So, About Beslan

[queerbychoice]

Part of the reason I haven't updated my journal in almost a week is that I've been reading every article I could find about the horrible violent atrocities and murders committed against the thousand-plus hostages in Beslan's School No. 1, of whom some 400-ish died. The article that I found most informative as to the motivations of the Chechen terrorists to commit terrorism is unquestionably "'Black Widows' Behind Beslan Tragedy" by Hamid Mir, and I hope the details in it get wider news coverage soon than they seem to have gotten so far. Here is the pertinent excerpt from it that caught my eye (with boldface emphases added by me):

Some journalists in Moscow received anonymous calls on the second day of the siege in Beslan, saying the extremists had communicated their demands to the authorities but the latter were not making them public. The demands included the expulsion of Russian troops from Chechnya and the release of more than 8,000 Chechen prisoners from Russian jails.

The anonymous callers also claimed that the group responsible for the siege called itself Black Widows of Chechnya and comprises women whose husbands and other loved ones had been killed by Russian troops over the last 10 years.

The name Black Widows surfaced in July 2003 when a Chechen woman, Zarema, was arrested in Moscow with a bomb in her bag. An explosives expert was brought in to defuse the bomb, but it went off and killed him. A Moscow court found Zarema guilty of terrorism and attempted murder and sentenced her to 20 years in prison.

The woman told investigators that she belonged to the Black Widows of Chechnya, a group whose aim is to wreak vengeance on Russians for killing their husbands and children.

Another source said the name of the woman leading the Beslan operation was Khaula Nazirov, a 45-year-old widow from Grozny, the Chechen capital. Her 18-year-old son, 16-year-old daughter, and some other relatives were also part of the operation. They attacked the school because Nazirov's husband was tortured to death in a Russian military camp five years ago, while some of her children's cousins were killed when Russian troops bombed a school in Chechnya some years ago.

The latest wave of violence in Russia is related to the presidential election held in Chechnya on August 29. President Vladimir Putin visited Grozny a few days before the election to convey the impression of complete peace in the region. He also rejected the possibility of talks with the separatists.

Violence began two weeks before the election. More than 46 people were killed in the first three weeks of August in Chechnya, but Russian authorities continued to downplay the situation.

Two planes were destroyed near Moscow on August 25 by suicide bombers, killing more than 90 people. But once again the government claimed there was no clear evidence of terrorism. It was Moscow Times that published the names of two Chechen women suicide bombers who destroyed the planes. Amnat Nagayeva, 30, destroyed the Tu-134 and Satsita Dzhebirkhanova, 37, destroyed the Tu-154. All their relatives went underground after the event. Both women were close friends and lost their husbands a few years ago in the Chechen war.

After this incident and the election in Chechnya, it was only to be expected that the rebels would increase their attacks, but common Russians were unaware of the situation because the largely State-controlled media had carried on chanting that things were now normal in the breakaway southern republic.

Last month I was the first Pakistani journalist ever to enter Chechnya. I was with two dozen other journalists from European and Arab countries. All of us were stopped from visiting polling stations in Grozny after 3 pm because there were no voters. We were all taken to the 46th Brigade headquarters of the Russian army and confined to the camp.

The next day the authorities announced that pro-Moscow candidate Ali Alikhanov had got 73 percent of the votes and would succeed Akhmad Kadirov as president. Kadirov was killed on May 9 in a bomb blast at the Grozny stadium.

Immediately after the results were announced, Alikhanov claimed he would bring peace and stability to Chechnya. But when we were coming back from Grozny to Moscow, people in the streets were openly expressing their fear that Russia is headed for big trouble. The day we arrived in Moscow, we witnessed another suicide bombing at a metro station in which 10 people were killed. Once again a Chechen woman was behind the operation.

We were told by some Chechens in Moscow that most of the Black Widows are not very well educated, have little knowledge of Islam, and don't know that killing innocents in the name of Islam is forbidden. These widows are simply looking for revenge. They are being trained by fighters of Shamil Basayev, who is known to have had contacts with Osama bin Laden in the past.

