The bastards did it.

From the BBC

It is still far too early to draw up a full assessment of the performance of the Russian security forces at the besieged school building in Beslan.


Were the armed forces fully trained for such situations?

That will have to wait until a clear chronology is established, detailing exactly how the events unfolded, what orders were given and how they were acted upon.

But already one thing is clear.

This looks like an improvised operation at best - and one which revealed several disturbing failures in contingency planning.

Deficient

As dawn broke on Friday there was no immediate hint of the trouble to come.

It looked as though negotiations would continue for the day, at least.

One small group of hostages had already been released. However, the uncompromising demands of the hostage-takers left the Russian authorities with few options.


Hundreds were freed in the seizure

The heat and the overall condition of the hostages - many of them young children - meant that this stand-off could not be allowed to drag on for days.

As a result, it would be expected that all necessary military measures would be taken to prepare for a possible assault - either as a last resort, or to respond to some unexpected turn of events.

In the event these preparations seem to have been deficient on a number of counts.

For one thing, the Russian forces failed to establish clear and secure perimeters within which the conflict could be contained.

The break-out of at least some of the hostage-takers should have been impossible.

The operation appeared to lack co-ordination. Medical facilities on the scene appeared to be inadequate.

Old forces in a new world

One fact should be clear from afar in the rush to judge the Russian security forces' performance.

Once military action began, significant casualties may have been unavoidable.



The hostage-takers were clearly not going to get independence for Chechnya. The 'best' they could hope for was to cause a major tragedy that would damage President Vladimir Putin's reputation - and force Chechnya back to the top of the Russian political agenda.

Friday's tragic events may well have done that. But equally, they may well have forced the whole issue of security and the state of Russia's armed forces to the head of the agenda as well.


For all the talk in Russia of military reform and modernisation, this former superpower's armed forces have languished in the post-communist world.

They have not been sufficiently streamlined, nor trained and equipped, for the new challenges of a very different world.

Elite special forces troops flown in from Moscow, or wherever else, cannot operate in a vacuum.


It is not clear how many hostages are free

The string of attacks inspired by Chechen radicals in the past few weeks has brought a general sense of insecurity to many ordinary Russians - akin to that felt by many Americans after the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

Whatever the popular Russian mood towards Chechnya, there are going to be many people who will now ask fundamental questions about their government's capacity to ensure their safety.

It is a question that Mr Putin may well be asking of his generals and intelligence chiefs as well.

This single act makes me a whole lot less sympathetic to the chechan seperatists' desires.

Really sad, littlek. I was watching this on the BBC News and started crying. Those pitiful little bodies and the bereft families. THere was a little boy so traumatized that he couldn't remember his name.

One of the contingencies that they missed, Panzade... there were no ambulances standing by so the first casualties were taken by private car to the hospital.

Oh my god, imagine surviving that? Geezus, those poor children.

Incredible

But understandable for the Russians wouldn't want to intimate that things could turn out poorly.

How many people were taken hostage inside that school -- over 600? How could they not think that things would turn out poorly when they ran into the school with tanks?

I tried to imagine what the local cops might do if that happened here. Not many law enforcement officers would know what to do.

ditto here

I actually had a nightmare about the situation last night.

I was watching a bit of this on the news and they showed a young mother going from one casualty to the next, tentatively lifting the sheet to see if this one was her child.

Heartbreaking stuff.

The ancient formulary of the Tsars was: "Of Great Russia, of Little Russia, and of all the Russias, Autocrat." Although theoretically, Petr I (Peter the Great) made all of his Romanov successors Emperors, they were still called, and called themselves Tsars. Of all of the Romanov Tsars, the one most like Petr Alexeevitch in fully taking up the role of Autocrat was Nicholas I. He was the grandson of Ekaterin II (Catherine the Great, a German, born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst). Nicholas Pavlovich was the third son of his father, who was still the Tsarevitch in 1796 when Nicholas was born. As was her custom, Catherine had him immediately removed from his mother's care, and took him into her own quarters to raise him. But she died within five months. Nicolas and his brother Mikhail were given into the care of one of Catherine's retired German General's, Lamsdorff. As a third son, with his grandmother dead, Nicholas' education was not an important consideration. Having a stubborn streak like his illustrious ancestor Petr, and his grandmother, he resisted what little education was given him, and he was only interested by one subject, the French Revolution, an event he viewed with an obsessive horrified fascination at the excesses of the regicides--the events were very fresh when he was a boy, and had horrified his entire family. His mother had little interest in him and no time for him.

