In Beslan, they are filling in the holes. The cemetery on the road from the airport is a sprawling mass of upturned earth, each fresh grave marked out from the surrounding mud by a perimeter of red bricks. The flowers and bare wooden stick crosses jut out from the rough grazing pasture.
A fortnight after the Beslan siege, the funerals are still going on, and 70 graves remain unfilled. The empty soil trenches are a reminder of how many families still face the gruesome process of identifying the scorched remains of their dead.
Lubov Salamova (58) weeps at the grave of her grandson, Sergei Alkaev. ”He would have been 15 this month. His mother died in a gas explosion at home years earlier, and now he has left me. He was found dead in the gym, his head and hands partly missing. He was such a good boy”. Across the 188 fresh graves, the sound of wailing hangs in the country air.
They are also filling in the holes outside Middle School Number 1. Aslan and another workman drill away the surface of the road near the garages on the school’s left. Here, a fortnight earlier, Russian special forces and hysterical locals had broken a hole in the garage walls, giving access to the school’s courtyard, where the bloody siege was into its second hour. Through the hole poured grimy, bloody children and parents on to waiting stretchers and into local cars, requisitioned for want of ambulances. Aslan explains that his orders are to dig up the pock-marks and make the road smooth again, to remove the traces of the grenade blasts and bullets.
No such cosmetic considerations are in evidence at the school itself. It remains an open monument to the town’s grief and catalyst for its anger. For two weeks, locals have simply trudged over its ruins, mindless to the human remains and unspent ordnance buried under them. The remains of ”Boevik 3” — the Russian prosecutor’s ID for ”militant 3” of the 32 who seized the school — still lie outside. His mortar shell, webbing, gloves, the dusty knot of his gristle, are turned over by a curious youth’s trainer.
The school’s serene calm is punctuated by the indelible smell of fire and the mourning of local mothers. Revenge is part of the vocabulary of grieving here; amid the rubble, there has been talk of war. Zaur Rubayev (16) stands hunched with four other teenagers, mulling over the loss of his brother, Hassan (14) in the shade of the school walls. He tells me: ”Of course I want revenge, but against who?”
Anger has grown against the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia, from where some of the terrorists came, and against whom North Ossetia fought a bloody war in 1992. Many fear Beslan’s grief could eventually spark conflict in a region as ethnically diverse and tense as the former Yugoslavia. But Rubayev says: ”What’s the point of attacking them? We can’t go and kill their children.”
Instead, around them are signs of how their grief has been internationalised, appropriated by the various”wars on terror” fought worldwide. The Israeli government has sent hundreds of bouquets that now line the walls along the gym.
Beslan’s scars are rarely far from the surface. Near the gym I meet Diana Gagiyeva and Borik Rubayev, both aged seven. They play together despite the terrible gulf that the siege has created between them. Diana escaped from the gym with her mother, and grins, ”I don’t know,” when asked about her return to school. Borik was dragged from the wreckage by a rescuer whose face he cannot remember. He is clearer on another fact. ”I don’t have a father or mother”, he says. ”Well, I did, and he was called Arthur, and she was called Lena, but they both died there.” He points towards his school.
There also remain many gaps in the town’s grasp of events. Why did the first bomb detonate, sparking the chaotic storming of the building? Few believe that the government is telling the truth about the number of dead. The local administration says 1 347 people were taken hostage, while the prosecutor insists that only 329 of the 1 156 hostages died.
At the Palace of Youth, a rickety, unmaintained theatre hall, a private, local meeting is taking place at 1pm on Wednesday. Outside, bearded, husky men gather in circles. ”Of course the real number of dead is higher than 329 — just look at the number of graves there are”, says one. The unemployed, the grieving and angry, and even the prosecutor and local mayor, pile into the theatre. After a 10-second, respectful silence, some take it in turns to speak. Most talk in soothing truisms. Yet a war veteran from the 92 war against Ingushetia stands, a crutch in place of his missing leg, to interrupt one speech. ”We need revenge. We need to mobilise the youth”, he says. ”We need to get rid of our local president”.
Above all, what the people of Beslan crave is answers to the countless questions that followed hard on the heels of the grief and shock. Who were these people who were prepared to turn a school into a charnel house? Why Beslan? Why our school? Why was the siege so catastrophically mismanaged?How on earth did it come to this?
It will take months or even years to produce meaningful answers, if it is ever possible to answer adequately such questions. But to try to fill in a few of the unfilled holes in the story of Middle School Number 1, I head east from Beslan, along the sparse highways across Ingushetia, and into the hills of Chechnya where the seeds of Russia’s September 11 were planted. To understand the road to Beslan, I follow the road out of it.
