Posted on 09/04/2004 5:23:14 PM PDT by blam
Mr Putin will not be moved by this tragedy
By Oleg Gordievsky
(Filed: 05/09/2004)
Negotiating the release of hostages is never less than appallingly difficult. But I do not believe the crisis in the school in Beslan was bound to end in the deaths of hundreds of children. The official toll already stands at 322, half of them children, and is likely to go higher. The Russian "Spetsnaz", or Special Forces, who surrounded the school and who were in charge of containing the hostage crisis and bringing it to an end, have a reputation for fearsome, if brutal, efficiency. That reputation helps to sustain the belief, at least in the West, that there was very little that could have been done to prevent this disastrous outcome.
This is simply not true. Only part of the Spetsnaz's reputation is justified. They are certainly brutal. But they are not efficient, and never have been - even in the old days of the Cold War, when they were well financed. The Spetsnaz were assigned to assassinate President Amin in Afghanistan in December 1979. They bungled the operation comprehensively. True, they killed the president - but only after shooting dozens of their own comrades, and shooting his children.
The operation was aimed to be "clinical" and to assassinate the president with a minimum of what the Americans would call "collateral damage". It quickly turned into a nightmare of confusion and incompetence: members of the Spetsnaz teams (several of them had been assigned to the task) attacked in the dark, and then failed to recognise who was firing at whom - with the result that they ended up shooting each other, inflicting horrendous casualties on their own side.
Vladimir Putin was beginning his career in the KGB when it organised that debacle. Now the president of Russia, Putin has sent messages of condolence and sympathy to officials in the North Ossetia region where the terrorists took the school hostage. Yet the truth is that he is at least partially responsible for the fact that the siege ended in so horrible a blood-bath. The Russian siege negotiators and the Spetsnaz (there were several thousand of them) who had surrounded the school were totally unprepared for what happened. They knew that the terrorists had mined the school and had strapped bombs to themselves and its roof, but they had no contingency plans if one of those bombs went off.
That was what actually happened: in the chaos which followed the explosion, there was a break-out by some of the children, followed by some of the terrorists. Yet the Spetsnaz had failed to seal off the school, with the result that some of the terrorists managed to get away. There weren't even any ambulances waiting to take the wounded hostages to hospital. Many of the children who died will have been shot by Spetsnaz officers because they were caught in the crossfire between the terrorists shooting at them, and the Spetsnaz shooting at the terrorists. It is distinctly possible that the roof which collapsed and buried many more of the captured children under a pile of rubble was destroyed by a rocket fired by one of the besieging Spetsnaz.
Despite the official denials, President Putin was certainly planning to storm the school before the sudden explosions derailed that plan. He had taken the precaution of persuading the UN to issue a condemnation of the hostage-takers - thereby ensuring that the international community gave him carte blanche to deal with the incident as he saw fit. Storming the building would also certainly have caused hundreds of casualties - but that would not have deterred Putin.
Despite all the caring, sympathetic noises he is now making, Putin has a fabulous indifference to human life. When the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk was stuck on the bottom of the Baltic, its 118 crew suffocating and freezing slowly to death, he didn't even bother to interrupt his holiday. When he was later interviewed on CNN about what had happened to the Kursk, he simply smiled and said: "It went to the bottom." About the 118 Russians who died he said not a word.
The thousands of deaths in the war in Chechnya don't move him in the least. He regards them as "normal wastage" - a hardly noticeable price which has to be paid for maintaining Russian control of Chechnya. That is the traditional KGB view, an attitude I remember all too well from my own days in the organisation.
Russia's army and its security forces aim to inculcate an attitude of total indifference to the loss of human life, and they certainly succeeded in the case of Vladimir Putin. For example, for at least as long as he has been president, the Russian press has published stories about the more than 1,000 Russian army conscripts - they are teenage boys - who are killed every year during training, often as a result of being viciously bullied by other soldiers. And what has been Putin's response? Nothing at all.
Putin believes he can bludgeon the Chechens into submission. Hundreds of dead children from a school in North Ossetia won't be enough to persuade him to change that policy. He may never accept that it has failed. And yet Russia has very little reason to continue to be so intransigent on the issue of greater autonomy for Chechnya. Chechnya's oil reserves are almost spent; the country has few other natural resources; and its "strategic" importance to Russia is largely a myth. Most Chechens are not Islamic fundamentalists, or even seriously Islamic at all. Al-Qaeda is not welcome there, and I regard it as almost inconceivable that there was any serious al-Qaeda involvement in the hostage-taking in Ossetia, despite the claims from the Russians that they have identified 10 "Arabs" among the dead.