This was not the first article I came across that discussed the phenomenon of "Black Widows" seeking revenge for the murders of their husbands or other family members by Russian authorities. It was, however, the first article I came across that gave details of a specific woman who, according to this article, led the terrorist siege of the Beslan school itself. When reading about Chechen "Black Widows" in general, the women I imagined were women who either had lost their children to the violence of Russian authorities or had never had children or had raised their children to adulthood before their husbands or other family members were killed. That's because, to my mind, no matter how angry and furious a woman may be (or for that matter a man) at the death of a spouse, a parent who still has young children depending upon them would have to focus on continuing to take care of the living rather than avenging the dead as a suicide bomber.

But apparently not, since this article claims that the woman leading the Beslan school siege brought her 18-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter (who would have been only 13 and 11 when their father was murdered by Russian authorities five years ago, the time I'm presuming she first got interested in being a violent terroris) to help murder the children of Beslan's School No. 1. Tell me, how far gone do you have to be to believe that the best way to honor your murdered husband is to kill off his only surviving descendants by raising them to murder other children? I mean, I don't know about you, but if I had children and I were tortured to death, my dying wish for my children would be that they could live long happy lives as non-murderers, not that my spouse would raise them to be suicide bombers to avenge my death. Did Khaula Nazirov's husband's dying wish as he was tortured to death really differ so much from what mine would be? Where did she get the idea that it would?

The article tells us that the Black Widows are usually not very well educated and know very little about Islam. They are not, in other words, motivated by grand ambitions for the future of Islam, but by their own personal family tragedies. The lack of education does suggest one possibility for why Khaula Nazirov might not have felt guilty for sending her husband's only surviving descendants to their deaths: perhaps she was too poor and uneducated to be able to take care of them at all without a husband to financially support the family anymore, so she figured they would die either way. However, although that thought may have beein in her mind in the beginning, the fact that she did raise them herself for five years, to the ages of 18 and 16, tends to belie it. Unless she was getting major financial support from the terrorist organizers like Shamil Basayev and was dependent upon them to be able to feed her children, which is also quite possible. I don't know the answers, but I'd be interested in knowing.

I don't know who to feel sorriest for. The children and adults who were murdered in School No. 1? The ones who survived but with massive skull fractures and shrapnel embedded in their brain that will paralyze or otherwise handicap them for life in ways that haven't even become clear yet? The ones who survived with their brains intact but permanently deafened from the sound of the bombs exploding, who are left to cope in silence, no longer able to hear or hold spoken conversations about the emotional trauma of having seen their friends' intestines spilling out in front of them or the terror of masked faces and guns that runs so deep that the nurses have to avoid wearing hospital masks and ask visitors not to bring cameras near the children because one child mistook a camera for a gun? The mothers released early with their infant or toddler children, but who were made to choose between staying and being murdered with all their children or abandoning their older children with murderers and walking away from those children's wails for them to return, who later either found out that those older children did die, or were reunited with a child who now knows that their mother abandoned them to save the younger child? The fathers who left a wife and three children at home when they went to work one morning, and three days later found themselves with neither a wife nor any children at all? Or the son and daughter of Khaula Nazirov, who after having their own father murdered, were raised from the ages of 13 and 11 for a future as suicide bombers, and who not only died violently but did so knowing that they themselves had helped murder all these children and parents who had not personally done anything to them other than failing to single-handedly overthrow Putin's government and possibly, in some cases, voting for him?

The moral that Putin drew from this massacre of his citizens was, "We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten." Well, it's true that weak people are very often beaten, and Putin knows that because Putin does plenty of beating Chechnya for its weakness. If it were strong enough to bomb Moscow to pieces, he wouldn't dare try to oppose its people's wishes. However, what Putin fails to acknowledge, and possibly fails to see, is that weak people are not the only people who are beaten. Cruel people who beat up weak people are also beaten, if they make the weak people sufficiently angry and desperate. And maybe Russia did show some weakness, but it also showed a lot more cruelty.

