EDITORIAL – Casualties of conflict

The world mourns with Russia in its loss of over 300 people, many of them children held hostage in a school. Rebels demanding independence for Chechnya, some with explosives strapped to their bodies, raided the school in Beslan in southern Russia on Wednesday, school opening day. The rebels herded up to 1,200 children, teachers and parents to the school gym and kept them there at gunpoint without food or water.

On Friday, with the school surrounded by government forces and worried parents trying to get in, confusion reigned. Who started the firefight remains unclear, but witnesses reported that the rebels started shooting some of the hostages. During the firefight, the roof of the gymnasium collapsed, trapping the hostages packed together inside the building. By the time the smoke cleared, over 300 people were dead, most of them schoolchildren. Hundreds more were injured; many are likely to be permanently maimed or disfigured.

The carnage was worse than the attack on a Moscow theater, staged in October 2002 again by Chechen rebels. That attack left 129 hostages and 41 Chechen rebels dead. The tragedy in Beslan was just the latest in a violent separatist movement that was launched with the declaration of Chechen independence by then President Dzhokar Dudayev in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow has respond-ed to the separatist movement with brutal force and repression in Chechnya, which rebels have matched with similar viciousness. Last year alone 11 bomb attacks in Russia were believed to have been launched by Chechen rebels. This year the attacks have not abated. Only last Aug. 31, 10 people were killed in a Chechen attack on a Moscow subway stop. On Aug. 24, two commercial planes crashed almost simultaneously in Russia, killing 90 passengers. Investigators have des-cribed the crashes as terrorist attacks.

Moscow has been accused of se-rious human rights violations in its determination to crush the Chechen separatist movement. Yet it does no-thing for the Chechen cause when separatists use even children as bargaining chips in a deadly conflict. The death of innocents – over 300 of them – can only diminish any cause.