Putin has been able to convince the world that his war in Chechnya is part of the global "war on terror". It is not. It is a totally avoidable civil war which has very little to do with Osama bin Laden or indeed any group of Islamic fanatics. But by persuading gullible Western leaders such as Tony Blair and George W Bush that, in Chechnya, he is dealing with the same sort of people who destroyed the World Trade Center, Putin has been applauded, even while he uses exceptional cruelty in prosecuting his unnecessary war. No civilised person can deny that the hostage-takers have taken barbarity and inhumanity to new depths. But in President Putin, they are up against a leader who has as little regard for human life as they do.
Oleg Gordievsky was the highest-ranking KGB officer to work for MI6
The guy tipped his hand at the end. He's not a serious analyst, just another partisan.
You wrote:
"The accuser of Putin doesn't bother to explain what his policy would be vis a vis Chechnya and why. Folks who don't offer and defend an alternative, and just kvetch, waste bandwidth."
Kinda like that other Communist, Kewwy, vis-a-vis Iraq.
They are both delusional about the chances that they
will assume power.
You wrote:
" think Putin ought to take the people that the terriorists were demanding be released and let the folks in Beslan have a go at them."
Yes, that's it!
This is a pro-Chechen article. Think about it.
Typical liberal - blame the victim. Should have a barf alert.
Maybe Russia will be in a better mood to cooperate with us now.
I'm sure the police made mistakes but this is blaming the victims.
And yielding to terrorists who have taken children will result in the taking of more children.
This raises the issue to a frightening level. We are concerned about terrorism on a grand scale, the blowing up of a football stadium full of fans for example. But the killing of a few hundred innocent children strikes me as just as vicious a crime and much easier to pull off. Since we connot possibly guard all schools in the country, we had better get the offense going. Playing defense in this situation is not a good idea.
PS, I heard a discussion between Page Hopkins and an official concerned for the safety of schools. "Are we prepard for this in our country she asked?" Well the official ran around the circle about emergency planning, but the sad truth is that as long as weapons are kept out of schools, they are sitting ducks, and no amount of planning on the part of people charged with the education of kids is going to have any impact on terrorists bent on this kind of carnage.
This guy's flat-out wrong.
I'll say. You see there's some sympathy for Chechens considering the hand they've been dealt with under the old Soviet system. However they had autonomy in 1957, and they had even more after 1997 with their own parliament and own president.
However since then they declared Sharia law and have undertaken a sort of ethnic cleansing of of Orthodox and claims and invasions to adjacent territories. Very much like what happened in Kosovo. What was a tribal cultural autonomy seems to have turned into another Islamic jihadi adventure. Give them an inch they'll kill anything that is not Islamic.
We're in WWIV. Time to mount a Christian crusade.
Life Rule Number 13: "You never get credit for preventing what might have happened."
PERIOD!!!
Anything else conveyed is nothing but smoke to mask the true reasoning for such an atrocity!
You know, they picked a wrong fight with Russia. They picked a wrong fight with us, but with Russia--they don't have the political-correctness constraint like our country. No, I posted way back that I couldn't wait for the day Putin met Bush. I knew they would hit it off. Putin can work on instinct, President Bush has quite a few advisors to calm him down.
This is such an idiotic statement its mind blowing. These were not really hostage-takers, they were ruthless child murdering terrorists. These savages would not be the least bit impressed by any hollow condemnation from an effete organization like the UN.
Right now one set of those barbarians is sort of on our side, at least we have a common enemy. But they are still barbarians and will still be barbarians when this war is over. That is why we must not welcome them to the fight too enthusiastically. It is important that they win the battles within Russia and that we win all the rest of them else we find ourselves facing victorious Russian armies far from their borders.
See, when it closes towards the end with saying Tony and G.W. are gullible, I tend to review everything in the article with scepticism.
Russia didn't take terror as seriously as it should have. It displayed weakness. They are going to take a hit for that politically but it should be noted the people didn't take it seriously. We didn't either, before 9-11. Even now some still do not.
Putin came out with a decent response. The best thing he can do is take the hits, and strike back hard against terrorism. It'll all equal out if he is shown to take the threat seriously in months and years to come.
f' Chechnya. I hope they turn that country into a pile of rubble.
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