I've read articles arguing, variously, that the Chechen terrorists either hurt their cause or helped their cause. I'm not sure which I agree with. Did Osama bin Laden help or hurt his cause with September 11? If his cause was to prevent so many Iraqis and other Middle Eastern people from being murdered by the American government, then I'd have to say he hurt his cause, not only in the short term but also, considering all the new radioactive depleted uranium that the U.S. military has now scattered across the region (in addition to what it had already scattered in the first Gulf War), in the very very long term. If, however, his cause was to make more people hate the U.S. government, then I'd have to say the reaction he provoked from George Bush certainly accomplished that. And if his cause was to promote the spread of Wahabite Islam and its accompanying patriarchal laws, well, the Middle East's only secular government is certainly well on its way to becoming an Islamic state, and not only that but a more fundamentalist and patriarchal Islamic state than the forms of Islam and patriarchy that previously existed there. I'm getting the impression that his success at the last two causes outweighs, in his mind, his failure at the first. And as for the Black Widows of Chechnya, maybe their equivalent of cause #2 (to make more people hate the Russian government) is what matters most to them - in which case, it's now up to Vladimir Putin to refrain from retaliating with the kind of violence against Chechnya that will squander the world's current sympathy for Russia in the same way that Bush squandered the world's sympathy for the U.S. after September 11.

Comments

[cheeser1.livejournal.com]

i should just read your journal instead of thumbing through the news.

that's really so much information, it's just wonderful. you are, by far, the best reading i've done in a long time.

[cheeser1.livejournal.com]

that last sentence does not make sense. i am very tired.

[chisparoja.livejournal.com]

Your article about this is very well put and incisive. I had no idea before about the existence of the Black Widows nor their involvement in any of these attacks, so that will be a lot to process and try to understand now. I agree with what you say about Putin, and the Russian media has surprised me, from what I have read about them, by being rather critical of the government's handling of the crisis and asking some very tough, intelligent and non-jingoistic questions. (is this territory really worth all of this?) This was not the hardline, uniform Americanistic response I was expecting.

I think the arguments about which is the "real" Islam and will the "real" Islam please stand up somewhat miss the point, though I understand why they are made - Westerners want Muslims not to feel so alienated anymore, though the West's attachment to its Christian church gives it a serious credibility problem in making judgements about Islamic culture.

One thing you said was that Nasirov would not have wanted his wife to do this as his dying wish, but I think that the possibility that he indeed would and did want his wife to do this is definitely very significant. He may have done the same thing himself.

Also you assume that these parents necessarily love their children, and I'm not sure what you have read to suggest that, but it is very possible that they do not love them or like them all that much and even that, saddled with the burden of raising them as widows in an underdeveloped society with few opportunities for women, they had grown to hate or at least resent them. So I don't know if I would agree with your presumption that they necessarily loved their children, and as you say I don't think it would make sense to have done this if one felt any pity for their children.

You suggest you find it unbelievable and outrageous that a mother would lead her children to do this, and then also add father in parentheses, in what felt to me like a sort of half-hearted way. This is understandable because, actually, fathers very frequently do this - they kill their children or even their entire families, without remorse, frequently never having had feelings for any of them to begin with. So it is not unusual to see and people have not only ceased to become exactly outraged by it, but have even come to expect it and have blamed women even for the actions of these husbands. It is unusual for a woman to kill all her children and outraged by it in the same way as people were outraged by the few women involved in the Iraqi abuse cases but sympathized with the men. The other day some paper had the audacity to say it could not publish the names of the men arrested for torture in Abu Ghraib because it would violate a "privacy" not afforded to even one woman perp. Can you imagine?

My experience though has been that mothers quite frequently want to kill their children, particularly in the beginning as the weight of the responsibility first falls -- nearly entirely on their shoulders. They simply keep it to themselves and imagine themselves possessed by demons or something. Also many have no idea what to do after childbirth with the child, having been told that it would all just come "naturally" to them, from some magic gene or whatever, imagining something was wrong with them when, obviously, no such thing happened. None of this is widely talked about and it is not a father's experience.

In any case in the past month I've read of dozens of men going postal on children, women, men, animals, everyone. I'm disgusted by them. I'm also disgusted by the Black Widows of Chechnya. But I'm not about to get any more excited than that about them, either.