In the days following the massacre, Beslan’s anger focused on neighbouring Ingushetia but the first piece of this bloody puzzle lay uncomfortably close to home. Twenty minutes drive south through barren, green plains and dejected roadside houses is the town of Elkhotovo. It’s a sleepy place, an armed policeman guarding a nursery school the only sign of its proximity to the horrors of a few weeks ago.
In the leafy courtyard of one Soviet-era housing block is the groundfloor flat where Vladimir Khodov lived. My driver, Timur, knows of Khodov, and takes me straight there. Some time ago, Khodov’s brother, Borik, had abducted one of Timur’s relatives, Sveta Gabisova. Later, he was killed in revenge by another of Timur’s relatives, Sveta’s brother, Iriston Gabisov. Yet Vladimir went on to eclipse his brother’s parochial notoriety.
Khodov is the only North Ossetian who has been identified so far out of the 32 militants who seized the Beslan school. Now his old, starving cat, Dima — sipping a watery-yellow liquid from the cut off-end of a plastic bottle — is the only sign of life at his former flat. Here, his mother, Alexandria, and father, Anatoly lived, their two sons occasionally coming home from prison or elsewhere.
When I arrive, neighbour Lyda Darakhokova (50) is in her garage, busy forcing homegrown cucumbers into large pickling jars ahead of winter. She tells me that Anatoly was a good man, but recalls little about the mother. ”Vladimir was a character,” she says. ”Both the brothers were underhand and cunning. Vladimir was not an Ossetian,” she insists, ”he was Russian.”
She says he was converted to the Muslim faith when in jail and left the family home in 2003, coming back only for three days to bury his brother in June. My driver Timur recalls how his mother watched at Borik’s funeral while Vladimir burst in. Outraged at the Orthodox Christian funeral, he carried away the corpse to give it a proper Muslim burial and then disappeared again.
Vladimir became a wanted man when he set off a bomb in the market of the main city of Vladikavkaz in February, according to locals and media reports. He next appeared in Middle School Number 1.
Lyda adds: ”The police took Alexandria away at 5pm on the night of the siege and we have not seen her since. We know nothing about her now.”
I peer through a gap in their flat curtains to see ageing flowers in a vase on the empty flat floor. ”It’s hard to understand”, she adds. ”Children?”
Crossing the border
It is 30 minutes’ drive east through rows of fallow cornfields and verdant sloping hills to the border with Ingushetia. The frontier is closed to cars — a weak bid to keep putative hordes of vengeful Ossetians out. Yet I manage to cross on foot, walk past the open door of a Russian military armoured personnel carrier (APC) parked at the border post’s tranquil roundabout, and then the capital of Nazran is only 10 minutes away in a taxi.
Two years ago, Ingushetia was a quiet haven to which Chechens fled to escape the ongoing violence of their shattered homeland. Tent-camp cities of refugees emerged on the border, their inhabitants quickly discovering that the horrors of Chechnya followed them. Moscow has for centuries lumped the Ingush and Chechen people together. Stalin sent them both to Kazakhstan in 1944, considering them an equal threat. Brezhnev eventually allowed them home. After the second Chechen war, Russian officials began to suspect that the Ingush president, Ruslan Aushev, was allowing separatists to shelter in Ingushetia, and installed a former KGB officer, Murat Zyazikov, as president. His hardline regime has attempted to send the refugees home, yet also allowed Russian troops to begin replicating in Ingushetia the brutal tactics of their Chechen campaign.
The past year has seen the republic transformed from a quiet farming community into the new frontline in Russia’s purported war on terror. It began with occasional disappearances and abductions. Then, four students who were quietly sitting and smoking by a river one March evening, were shot at by a Russian military helicopter. Two of them were killed. Days later, the military surrounded a house where they claimed militants were sheltering, and blew it to pieces with grenades. Tensions rose, and Ingushetia became a more dangerous place to be than neighbouring Chechnya, where a decade-old war still rages.
On June 21 at 8pm, up to 200 militants burst into the republic’s capital, Nazran, and began murdering local policemen. They easily gained control of the capital and some of its major buildings, setting up checkpoints, where they stopped cars, and shot dead local law-enforcement officials. Up to 100 people died in one night. By all accounts, the well-equipped Russian troops stationed there did little to confront the militants.
