A Year Later, Beslan Parents Still Angry Over 335 Dead In Siege

by Kester Kenn Klomegah

(IPS) MOSCOW -- Thousands of Russians gathered to mourn the Beslan dead Thursday, a year after the deadly school siege.

Parents and relatives of the 335 dead, children mostly, were joined by thousands of others in laying wreaths on graves at a cemetery set up by school No: 1. More than a thousand had been taken hostage by terrorists at the school Sept. 1 last year.

The mourning extended far beyond Beslan town in the republic of North Ossetia. Services were held at Orthodox churches across the country all week. Black posters saying only "Without Words" were pasted on public transport and along Moscow streets.

At Beslan the commemoration itself took place amid tight security. National television showed mourners being searched and their belongings checked by sniffer dogs.

But the commemoration was not all a picture of grief. Anger showed through.

Parents of many of the children who died say the Russian government has not learned from its mistakes, and that Russia is open to more terrorist attacks. And they want to know why the government failed to protect the Beslan hostages.

Members of the Beslan mothers committee will meet with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Friday to raise their concerns.

The mothers decided to accept the invitation despite a month-long standoff with officials over their insistence that authorities must do more to locate the masterminds behind the killings. The mothers group says senior officials in the federal security service and the interior ministry should be held accountable for how the crisis was handled.

The scheduled Kremlin meeting has divided the committee. Some opposed the trip, saying its timing was inappropriate. Others felt it was a chance to speak their mind.

In the year since the Beslan killings, Russia has seen increased violence and terrorist attacks almost everywhere in the north Caucasus, including Ingushetia, Dagestan, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Kabarda-Balkaria and Astrakhan regions.

"The whole region looks like a powder barrel and nobody knows where and how an explosion will take place," associate researcher Nikolay Petrov with the Carnegie Moscow Center, a strategic think tank, told IPS. "The whole bunch of ethnic, socio-economic and political problems make the region an absolute leader in terms of instability, and extremely risky for the civilian population."

These problems have arisen due to a "wrong political approach and ill-advis ed strategies, while some were conservatively hidden under the carpet from the public instead of solving them," Petrov said. The decade-long war in Chechnya had led Kremlin authorities to support corrupt and inefficient regional leaderships with increased budgetary allocation in an attempt to avoid any further destabilization, he said.

A year after the hostage tragedy, the inter-parliamentary investigative commission is yet to come up with a report. But commission chairman Alexander Torshin refuted suggestions that the commission is not sufficiently professional.

"In a situation like this attacks on the commission are a normal thing and the deputies understand this," Torshin said in a statement. "We'll continue doing our work, disregarding attempts to pressure us. In fact, no one is trying to put pressure on us except media."

Meanwhile, a first group of psychologists from Beslan has been trained in Israel to treat post-trauma syndrome.

"The situation still requires adequate psychological counseling in order to minimize the negative effects of the tragedy among the children and their families," psychology professor Galina Soldatova from the Moscow State University told IPS. "It should not just be for a short term, and not just former hostages, but also people who watched the Beslan tragedy need psychological aid."

Effects linger even though a year has gone by, she said. "It can't easily be forgotten, and specialists have to continuously provide post-trauma aid to the most affected families." Soldatova is among a team of psychologists who regularly visit Beslan, a town of about 35,000 people.

Meanwhile, the Russian government on Wednesday approved 11.61 million rubles ($400,000) from the government's reserve fund to further help victims of the terror attack.