Blaming her singly for raising terrorists is also an assumption I don't necessarily agree with. 13 and 11 are quite old, and I am certain the father will have had a significant influence in these childrens' development as well, along with the society surrounding them. You do demonize the mother but seem to exonerate the father, simply because he was killed by the Russians. His death was certainly unjust and evil, but that does not make him an angel either, and I think it more likely that he was not all that different from his wife.

great article. thanks. :)

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I've been more surprised by the reaction of the Russian government than by their media - not by the fact that the Russian government is being so dishonest, but more by the fact that they're being so goddessdamned sloppy about their dishonesty. I mean, they knew there were 1,200 hostages in that school and they claimed there were only 300? How could they possibly have imagined, even if every single one of them had gotten out alive, that the hostages wouldn't themselves point out that there were plenty more than 300 of them or that the public wouldn't think less of the Russian government for having been so dishonest? What the hell was the point of even trying to lie about something they had to have known would be so easily and immediately proven a lie? At least all the lies the American government tells are ones that they can go on claiming haven't been proven to be lies for enough months for the lies to have served their purpose - you know, kick the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq before they've had time to fully finish inspecting, and thereby get away with continuing to claim Saddam has WMDs until the war is already fully underway. The Russian government doesn't pick its lies at all cleverly. Putin needs to go attend the George Bush School of Dishonesty and not pretend he's ready to handle leading his government until he's graduated.

About Khaula Nasirov's dead husband, I wasn't so much claiming anything about him as just asking what he would or wouldn't have felt. You certainly might be right; I have no way of knowing. It's interesting, though, that you always have such a different take on everything than I do (including not only him, but also his wife and his children) because your experience of humanity has been so much more unpleasant than mine that your natural tendency is to attribute to everyone much less of a heart than it's my natural tendency to attribute to them. Really you may well be closer to accurate than I am, because from what I can see, more people's upbringings seem to have been violent and heartless than have been like mine.

About the gendering of violence, I've been meaning to mention to you an article that moominmuppet posted recently, and particularly this portion that interested me:

One particularly well-designed study of over 200 college students
produced very strong and significant findings. The study, which was conducted by two Princeton psychologists, sheds some light on this question. In it, college students--male and female--were asked to play a computer game with an unknown partner in which the object was to bomb the "enemy" and to be bombed in return.

Which sex was more bloodthirsty? The answer depended less on gender than on whether the players were being watched. When the investigators could identify the players, women dropped significantly fewer bombs than the men.

But when the women thought they were anonymous, they bombed their
opponents back to the Stone Age, in military lingo. They were significantly more aggressive than were the male students. However, when they were asked after the experiment to say how aggressive they had been, the women claimed to have been far less aggressive than the men, even though the opposite was the case. Scrutiny was a much better predictor of aggression than was gender.

If these findings are consistently replicable, the guess I would venture in order to explain them would be that women tend to perceive themselves as weaker and therefore feel more need to compensate for their perceived weakness by being more violent, provided that no one is watching them and making them feel like they need to go on pretending to be weak and helpless in order to be "real women." I would be interested in seeing follow-up studies on that - and on, for example, whether mothers' behavior toward their children when no adults are watching them falls more into the pattern of "watched" or "unwatched" behavior, or whether it is more "watched" if the children have another parent who they might tell about their mother's behavior and more "unwatched" if the woman is a single parent. But for now this article is all I have.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm extremely flattered.

[medusaofticun.livejournal.com]

i apologize for being so ignorant...but i don't have TV, an dvery rarely read online news...

but what exactly did they do to the children?

like, i mean, they were there for a week or so, right?...were they torturing the children and staff? or killing a set number of hostages daily? how did those people die? and who died? mostly children? mostly staff? and why that particular school?

Part 1

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I need to learn to summarize things better, because there will always be people who haven't read the news yet. So, here goes.

It was the first day of school in a small town in Russia, near the border of the state of Chechnya. Parents brought their kids into the classrooms and came in with the kids to meet their kids' new teachers. Then suddenly around 40 masked terrorists showed up with guns and herded all the parents, teachers, and children (1,200 people total) into the school gymnasium. Along the way they shot a few fathers to death to show everyone they were serious about killing people. When they got to the gym, they made the adults pry up some floorboards, and under the floorboards were more guns and bombs they'd hidden there in advance. (The school had been under construction during the summer to fix the floor, and one of the terrorists had probably gotten hired as a construction worker to get the chance to hide the weapons under the floor.) The terrorists dumped the dead bodies of the men they'd already shot in the middle of the gym floor to remind everybody to be scared, and they strung bombs all around between the basketball hoops (or possibly the bombs were already strung there in advance; I'm not clear about exactly which weapons were hidden under the floor and which were available from the start). The terrorists smashed all the windows so that the Russian government couldn't smoke them out with poison gas, because of the air circulation. After a while, the bodies in the middle of the floor were dragged outside, but they left big bloodstains down the whole length of the gym to continue reminding everybody to be scared, besides which there were bombs in the basketball hoops over everybody's heads and the terrorists were standign around with their feet poised over pedals connected by wire to the bombs, telling everyone that if they stepped on these pedals at any moment they would blow up the whole gym.