By the time he came of age, and married the frail Charlotte of Prussia (and he was considered by many to be an extremely attractive young man, one English noblewoman calling him the handsomest man in Europe), the succession was in some doubt. Alexandr I and his wife had no children. The second brother, Konstantin, was uninterested in the throne, and may have been mentally ill. When Alexandr died in mysterious circumstances in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, in 1825, Nicholas managed to survive an attempted coup by an aristocratic group known as the Decembrists, who likely thought to gain ultimate power themselves through manipulating Konstantin. But Alexandr had secretly designated Nicholas as his successor, and within a few weeks of his brother's death, Nicholas was "of Great Russia and Little Russia, and all the Russias, Autocrat."

Ill-educated, devoted to his status as Autocrat, soured and suspicious after the Decembrist incident, Nicholas was possibly the most conservative monarch in a Europe dedicated to conservatism. After the settlement in Vienna in 1815, Russian, Austria and Prussia had formed "the Holy Alliance," the purpose of which was to extinguish any trace of all movements toward popular government, assure the suppression of France, and assure the stabilty of central Europe. In Nicholas, the alliance had its greatest bulwark, and it's strongest reactionary leader.

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The earliest mention of the Chechens of which i know is during the reign of Tamara Georgiu, the Queen of Georgia in the Caucusus. When her father David died, she had to suppress an uprising among her own people, a proud and warlike people who had unsuccessfully attempted to fight off the Turk, and many of whom would not be ruled by a woman. She succeeded however, and made herself the undisputed ruler in 1184. Her opponents tried another uprising, using the "wild Caucasian tribesmen" as allies, and perhaps the bitterest of the many military campaigns which she conducted in person was in the suppression of the Chechens. Georgians like to claim that under Tamara, a Renaissance occured in Georgia two centuries before that in Italy. Tamara successfully suppressed the Ossetians, the Chechens, the Ingusetians, and drove back the Turks to establish the independence and the supremecy of Georgia in the Caucasus. To fight the Turks, she enlisted those same tribesmen, who were willing to serve under so warlike a woman as to have defeated them when all of her predecessors had failed or simply not tried.

The short life of the magnificence of the Georgian kingdom was snuffed out in the Mongol conquest. Although Mongol supremecy did not last long, their client nation, the Tatars, made themselves master of the region, and many Chechens and Ossetians enlisted in their ranks. The Chechens became Muslims as did the Tatars; unlike their former Tatar masters, they never recognized the authority of the Turk. When the Persians attempted to dominate the region, they failed utterly in the military realm, but their trade was valued, and their towns were tolerated. When Petr Alexeevitch marched through the region, the Chechens simply slaughtered the Russians sent to deal with them, and faded back into the Mountains, where Petr wisely did not attempt to follow.

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Alexandr began a campaign against them in 1817. Although the Russians would defeat any force the Chechens mounted against them, they dared not attempt to follow them into the mountains, and a hateful truce setteled over the Caucasus. The Russians had better results with the Georgians and the Ossetians, because the former had remained Christian, and few of the latter had become Muslim--the Russians looked like protecting them as Christians afloat on a sea of Islam in the region. Nicholas, for all of his vanity and ignorance, was a devout man, and a hard-headed man, totally devoted to his autocracy, which he soon styled the "Nicholas system," with his slogan, "One Tsar, One Faith, One Nation." He set out to ruthlessly suppress all dissent, to make all the subjects of his realm Orthodox christians, to end all ethnic distinctions, to extinguish all other cultures and religions. With the war against Turkey on his hands, fighting the English and the French in the Crimea, Nicholas reacted with irrational fury to Muslim revolts in the mountains. The Imam Shamyl lead a Chechen uprising, and Nicholas suppressed in a bloody campaign against which the butcher bill at Sevastapol paled. Fighting endless insurrections, with every supply convoy subject to raids, with every able bodied boy and man a potential soldier or assassin, the Russians hacked their way into Chechen territory and set up a military city in the principle Chechen town--and named it Grozny. Grozny can be translated in many ways from the Russian, usually as evil or terrible: Ivan the Great is Grozny Ivan--Ivan the Thunderous, or Ivan the Terrible. In this case, Russians most often translate Grozny as Hell. Although Nicholas died in 1855, the war to suppress the Chechens lasted from 1853 until 1864, when the Chechens finally surrendered. The Chechens rose again in 1877, and were as ruthlessly supppressed.