Now Ingushetia has been reluctantly dragged into the spotlight again. At least three of the Beslan militants lived, or were born in, this tiny, volatile republic, which you can drive across in 20 minutes. I drive north from Nazran to thetown of Sagopshi. For much of this year, Sagopshi has been a peaceful place, though it has been bequeathed a modest infamy by its former resident, Bei-Ala Tsechoyev (27).
Tsechoyev lived on a broad, sparsely populated road here. Some men selling motor parts at the market point me immediately towards his home, and local hospitality soon has me standing in the courtyard of his uncle, Magomed (70) who fumes at his people’s fate.
”I served in the army and was sent to Kazakhstan for 13 years. I worked 24 hours a day for the Soviets. I fought in the 92 war where the Ossetians killed children and pregnant women. Nobody cared then. But now we have the KGB and the FSB all over us. And everybody suddenly cares — but about Beslan. I want to live like a man here and for a woman to be able to live like a woman. Without that, it is better not to live.”
His supposed neighbour goes next door to ask if Tsechoyev’s family want to speak, and returns with an emphatic ”No”. A few minutes later, I approach their door myself and the supposed neighbour answers. ”OK, so really I am his brother,” he admits. ”What do you want?”
At first, Hussein (25) insists that he has seen his brother since the siege but after a while he softens. ”Look, you are English. Where do you live? England. The [Chechens] are fighting for their independence, too.” We begin to talk about the supposed influence of foreigners — namely Saudi Arabian Wahhabite extremists — on the Chechen separatist cause. Moscow has long maintained that the independence movement sold out to well-funded Wahhabite groups once the separatist core began to flag in the late-90s. Yet Hussein insists: ”There are no Wahhabites, no Arabs here. We do not need Arabs.”
I ask for a photo of his brother and, now friendly and open, Hussein insists that there are none as Bei-Ala feared the police. ”He was part of an independence movement,” he says.
The media have reported that he fled town before Beslan because locals thought he was a Wahhabite and wanted him dead. As he fled, he reportedly shot a local police chief in the neck, wounding him and making his return impossible.
Hussein will not fill in the gaps in his brother’s story. No photo, no personal details, no fond memories. It is as if, for Hussein, his brother no longer exists. I ask Hussein where Bei-Ala may be now. He answers: ”Allah knows he is alive.” I leave a phone number that Bei-Ala never calls, and head for Malgobek, a few kilometres down the road.
The involvement of some Ingushetians in Beslan and other terrorist acts has fuelled Russian theories that Islamist extremism has spread across the Caucasus, involving them in a war on terror on their own soil. But across the region, most locals see the extremist violence as a radical extension of the Chechen separatist conflict, not some foreign, imported evil.
A local prosecutor confirmed to me media reports that the other Ingush militant was called Isa Torshkhoyev (26) and that he lived in Malgobek. It takes about an hour to drive up the long and dusty roads, often blocked with cows, to the small village, Stari — or Old — Malgobek. The town’s idyllic setting does little to soften its poverty. Media reports have laid much of the blame for Torshkhoyev’s extremist fate upon the collapsed economy here. A turner like his father, he could not find work. They reportedly ended up cutting down hay — a car’s worth can be sold for £30. Isa’s cousin, Kazbek, dug up bricks at an old, disused tile factory, selling them for 6p each. When the money ran out, the Wahabites were reported to often be the only source of income. Some of the bus stops here have Arabic writing on them.
Torshkhoyev’s mother, Luba (64) answers the door of her ramshackle cottage, wearing a green headscarf and a pair of cut-down Wellington boots, her toe poking through a hole in the left shoe. She points to the small shed behind her home, now a wreck of bricks, collapsing walls and rusted doors, where her son used to live.
In March of last year, Isa welcomed in six friends, apparently fellow Chechen refugees aged 16 to 22. He reportedly asked them for 300 rubles each, but they paid double. At 7.20am on March 5, according to testimony collected by the human rights group, Memorial, local police and Russian troops blocked off the roads to the house and approached the shed. Isa and his friends opened fire. A two-hour gunfight ensued, during which five of Isa’s guests were killed, while he and another escaped. One policeman died.
The FSB apparently believed that the men were ”boeviki” — a catch-all word that epitomises the gulf in perceptions in the conflict. It translates directly as ”fighter”, but means to some locals ”separatist fighter”, yet to Russian officials, ”terrorist militant”.
Luba says that her son never came back and that her husband and second son went to live in the village. She has nothing to say about him except that he had no friends and was ”a good Muslim boy”. The prosecutor had come to take away his possessions and a blood sample from her to help identify her son, she says. Her husband had been asked to identify a corpse in Beslan and said that it was not their son’s. – Guardian Unlimited Â