PRAGUE - Into the second day after a group
of about 40 armed militants seized a school in the town
of Beslan in the Republic of North Ossetia on the
morning of September 1, the identities of the militants
and their aims remained unclear.
The militants
are still holding hostage some 350 people, including
students, parents and teachers; at least eight people
are reported to have died from injuries received during
the initial onslaught, although reports of casualty
figures varied.
Beslan, a town of about 30,000,
is in North Ossetia, near the republic of Chechnya,
where separatist rebels have been fighting Russian
forces since 1999.
Negotiations via phone
continued on-and-off throughout Wednesday night and
early morning, involving pediatrician Leonid Roshal, who
aided hostages during the deadly seizure of a Moscow
theater by Chechens in October 2002. The hostage-takers
had demanded his participation. Russia's NTV television
reported that Roshal had told the militants they would
be promised a safe corridor out, but the request was
refused.
The raiders reportedly have threatened
to blow up the school if police storm it, but what they
want and who they are remains unclear. The modus
operandi of the attackers, a group comprising both
men and women, some of whom were reportedly wearing
explosives strapped to their bodies in readiness for a
suicide bombing, is reminiscent of that used by the
Chechen perpetrators of the Moscow-theater hostage
taking.
Responsibility for that operation was
claimed by radical Chechen field commander Shamil
Basaev. Basaev was also reportedly one of the
masterminds behind the multiple raids into Ingushetia
during the night of June 21-22, in which up to 100
people, mostly Interior Ministry personnel, were killed.
The Russian region of Ingushetia borders Chechnya.
Two recent deadly attacks have been blamed on
Chechen militants - a suicide bombing on Tuesday near a
Moscow subway station and explosions last week that
downed two Russian jetliners.
Initial reports
suggested that the Beslan kidnappers demanded the
release of the 30 or more suspects apprehended on
suspicion of taking part in that raid. (They also
reportedly demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops
from Chechnya.) Eyewitnesses told the independent Ingush
website ingushetiya.ru that many of the young men who
took part in the June attack were Ingush, not Chechen.
The same website also quoted one of them, who
explained that he "never used to be a militant" but that
he and hundreds of other young Ingush had fled to
southern Chechnya and joined the ranks of Basaev's
fighters after their relatives were abducted by Ingush
Interior Ministry personnel.
The fact that the
Beslan hostage takers reportedly demanded talks not only
with the president of North Ossetia, Aleksandr
Dzasokhov, but also with Ingushetia's President Murat
Zyazikov would substantiate the hypothesis that at least
some of the hostage takers are ethnic Ingush.
And if the hostage takers are Ingush, there is a
logical explanation why they should have sought a target
not in their home republic but in neighboring North
Ossetia. The Republic of North Ossetia-Alania is an
anomaly in the North Caucasus on several counts. First,
its population is Christian, not Muslim (their patron
saint is St George). And as Dzasokhov pointed out in a
recent article published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the
Ossetians were the only Caucasian ethnic group that
voluntarily petitioned the tsar (in 1774) for their
territory to be absorbed into the Russian Empire.
Second, they are the only ethnic group in the North
Caucasus to speak an Indo-European language (part of the
Iranian language group).
More important,
however, there is bad blood between the Ingush and
Ossetians. The Ingush, like the Chechens, were deported
en masse to Kazakhstan in 1944 on the orders of Soviet
leader Josef Stalin on suspicion of sympathizing with
Nazi Germany. The Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet
Socialist Republic was then formally abolished, and its
westernmost Prigorodnyi Raion incorporated into North
Ossetia. Following secretary general Nikita Khrushchev's
1956 "secret speech" to the 20th congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a green light was
given for the repatriation of the exiled peoples,
including the Chechens and Ingush, and for the
reformation of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, albeit within
different borders: Prigorodnyi Raion remained part of
North Ossetia.
In October 1992, just months
after the Checheno-Ingush ASSR split into its two
separate components, the Ingush and Ossetians fought a
brief but brutal war for control of Prigorodnyi Raion.
Up to 500 people were killed within less than a week,
and the Ingush population of not only Prigorodnyi Raion
but North Ossetia as a whole - variously estimated at
between 35,000 and 60,000 people - was forcibly
displaced by North Ossetian security forces reinforced
by Russian army troops. Most of them fled to neighboring
Ingushetia. Over the past 12 years, and especially since
Dzasokhov's election as North Ossetian president in
1998, efforts have been made to enable Ingush to return,
but with minimal success.
Copyright (c) 2004,
RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut
Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
