A tolling bell and 332 white balloons — one for each victim — will commemorate on Friday the second anniversary of the school hostage massacre in Beslan, where the mental and political scars of the tragedy remain raw.
Commemorations will begin Friday at 9.15am (5.15am GMT) in the mountainous province of North Ossetia in southern Russia’s turbulent North Caucasus region — two years to the minute after dozens of militants burst into Beslan’s School Number One on September 1 2004.
They will conclude on Sunday with schoolchildren releasing the balloons followed by a minute of silence throughout the province at 1.05pm, the moment when the three-day hostage stand-off came to a horrifying end.
The gunmen, who were demanding an end to the war in nearby Chechnya, took hostage more than a thousand people celebrating the start of the academic year.
The siege ended when special forces backed by heavy weapons launched a chaotic assault in which hundreds died, including 186 children.
The latest victim was a woman who died just two weeks ago after never recovering from her wounds, bringing the total to 332.
The final bloodbath on September 3 horrified television viewers around the world and shook Russia, bogged down in a bloody and widely condemned war against Chechen rebels for more than a decade, to its core.
In the aftermath, President Vladimir Putin stunned observers by using the attack to justify a series of political reforms significantly strengthening the Kremlin’s already growing dominance of the political landscape.
Moscow poured compensation money into Beslan and promised an open investigation.
The man officials described as the sole surviving hostage-taker out of a total of 32 was sentenced to life in prison this May and the Chechen rebel leader who claimed responsibility for the attack, Shamil Basayev, was announced killed in July.
Yet two years later, many Beslan survivors say they feel cheated — that the Kremlin used the tragedy for its own ends without ever seriously intending to find out what happened.
That sense of bitterness haunts the ceremonies organised to mark the second anniversary, just as they did the emotional first anniversary last year.
Officials in North Ossetia say that mourners will start laying flowers at the ruins of School Number One after the minute of silence on Friday.
At midday, there will be a ceremony at the graveyard outside Beslan, where more than 300 of the victims lie, in honour of soldiers from the elite Alpha and Vympel units who were killed in the final battle.
On Sunday, the 332 white balloons will be released to mark the moment when the battle began. That evening a concert will be held at a stadium in the provincial capital Vladikavkaz.
However, the victims’ group Mothers of Beslan warned officials seen as having been negligent during the crisis to keep away from the ceremonies.
The statement blamed numerous political figures, including regional leaders and the heads of the official investigations, for having helped provoke the tragedy, or trying to cover up the aftermath.
”We’d see their presence at the graves of our children and loved ones during these days of mourning as an insult to all the dead and living,” the group said in a statement.
”We are convinced that the difficult last two years have not brought us to the truth about the Beslan tragedy but to the covering up of the truth.”
That lack of trust means that even the trial of Nurpashi Kulayev, who officials say was the only hostage-taker not to die during the fighting, failed to bring closure to victims and their relatives.
”One person cannot be responsible for the deaths of more than 300. Those who allowed the fighters to travel unhindered to Beslan along federal roads should sit in his place. And those who allowed the bloody ending,” said Valery Karlov, who lost his father.
Neither are locals putting faith in a major enquiry being carried out by a Russian parliamentary commission. After repeated delays, publication is expected at the end of September.
”We already know what they will write,” said Fatima Dudiyeva, a surviving hostage and the only member of the police to have been at the school on the morning of the attack. ”They will write everything to defend the authorities.”
Alternative investigations, including by Yury Savelyev, a dissenting member of the official parliamentary commission, have already put much of the blame at the authorities’ feet.
Savelyev, who is also an explosives expert, said that the battle was initiated not by militants inside the school, as most officials insist, but by a volley of rocket-grenades fired from outside.
He also says that massive and indiscriminate fire by tanks and rocket-grenades, as well as a fire caused by one of the rocket-grenades, killed a large proportion of the trapped hostages.
Other independent investigations claim that far more than 32 hostage-takers were present and, despite government assurances, that many escaped.
Officials announced that security will be heightened at schools across North Ossetia when the academic year opens on Friday.
But Anneta Gadiyeva, who lost her young daughter in the school two years ago, is not impressed.
”We mean nothing to the authorities. They used us for their political goals and next time the same thing could happen. Beslan didn’t teach society or the authorities a thing.” – Reuters