In 1918, the Bosheviks seized the region with Trostsky's Red Army. But in the prolonged civil war, Chechnya again became a bastion of resistance, and a White Russian Army lead by General Denikin, heavily recruiting Chechens and Ingusetians, threw the Bolsheviks out in 1919. The Red Army clawed its way back in 1921, and Chechnya was made a part of the Mountain People's Republic. A Chechen Autonomous Region was created in 1922. It was recognized by the Soviet state as an ethnic region, the Chechen-Ingush Region, in 1934, and made an autonomous republic in 1936. During the Great Patriotic War, the Chechens and Ingusetians collaborated with the Germans (anything to revenge themselves on the Russians) and thousands of the mountain tribesman fought for the Germans. When Stalin's troops reconquered the region in 1944, tens of thousands were deported to Central Asia. In 1956, under Krushchev, the deportees who could still be identified were repatriated, and the autonomous Republic was reestablished in 1957.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Chechens declared their independence and established the Republic of Ichkeria; the Ingush soon established themselves in the western quarter as the Republic of Ingusetia. The story of Dudayev and the renewed war between the Russians and the Chechens should be easily found on-line. I've checked my facts and found new information (new to me) at Britannica on-line and a few other "on-line encyclopedias." No one need doubt that this struggle is far from over. In thinking of the Chechens and the Russians, apt metaphors would be the Catholic-Protestant war of three centuries in Ulster, or the pigheaded Serbian war against the Turks (and they called the Bosnians "Turks" in the 1990's) for the last 7- or 800 years. It won't be over soon, and it will be just as ugly as both sides can make it.

Remember the hijacked theatre a few moons back? The gas that killed captors and hostages alike?

If I were a Russian hostage, I would be very nervous about my chances of being rescued alive.

I understand from a PBS interview that your average Russian-in-the-Street is accustomed to surviving by sitting tight and following orders.

Is it possible that the Chechen rebels are so intoxicated with their own rhetoric that they can't comprehend how dead children affect world opinion? I had some sympathy for them before they started killing potential sympathizers.

Lord what fools we mortals be.

Another killer post Set.

News is reporting Russian officials as saying that the action was unplanned - and began when terrorists opened fire on soldiers on a negotiated mission to retrieve bodies - and that a number of children broke for freedom, and were being fired on by terrorists - and that a terrorist ignited a suicide bomb in the gymnasium holding the prisoners.

Doesn't sound like there was much choice.

And - they broke down walls to let captives escaps.

Kids didn't have long anyway, poor li'l things - were not being allowed water.

This has been such terrible news. I pray this doesn't fuel other terrorists to do the same thing.

Wonderful! Wonderful! Watch this forum of wisemen and soothsayers start by blaming the rescuers of the hostages and not the the evil murdering bastards who took those innocent souls. True to form you wonderful humanitarians.

Gleeful and glib the Chuckster never disappoints

He has a point, although he may be imposing it on this thread.

It is amazing to me that this is not THE news story throughout the world.

It is amazing to me than anyone would suggest that the Russian security forces might be to blame.

What can be more heinous that firing automatic weapons at children trying to flee from a building in which explosives are going off?

Have we reached a point where we accept anything from Terrorists, that they are somehow a force of nature and therefore any blame for a terrorist disaster must be directed at those that don't necessarily respond properly?

For me, this is more horrific than 9/11.

If this cannot galvanize the world against terrorism and Islamic terrorism at that, nothing can.

Perhaps you misunderstood Finn. I posted a report from the BBC stating that the Russian Security forces had botched the operation, that perhaps there was a lot of needless carnage. In no way does this infer that the Chechens are innocent. It would behoove all the nations fighting terrorism to learn from these mistakes for it is just a matter of time before this scenario is repeated.

Chucky certainly is imposing his "point" on this thread. In another thread, Chuck contends that Chechens are part of some monolithic world-wide Islamo-facist terrorist movement. This is niave, but more than that, it is part an parcel of the bill of goods which the neo-cons wish to sell you, and which the religious right laps up. Cast as a holy crusade, the "war on terror" (never more than half-heartedly waged by the Shrub and his Forty Thieves) is an preeminent manipulative tool for imposing an agenda which has not the least to do with waging war on terror.

Chuck asserts, without providing any substantiation, that ten of the Chechens had "middle-eastern" passports. I laughed aloud. Can someone direct me to The Middle-eastern Consulate, so i can get one of those nifty passports myself? Even a passing familiarity with the Russian-Chechen bloodbath, now nearly two centuries old, will know that the Chechens and the Ingush will make a bargain with Old Nick himself if they think they can further their war against the Russians. In the brief review of the history of the conflict given above, you'll note that they allied themselves to other Russians (the White Russians) and the Nazis in the attempt to throw off the Russian yoke. No one is going to save any lives, nor do anything to lessen the threat of terrorist attacks by tailoring from whole cloth any contention of "Islamo-facists" in a world-wide conspiracy which must be eradicated by self-righteous christians everywhere. That is the slippery slope to becoming automatons in a 1984-like world order, to becoming the same sort of murderous sons-of-bitches which have here been rightfully condemned, long before Chuck showed up with his "Onward Christian Soldiers" horseshit. But you rock on, Finn, i already know you come here to pick fights, as opposed to learning or teaching useful knowledge.