The teachers and parents and children all stayed trapped in the gym for three days. There was no food and no water and it was extremely hot. The terrorists actually specifically smashed the faucets in the school bathrooms so that the hostages wouldn't have any water. As the hostages started fainting from heat and thirst, most of the hostages stripped down to their underwear to get cooler, and they urinated on their clothes and drank their urine because it was the only fluid they had. At one point, a very small group of mothers who had children two years old or younger with them were allowed to leave with their small children, but if those mothers had any children over two with them (which they all presumably did, since they were there at school taking their children to school because they had school-age children), then they had to leave all their children over the age of two in the gym and leave without them.

Part 2

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

After three days, something unplanned happened - either some of the terrorists got confused and thought there was a rebellion, or they just accidentally tripped and stepped on the bomb pedal, or they got impatient and just felt like spontaneously blowing themselves up - but for whatever reason, one of the terrorist women suddenly blew herself up and blew up most of the people around her along with her, even though this had not been planned and took the other terrorists by surprise. Some of the other terrorists reacted to that first explosion by deciding that they must be under attack or it must just be time to get it all over with - whatever, they started blowing themselves up too, and the hostages near those terrorists were also blown up along with them. at this point, some of the hostages who hadn't been blown up started jumping out of the broken windows and running for cover. Unfortunately, there were terrorists standing guard on the roof of the school who shot down the hostages from the roof as they tried to run away, so a lot of that group of hostages died too. Meanwhile, the Russian troops outside were shooting back at the terrorists on the roof, and as they succeeded in killing some of the terrorists, the bullets got few enough that the Russian troops started running toward the building and carrying the surviving hostages out. Most of the surviving hostages are from this group - the ones who didn't get blown up in the explosions and also didn't try to run for it and get shot at.

In all, a little under 400 hostages died, of whom a little under 200 were children. Another 700 or so were hospitalized, sometimes for explosion burns, sometimes for bullet wounds, and sometimes just for the effects of having gone without food and water for three days. That leaves only around 100 hostages who were never hospitalized or killed.

The school was chosen because it was near enough to the state of Chechnya for the terrorists from Chechnya to get there easily, and because it had been under construction during the summertime, which gave them a good opportunity to hide weapons under the floor. (It would have been difficult to walk down the street toward the school carrying that large a number of weapons without being noticed.) It was also a place that would have a large number of people gathered at one time, and it had a big gymnasium that was a convenient place to herd them all into. The terrorists had hoped that by informing the Russian government that the only way all these children and parents and teachers would ever escape the school alive was if the Russian government agreed to allow the state of Chechnya to secede from Russia and become its own country, they could scare the Russian government into actually agreeing. This did not happen. So they just blew themselves up and most of their hostages along with them, and now the Russian government has to answer a lot of uncomfortable questions from the Russian people about why the government thinks keeping Chechnya as part of Russia is worth getting all these people's children and spouses and other family members killed.

Re: Part 1

[medusaofticun.livejournal.com]

jesus christ...

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your essay and all the information you put together.

Adding to your speculating on the motives of a woman carrying on her husband's work and raising her kids to do the same dangerous and likely fatal work, I could see it as an act of love--of the love of loyalty to the dead. To be invested in a culture, and nationalism is a part of this investment, is in many ways to honor the dead. Whether she was motivated for love of her husband, ther family members and friends, or her culture as a whole (which would include whomever of her family had already died both in the nationist cause she's working for or for any other normal reasons) might not be clear to her. And if you believe the dead have power and watch what you do, you may have punitive pressure on top of your desire to be loyal. Raising her children to do the same may also be an act of love--raising them to be people who will further their cultural ideals even by dying for them--the best kind of people they could be in her mind, perhaps.

How could she kill other people's children? Because her own dead are more important to her and she sees killing those children as a way of both avenging her dead and protecting those she sees as her cultural family by driving off their enemies.

Such ways of defining ingroup and outgroup and acting upon those definitions are sadly not unusual in human history.