3 September 2004The Guardian
Children make it different. Like the tragedies of Columbine and Dunblane, the terror that stalks the classrooms of besieged Middle School 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia, is uniquely disturbing.
Who in these torrid days of random, global violence has not become accustomed, even inured, to the suicide bombings in Iraq or a host of other troublespots? Yet who, anywhere in the world, is not touched, angered or frightened - or all three - by the thought of young kids traumatised by masked killers wearing bomb-belts?
When the victims are children, the sort of horror on show in Beslan, real or threatened, represents the adult world's ultimate betrayal of innocence, its final failure to nurture and protect. Here is a shared disgrace, borne of a universal grief. Here is an international crying shame, beseeching an urgent remedy.
The Chechen conflict, in which the Ossetian siege is inextricably bound up, has become internationalised in many other ways since it reignited, in its modern incarnation, in the early 1990s. Like Czechoslovakia in a different time, the Caucasian lands of Chechnya, North and South Ossetia, Ingushetia and Dagestan cannot be dismissed as distant countries of which we know little and care less. What happens there matters here.
"Their suffering is our suffering," Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said yesterday. "The awesome responsibility of President Putin and his government is our responsibility, too."
The mere fact of non-stop international media coverage makes Beslan school a shared reality around the world. The inescapable fact that the Chechen conflict once again pits Muslim peoples against Christians or plain non-believers, setting "Islam" against the "west", sounds an only too familiar post-9/11 global echo.
Putin pins the blame for the escalating crisis, perhaps the gravest of his presidency, not on home-grown Chechen fighters but, primarily, on an international Islamist conspiracy linked to al-Qaida.
The evidence for his contention is thin and often contradictory. But one thing is undoubtedly true. Since plunging recklessly back into Chechnya in 1994, Putin, his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, and the once proud Red Army have caused such untold misery, such rank injustice, such fury and despair that, like the Americans in Iraq, they created a breeding ground and magnet for the religious extremists they struggle to extirpate.
In effect, it was Russian generals and their turncoat allies who internationalised a war that should never have begun and which could have been peaceably resolved long ago. For this foolishness, Russia's conscript soldiers still pay a terrible price.
The risk of a spreading, regional conflagration grows with every outrage, every unanswered act of blood - and with every broken child. Since the time of the tsars, the mountain tribes of the Caucasus have fought for land, faith and just for the hell of it. In A Hero Of Our Time, novelist Mikhail Lermontov wrote admiringly in 1840 of the bravery of his opponents along Russia's lawless southern flank.
But now Caucasian instability threatens ever more broadly. Neighbouring Georgia, home to last November's "rose revolution", is no model of stability. And by coincidence, the Beslan siege has forced the postponement of a presidential visit to Turkey, Russia's historic Ottoman rival. Putin wants to build up trade and other links. But primarily, he needs Turkey as a southern bulwark of stability and security in a region sliding dangerously beyond Moscow's control.
Ten long years of destructive, on-off conflict, egregious human rights abuses, massive refugee displacements and blatant flouting of international law have also rendered Chechnya a matter of undeniable international concern. Organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the OSCE have kept a brave and faithful tally of the human toll and political cost of Russia's heedless policy. Again and again, campaigners have lobbied western governments to draw a diplomatic line, to sponsor a political process, to honestly recognise Chechnya for what it ever more evidently is - a threat to international peace and security, as defined by the UN. Again and again, those same governments, including Britain's, have mostly preferred to look the other way.
When Tony Blair talks of Britain's "moral responsibility" in Darfur and Iraq; when he speaks, as most famously in Chicago in 1999, of the criteria for intervention; when he sends troops dashing off to Kabul and Freetown, where in all this is there a thought for Chechnya? Ten years of conflict, tens of thousands dead and no end remotely in sight.
When Straw yesterday spoke of the "expanded range of issues" on which the UN will now consider the use of outside force under chapter VII - including "the overthrow of democratically elected government, terrorism, large-scale human rights violations, humanitarian catastrophe (and) refugee crises" - can he credibly exclude Chechnya which, in truth, arguably qualifies in all categories?
Russia has always maintained that the Chechen conflict is an internal matter, to be resolved internally. But now that Putin, by asking for international support, has for the first time effectively invited the security council to consider the issue, western leaders have a clear choice.
Britain and others can hide behind the pretence that, as Putin maintains, violence in the Caucasus is just another front in the US-led "war on terror" - and close their eyes to causes and remedies. They can give Putin what he wants, which is carte blanche to do whatever he deems necessary. Or they can find the courage to change the habit of the past decade. They can dispense with the sort of mealy-mouthed, turpitudinous shuffling-about indulged in by France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schröder at their recent meeting with Putin. And they can insist instead that in return for active western support, Russia must finally accept the obvious: that Chechnya is a pressing, international problem requiring an agreed, collective, non-violent, international response.
Is it so absurd to suggest that EU troops, or even forces organised through Nato, be deployed under a UN peacekeeping mandate? Is it practically impossible to set in train some form of externally mediated peace dialogue, currently absent?
Chechnya offers a key test of how, if at all, new, much-discussed post-Iraq rules governing future humanitarian and security interventions can be made to work. Certainly Chechnya is a devilish hard case to crack. Certainly it would be a fraught undertaking. But it is surely worth it - if only for the sake of the children.
