in Europe and the US which implied that Putin assisted terrorists.
The prosecution was launched under legislation introduced last year which civil rights activists warned could be used to attack critics of the Kremlin.
Previously unseen film proves that the bloody end to the 2004 Beslan siege was caused by security forces firing on a school crammed with hostages, not by blasts from within, a victim support group says.
The Beslan Mothers' Committee says the footage disproves the official version that the detonation of a boobytrap device planted by Chechen separatists inside the building caused the carnage at School No.1, in the southern Russian town of Beslan.
Learning from Mr Wopsle
It can be a dangerous thing to say that a man is guilty of a murder before he has been tried and found guilty of that crime by a jury in a court of law – as Mr Wopsle found to his cost, in Dickens's Great Expectations. If you have read that novel you will remember that Mr Wopsle was holding forth in the Three Jolly Bargemen about the guilt of the accused in a recent murder case. Listening to Mr Wopsle's words was the great London lawyer, Mr Jaggers. In an overwhelming demolition of the unfortunate Wopsle, Jaggers pronounces one of the supreme principles of English jurisprudence. "The law of England supposes every man to be innocent until he is proved – proved – to be guilty."
That is probably why no British newspapers have pointed out that the first, obvious conclusion to be drawn from President Putin's refusal to extradite former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi to the United Kingdom to face trial on a charge of murder is that it amounts to a tacit admission of guilt. Newspapers do not publish what they deem to be defamatory statements even if they are true.
But if the accused will never face a court of law to answer to the charges, what then? Must there be perpetual silence on the question of guilt? That would be to compound the wrong that has been done. It would not be right to the victims. It would not be right to Russia, nor to the people in London poisoned by polonium-210.
Andrei Lugovoi was employed (with others) to assassinate a Russian dissident, naturalized as a British citizen and living peaceably in London. President Putin is well aware of that. He also knows that a finding of guilty against the accused in a British court of law will involve a simultaneous finding in the court of world opinion that the murder of Alexander Litvinenko was ordered by the Russian leadership. This much is only too clear.
Possibly, during court proceedings in the UK , if Lugovoi could ever be brought to trial, his testimony would provide confirmation of one theory of why the murder was committed and at whose instigation, in relation to which a number of facts are already in the public domain. It is now known, from BBC TV, that an 8-page "due diligence" dossier prepared by Alexander Litvinenko was about Victor Ivanov, currently chairman of Aeroflot. It follows, from the hypothesis advanced in a BBC Radio Four programme by Yuri Shvets, that Victor Ivanov is the Mr X described as the "powerful, dangerous and vindictive" individual, "closely associated with President Putin", who may have ordered the murder of Litvinenko. According to the BBC radio programme, when Litvinenko gave the dossier to Lugovoi, in early October 2006, and Lugovoi delivered it (or reported its contents) soon afterwards to Mr X (Ivanov), the decision to assassinate its author was made, in revenge for the termination of a contract worth "dozens of millions of dollars". Perhaps Mr Lugovoi's evidence would shed light on the truth of this collection of allegations.
It would also be interesting if Titon International, the firm which allegedly employed Litvinenko to carry out the due diligence on Victor Ivanov, would publicly disclose the identity of the British company which commissioned the due diligence report, and subsequently pulled out of the deal.
But this is only one view of why Litvinenko was murdered. There were previous murder victims connected with the 1999 apartment building explosions, about which Litvinenko wrote in his (recently re-issued) 2002 book co-authored with Yuri Felshtinsky, "Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within". These include two State Duma deputies: the prominent liberal politician, Sergei Yushenkov, murdered by shooting in April 2003, and Yuri Shchekochikhin, a veteran investigative journalist, poisoned in July 2003, possibly with thallium. The assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, who was hated by the Russian hierarchy as a "traitor" to the organisation formerly known as the KGB, now the FSB, confirms the truth of what he wrote. The testimony of Andrei Lugovoi, supposing he could be persuaded to give it truthfully, would disclose that the FSB under its present head, General Nikolai Patrushev, is a corrupt, totally compromised, criminal organisation, so far beyond a possibility of being cleansed and reformed that it must be considered fit only to be disbanded.
There are only two commonly-held views of the 1999 apartment building explosions which killed more than 300 sleeping Russian citizens, and served as Putin's pretext for starting the second war in Chechnya: that they were carried out by the Rusian FSB at the behest of the Russian power structures; and that of the Russian authorities, that they were the work of unidentified others for no known motive. The refusal of President Putin to allow Lugovoi to come to the UK to be tried for murder stands as implicit confirmation of the FSB's guilt, in that it shows the government of the Russian Federation believes that his testimony would incriminate the guilty. And they are nervous.
