The Hindu Business Line : Terror in Beslan — Not justified by any cause

Fanaticism and fundamentalism have their limits, when these are crossed, as they were with horrific and tragic consequences in Beslan, people who rebel for a cause not only make themselves and their cause a grotesque comedy, they paint an entire community or religion black, says Rasheeda Bhagat.

AS THE grim images of parents weeping inconsolably over their children's graves were beamed into drawing-rooms the world over, few eyes would have been dry or hearts un-enraged at the fiends who target children. No cause in the world, however just it might be, can countenance an attack on a school as happened last week in the town of Beslan in the southern Russian region of North Ossetia, which left nearly 340 people dead, half of them children.

Each hour of the three-day siege, during which over a thousand people were held hostage, only strengthened the world's revulsion against and condemnation of the barbaric captors. An anger only heightened by the pathos of watching parents put bottles of water inside the graves of their children, sobbing that since the terrorists had denied water to their loved ones, they should not thirst for this precious commodity in the after-life?

This is exactly what some parents did at the graves in the fields outside the little town, as they wept over their children's gruesome death. One parent told CNN that as the terrorists refused to give water to the children for the three days they had been in captivity, "some of the children drank their own urine, and others poured it over their bodies to keep cool."

Another parent said, between sobs, "As parents, we should die before our children; our house is cold, cold."

As television channels beamed images of one of the captors, who looked frightened and kept swearing on Allah that he had not killed anybody, leave alone a child, viewers could not be blamed for wanting to lynch him. For an outraged and shocked world, he was the face of the terrorists who had not hesitated to hold children hostages in order to fight for whatever cause they had.

As Russians grapple with this tragedy, grief and anguish are slowly being transformed into anger against the Putin government and the Russain President himself, who had failed to protect the citizens from increasing terrorism which has its roots in the decade-long war in Chechnya that wants to break free from Moscow.

Just days before the Beslan massacre, terrorists had brought down two civil airliners killing 90 people.

In November 2000, a "mentally disturbed" Chechen hijacked a Russian plane but set free all the 58 passengers on board unharmed in Israel.

In December 1998, the severed heads of four Western hostages were discovered on a road about 40 km south of Grozny, the Chechen capital. In December 1993, teenagers in a school classroom in Rostov-on-Don city were seized, then taken on a helicopter trip around southern Russia, before the kidnappers were arrested and the hostages released.

There have been innumerable hijacking of buses and hostage-taking of innocent civilians — the Moscow theatre siege of October 2002, the murder of 41 people in a Russian hospital in August 2003, and the suicide bombing on a Russian train near Chechnya that killed 42 people in December 2003.

Small wonder that the Russian people are turning their ire on their President for soft-pedalling this issue and not giving it the attention it deserves. Coming as it did barely six months after Mr Putin returned to power on a landslide, the school tragedy has resulted in the usually tame media adopting a harsh tone of criticism and demanding not only an explanation but also some concrete action from the Kremlin.

The last straw for the grieving people of Beslan was the President linking the latest tale of horror to "international terrorism".

Interestingly, this opportunity is being used to point out that with the President returning with such a huge wave of popularity, power has got concentrated in his hands and "the Parliament, the political parties and the media have retreated into the background. Essentially, they are no longer independent. The president was awarded a contract to restore order in Russia and ensure that Russia's people are safe. Today we see that this contract has been broken," pointed out Vladimir Ryzhkov, an outspoken independent lawmaker, in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, as quoted by The New York Times.

Under fire is also Mr Putin's statement that Russia had let down its guard after the collapse of the Soviet Union 13 years ago and "would now need to rebuild its defences against internal and external enemies. Human rights groups said they feared that this might be a signal for a further restricting of civil liberties. The images of death and mourning seemed at least briefly to embolden newspapers to take to task a government that has been working hard to tame public criticism," added The New York Times report.

To Indians the Beslan tragedy brought back heart-wrenching images of children who were burnt to death in the Kumbakonam school fire tragedy. Particularly the images of parents putting bottles of water in the graves brought back the picture of a father in Kumbakonam who had tossed a handful of toffees on the grave of his son, saying between sobs that his son loved them.

Though the Kumbakonam tragedy was the result of negligence, and the greed, of the school that led to the crowding of too many children in a small space, it was nevertheless an accident, not a wilful act of cruelty. But the Chechen rebels, by targeting a school and holding hostage hundreds of innocents and then indulging in gross cruelty by denying the children even water before shooting them dead, have fallen to the most bestial of levels.

This brings us to the larger issue of terrorism that is stalking the globe, from Russia to the US, the Christian or Islamic world, or even in our own backyard, Kashmir. Fanaticism and fundamentalism have their limits; when these are crossed, people who rebel for a cause not only make themselves and their cause a grotesque comedy, they paint an entire community or religion in black. The jehadi brand of terror is doing just that.The backlash is going to be merciless and, worse, indiscriminatory. Ask the Muslim students from India or Pakistan who drive taxis in Sydney or Melbourne to make a little extra money to pay for their tuition, and they will tell you of the abuse they suffer at the hands of the odd Australian who notices the name on their ID.

Or the thousands of Muslim students from Asian countries who line up at the US embassies in their countries for visas, and run the risk of rejection because of their religion, their academic qualifications notwithstanding. How long will these people have to suffer just because a minuscule minority of their community picks up the gun or the bomb?

(Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in)