Putin Urges Strength; School Toll Tops 340

BESLAN, Russia (AP) - A shaken President Vladimir Putin made a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness Saturday in the face of an "all-out war" by terrorists after more than 340 people - nearly half of them children - were killed in a hostage-taking at a southern school.

Putin went on national television to tell Russians that they must mobilize against terrorism and promised wide-ranging reforms to toughen security forces and purge corruption.

Shocked relatives wandered among row after row of bodies lined up in black plastic or clear body bags on the pavement at a morgue in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, where the dead from the school standoff in Baslan were taken. In some open bags lay the contorted, thin bodies of children, some monstrously charred.

In Baslan, other relatives scoured lists of names to see if their loved ones had survived the chaos of the day before, when the standoff turned into violence, with militants setting off explosives in the school and commandos moving in to seize the building.

Workers cleaned up the gymnasium where the more than 1,000 hostages were held during the 62-hour ordeal. The gym of School No. 1 was reduced to a shell - the roof destroyed, the windows shattered - during Friday's fighting.

Regional Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev said 323 people, including 156 children, were killed. More than 542 people including 336 children were hospitalized, medical officials said.

Dzgoyev also said 35 attackers - heavily-armed and explosive-laden men and women who were reportedly demanding independence for Chechnya - were killed in 10 hours of battles that shook the area around the school with gunfire and explosions after 1 p.m. Friday. Earlier, a senior prosecutor had said there were only 26 militants and all were killed. The discrepancy could not immediately be explained.

Putin made a quick visit to the town before dawn Friday, meeting local officials and touring a hospital to speak with wounded. He stopped to stroke the head of one injured child.

But some in the region were unimpressed, as grief turned to anger, both at the militants and at the government response.

"Putin arrived and left in the middle of the night while everyone is sleeping, probably because he was afraid to talk with the people, to look them in the eyes," said Zalina Gutiyeva, 37, a pediatrician in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, a Russian Orthodox region set amid the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus.

It was still unclear how exactly the standoff fell apart into violence on Friday. Officials say security forces had not intended to storm the building but were forced to when hostage-takers set off explosives - some however questioned that version.

The militants seized the school on the first day of classes on Wednesday, herding hundreds of children, parents who had been dropping their kids off, and other adults into the gymnasium, which the militants promptly wired with explosives - including bombs hanging from the basketball hoops. The packed gym became sweltering, and the hostage-takers refused to allow in food or water.

One survivor, Sima Albegova, told the Kommersant newspaper she asked the militants, why the captives were taken. "Because you vote for your Putin," one of the militants told her, she said.

Another freed hostages said a militant told her, "The federal forces killed our children and you didn't help us. If Putin doesn't withdraw forces from Chechnya and doesn't free our arrested brothers, we'll blow everything up," according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.

Russian officials said the bloodshed began when explosions were apparently set off by the militants - possibly by accident - as emergency workers entered the school courtyard to collect the bodies of hostages killed in the initial raid Wednesday.

Diana Gadzhinova, a 14-year-old hostage, was quoted as telling Izvestia that the militants had ordered the hostages to lie face down in the gymnasium as workers approached to collect the bodies.

"They told us that there were going to be talks," she said. Others also told stories of how the explosions sent the militants guarding them running in what appeared to be confusion and surprise to see what had happened.

Hostages fled during the explosions, and the militants opened fire on them. Security forces opened fire in return, and commandos moved in, officials said.

The explosions tore through the roof of the gymnasium, sending wreckage down on hostages, killing many. Many survivors emerged naked covered in ashes and soot, their feet bloody from jumping barefoot out of broken windows to escape.

During his visit to Beslan, Putin stressed that security officials had not planned to storm the school - trying to fend off any potential criticism that the government side had provoked the bloodshed. He ordered the region's borders closed while officials searched for everyone connected with the attack.

"What happened was a terrorist act that was inhuman and unprecedented in its cruelty," Putin said in his televised speech later. "It is a challenge not to the president, the parliament and the government but a challenge to all of Russia, to all of our people. It is an attack on our nation."

Putin took a defiant tone, acknowledging Russia's weaknesses, but blaming it on the fall of the Soviet Union, foreign foes seeking to tear apart Russia and on corrupt officials. He said Russians could no longer live "carefree" and must all confront terrorism.

He called for Russians to mobilize against what he said was the "common danger" of terrorism. Measures would be taken, Putin promised, to overhaul the law enforcement organs, which he acknowledged had been infected by corruption, and tighten borders.

"We are obliged to create a much more effective security system and to demand action from our law enforcement organs that would be adequate to the level and scale of the new threats," he said.

The school attack was the latest violence thought connected to Chechen separatists who have been battling Russian rule for more than a decade. IT came after a suicide bomb attack outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday that killed eight people, and last week's near-simultaneous crashes of two Russian jetliners after what officials believe were explosions on board.