When Tony Blair had a "frank discussion" with Vladimir Putin about the British government's demand for Lugovoi's extradition, earlier this month, Blair may, at last, have begun to understand the truth of the unsavoury character of his enigmatic interlocutor. (To Putin, by contrast, Blair's lack of understanding of the truth seemed merely obtuse – hence, perhaps, Putin's comment that British insistence on extradition is "stupid".) A lawyer himself, Blair may now, as he leaves office, finally and too late have learned, from the refusal to surrender a criminal to justice, one reality of today's Russia: that it is run by people who are not averse to the commission of crimes when they seem expedient, or convenient, or financially rewarding to members of the siloviki.
Putin the Banal
Evil comes in many forms. Only rarely is it in the persona of an insanely criminal monster such as those who disfigured the twentieth century. More often the perpetrators of great wrongs are comparatively insignificant men. One such is the incumbent President of Russia.
When President George W Bush greets the Russian President on Sunday, at his family home at Kennebunkport, Maine, on Sunday, they will shake hands, and perhaps embrace. The Russian President, aptly named Akaky Akakievich Putin by the late Anna Politkovskaya , is a man of insignificant personality. In consequence, it seems, it is difficult for the US leadership to understand or recognize the extent of the crimes for which he is personally responsible.
The criminal character of the Russian hierarchy, by the way, has been in evidence for many years, going back to the brutal conduct of the second Chechnya war at its commencement, and the multiple war crimes and atrocities perpetrated by the Russian armed forces against a civilian population. Russia is now again a country with political prisoners, a country where those who have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights have been murdered by the armed forces or by the FSB, and in which the rule of law is effectively in abeyance. Torture of prisoners in the custody of the authorities is endemic in the Russian Federation under President Putin – a fact of which he must be well aware. "Disappearances" in Chechnya have been condemned by Human Rights Watch as a crime against humanity. Journalists are murdered and there is suspicion that agents of the government are involved. Dissidents living abroad are murdered. Russia is a misruled country.
Putin's upbringing and experience in the KGB, an institution which often operated supra-legally in accordance with orders from the political leadership, instilled in a notoriously vindictive man an amoral belief system: operational necessity justifies all methods – the end justifies any means. That is the present misfortune of Russia under Vladimir Putin, as his second term draws to an end and he prepares to nominate his successor.
When the history of Vladimir Putin's presidency comes to be written the final judgements on him as a man and as a national leader will require a proper assessment of his character. The question which is sometimes asked is whether the evil things that Putin has done are the result of impotence, weakness or incompetence – an inability to act properly due to incomprehension, or structural weakness in the way Russian government functions – or criminality. Joseph Stalin, it is accepted by historians, was criminal by nature. There is evidence that Putin as President has displayed, from time to time, both incompetence and criminality. It is really a question of which is the preponderant feature of his makeup. To the victims, of course, it makes no difference – the consequences, just as under Stalin, have been the same.
When President Bush looked at President Putin and saw what he wanted to see, that was a worthless assessment, based as it was on nothing more than first impressions, or maybe just wishful thinking. More revealing was what happened at Beslan . That was a true test of character, and it revealed much about the character of the Russian President. In September 2004 at Beslan, in southern Russia, 330 people were killed including 317 hostages, of whom 186 were children. When the storming of the school buildings began, in an effort to bring the hostage-taking to an end, the use of flamethrowers and tanks in the assault, carried out while the hostages were still present in the gymnasium, resulted in the collapse of the roof onto the hostages below, killing 160 of them.
The most important question about this disastrous assault on the school is, who ordered it? There is no information on this. Putin himself kept a very low profile during the three days of the siege, but there can be no serious doubt that he was in close touch with the situation, and would have been consulted on the decision to carry out the storming of the building. Without his authority the decision could not have been made. But if it was his decision, or with his authority, the blame for the disastrous outcome of the storming of the school while it was still full of hostages falls squarely on Vladimir Putin.
It is useless to point out that the honourable thing to have done, in the face of such a catastrophic failure, was for Putin to resign. This is a western concept, and Russian leaders have not, historically, taken such ideas into account – it is apparently not a practical or sensible attitude to take. Similarly a western national leader would have gone to Beslan immediately the school siege began, and would have done all things possible to save the hostages. There would have been negotiations. But Putin's way is never to negotiate.