An unidentified intelligence official was quoted by the ITAR-Tass news agency as saying the school assault was financed by Abu Omar As-Seyf, an Arab who allegedly represents al-Qaida in Chechnya, and masterminded by Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev.

With some families gathering for wakes for the dead, some were vowing vengeance in North Ossetia, a Russian Orthodox Christian region in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus.

"Fathers will bury their children, and after 40 days (the Orthodox mourning period) ... they will take up weapons and seek revenge," said Alan Kargiyev, a 20-year-old university student in Vladikavkaz.

Text of Putin's speech:

It is a difficult and bitter task for me to speak. A horrible tragedy happened in our land. During these last few days, each one of us suffered immensely, having all that happened in the Russian city of Beslan run through our hearts. We were confronted not just by murderers, but those who used their weapons against defenseless children.

In the first place, I am addressing today those who lost the dearest in their life, their children, their kin, their closest. I want you to remember all those who died at the hands of terrorists in the last few days.

There have been many tragic pages and difficult trials in the history of Russia. Today we are living in conditions formed after the disintegration of a huge, great country, the country which unfortunately turned out to be nonviable in the conditions of rapidly changing world.

Today, however, despite all difficulties, we managed to preserve the nucleus of that giant, the Soviet Union. We called the new country the Russian Federation.

We all expected changes, changes for the better, but found ourselves absolutely unprepared for much that changed in our lives. The question is why. We live in conditions of a transitional economy and a political system that do not correspond to the development of society. We live in conditions of aggravated internal conflicts and ethnic conflicts that before were harshly suppressed by the governing ideology.

We stopped paying due attention to issues of defense and security. We allowed corruption to affect the judiciary and law enforcement systems. In addition to that, our country, which once had one of the mightiest systems of protecting its borders, suddenly found itself unprotected either from West or East.

It would take many years and billions of rubles to create new, modern and truly protected borders. But even so, we could have been more effective if we had acted in timely and professional fashion. We have to admit that we failed to recognize the complexity and danger of the processes going on in our own country and the world as a whole. At any rate, we failed to react to them adequately. We demonstrated weakness, and the weak are beaten.

Some want to tear off a big chunk of our country. Others help them to do it. They help because they think that Russia, as one of the greatest nuclear powers of the world, is still a threat, and this threat has to be eliminated. And terrorism is only an instrument to achieve these goals.

As I have said on many occasions, we have faced crises, rebellions and terrorist acts many times. But what has happened now - the unprecedented crime committed by terrorists, inhuman in its cruelty - is not a challenge to the president, the Parliament or the government. This is a challenge to all of Russia, to all our people. This is an attack against all of us.

Terrorists think that they are stronger, that they will be able to intimidate us, to paralyze our will, to erode our society. It seems that we have a choice: to resist or to cave in and agree with their claims; to give up and allow them to destroy and to take Russia apart, in hope that eventually they would leave us alone.

As president, as the head of the Russian state, as a man who gave an oath to protect the country and its integrity, as a citizen of Russia, I am convinced that in fact we do not have any choice, because as soon as we allow ourselves to be blackmailed and to panic, we shall immerse millions of people in a series of bloody conflicts, similar to Karabakh, Trans-Dnestria and other well known tragedies.

We cannot but see the evident: we are dealing not with separate acts of intimidation, not with individual forays of terrorists. We are dealing with the direct intervention of international terror against Russia, with total and full-scale war, which again and again is taking away the lives of our compatriots.

All the world's experience shows that such wars do not end quickly. In these conditions, we simply cannot, we should not, live as carelessly as before.

We must create a more effective security system, and demand from our law enforcement agencies actions adequate in level and scale to the new threats.

But what is more important is a mobilization of the nation before the general threat. Events in other countries prove that terrorists meet the most effective rebuff where they confront not only the power of the state but also an organized and united civil society.

Dear fellow citizens, those who sent terrorists to commit this horrible crime had the goal of setting our peoples against one another, to intimidate citizens of Russia, to unleash a bloody feud in the North Caucasus. In this connection, I would like to say the following:

First, in the near future, a complex of measures aimed at strengthening the unity of our country will be prepared.

Second, I consider it necessary to create a new system of forces and means for exercising control over the situation in the North Caucasus.

Third, it is necessary to create an affective crisis management system, including entirely new approaches to the work of law enforcement agencies.

I would like to stress that all these measures will be implemented in full accordance with the Constitution.

Dear friends: Together we live through very hard, mournful hours. I would like to thank all those who demonstrated patience and civic responsibility. We shall always be stronger than they, by our morale, courage and our humane solidarity.

One could see it today and the night before. In Beslan, soaked with pain and grief, people expressed even more care and support to each other and were not afraid of jeopardizing their lives for the sake of the lives and safety of others. Even in the most inhuman conditions, they remained human. It is impossible to reconcile the pain of the losses. The trial has brought us even closer together, made us re-evaluate many things. Today, we have to be together. Only thus we shall defeat the enemy.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.