Why did the Russian President allow the assault on the school to begin? There must have been a calculation, and a conclusion that hostage deaths were acceptable. The storm was necessary because the alternatives involved a loss of face – from entering into negotiations with the hostage-takers, or acceding to their demands, or showing weakness in some other way. The decision resulted in death and disaster. Was the decision criminal, or was this incompetence? As evidence it must be recalled that after the siege Putin declared on television, "We exhibited weakness, and the weak are beaten." The hostages who died were sacrificed because the President feared to appear weak. Negotiations were possible, but were never tried. Whether the President was demonstrating a dreadful incompetence by refusing to negotiate for the hostages' lives, or ordered the assault on the school knowing that hostage deaths would be certain to result, either way this was criminally culpable.
But in the end, the question of whether President Putin is knowingly responsible for his crimes, or thinks he is doing a good job but – in Rumsfeldian language – "stuff happens", is not really important. To his victims it does not make any difference. World opinion, and the US President, remain largely indifferent to the question. There will be no real accounting any time soon, because when all is said and done the Putin presidency has been an interlude of considerable banality.
Information has been received concerning the movement of members of illegal armed formations from the plains of the Chechen Republic into an area of mountain and forest on the border between the Republic of Ingushetia and the Republic of North Ossetia.
The gathering of fighters is projected for mid-August this year, after which there are plans to carry out a terrorist action on the "Budyonnovsk scenario" on the territory of the Republic of North Ossetia. According to the information received, the fighters are planning to seize a public building with hostages, and then advance demands to the country's leadership concerning the withdrawal of units of the federal forces from the Chechen Republic. A large sum of money in Western currency is said to have come from Turkey to finance the action.
In EJ, Marina Litvinovich, editor-in-chief of the Truth of Beslan website, protests about the lies and distortions in the official Russian report on the Beslan tragedy [my tr.]:
For a start, it’s important to make it clear that no report has been published, although the commission promised to do this. All that has happened is that the commission’s head, Alexander Torshin, read out this report - so far there is no printed text anywhere.
No one was invited to hear the presentation of the report - not journalists, nor victims, nor hostages nor relatives - no one. Everything is being done in a hurry and in secret. On the eve of the holidays, on Friday, so that no one would even notice what was taking place. Moreover, after the report the Federation Council has already voted to close the activity of the Commission of Inquiry into the terror act in Beslan. In other words, as far as the Federation Council is concerned, the matter is now closed.
Now the State Duma is to have its say. But the text of the report was presented in the lower chamber of parliament only yesterday evening, and the Duma Council has not yet had time to study it. But at today’s session already they are already trying to raise a motion for the closing of the commission’s activity. Meanwhile, not a single deputy has actually seen the text. Thus, they propose to vote blindly.
Let us move on to the text itself. The report is very similar to the one that was published in August - in fact, the commission has not worked since then. The commission did not meet in September, or October, or November, or December. And it’s totally unclear what the new report is based on, because no work has actually been done, there have been no expert assessments, no new evidence has been examined.
Moreover, Torshin’s report is based on the same assessment of the actions of operational staff which was removed from the judicial process six weeks ago. An assessment, in other words, that has been acknowledged to be illegal and invalid. As for the report’s principal conclusion - that the first shots were the result of the actions of the guerrillas - this conclusion has not been confirmed in any way. By no mathematical calculations or technical analyses - it is all empty words. Thus, Torshin asserts that the federal forces did not fire flamethrowers at the school in which the hostages were held. Yet one has only to enumerate the people who were killed or injured as they stood in the windows - from this it follows naturally that the shooting came from the street. There is much evidence to support the contention that there was also firing from tanks.
Another of the report’s conclusions is that 32 people took part in the school seizure, of whom 31 were killed and one has been sentenced in court. This is simply ridiculous. Even the Prosecutor’s office has already admitted under pressure from us that there may have been more of them. It’s a mystery why this figure has not changed in Torshin’s reports since 2004 - there is a mass of evidence which refutes it.
All this is being done for one purpose alone - to close the question of Beslan. And to bring an end, as the government representatives say, to “the speculations and insinuations” on this subject. But I think, these efforts are in vain - those who suffered will not give up. Whatever the lies that Torshin gives them, they lost their children and they will go to the end.
What is more, the investigation continues: expert analyses are being made, there are studies, examinations of witnesses. It’s only for Torshin that the question is closed - he is the only one for whom it’s all clear. He has cleared it all up and decided not to do any more work, taking into account the fact that in any case he has actually done no work for the past six months.
