Minister Unwilling to Blame the Chechens

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No Chechens amongst the dead.
No Iraqis amongst the hijackers.

A war on the whole of the Caucasus.
A war of liberation in the Middle East.

"REVENGE ! REVENGE !" they all cried.

What the f*ck ?!?


Minister unwilling to blame Chechens


Jonathan Steele and agencies in Moscow
Wednesday September 8, 2004
The Guardian

Not a single Chechen has been found among the dead gunmen who took children hostage in Beslan last week, Sergei Ivanov, Russia's defence minister, told the Guardian yesterday. "About half of the 32 terrorists have been identified and we have not yet discovered anyone from Chechnya," he said.

The comment was a clear effort to back up the Kremlin's claim that last week's attack was not a result of Russia's actions in Chechnya.

The defence minister's remarks came as other statements from prosecutors carried on Russian television pinned the blame for the raid firmly on the Chechen rebel commander Shamil Basayev.

Mikhail Lapotnikov, a senior investigator in the North Caucasus prosecutors' office, said on Channel One television that investigators had established the assailants were "the core of Basayev's band" and had taken part in a June attack - also blamed on Mr Basayev - targeting police and security officials in neighbouring Ingushetia.

A man identified by authorities as a detained hostage taker said on state TV that he was told Mr Basayev and former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov were behind the attack.

The detainee, identified by a lawyer as Nur-Pashi Kulayev, said on both state-run channels that he and other members of the group were told the goal of the raid was "to unleash a war on the whole of the Caucasus" - the same thing Mr Putin had said was the attackers' aim.

Ahmed Zakayev, a London-based spokesman for Mr Maskhadov, denied that Mr Maskhadov had played any part, and alleged the detainee's televised statement had been extracted under torture.

"The claims of President Maskhadov's involvement in the terrorist act are part of a well thought-out disinformation campaign, which also includes officials' statements about the presence of Arab and African fighters and foreign mercenaries among the terrorists," he said in a statement faxed to media.

Mr Maskhadov, in a separate statement, said: There cannot be any justification for people who raise their hand against what is most sacred to us - the life of defenceless children! And there are no words able to express the full depth of our indignation at what happened."

Tens of thousands of Muscovites, waving flags and banners joined an official anti-terrorist protest in Red Square.

The crowd stood still for a moment of silence in memory of the Beslan siege victims, starting the rally after a clock in a Kremlin tower struck 5pm. Opposition politicians said the rally was intended to divert attention from the Kremlin's handling of the crisis and Mr Putin's failure to ensure security for ordinary Russians.

Demonstrators massed on the cobblestones outside St Basil's Cathedral brandishing banners with slogans such as "Russia against terror," "We won't give Russia to terrorists" and "The enemy will be crushed, victory will be ours."

"I have been crying for so many days and I came here to feel that we are actually together," said Vera Danilina, 57.

"We came here to show that we are not indifferent to the series of terrorist acts that have taken place," said Alexander, an 18-year-old student at a Moscow technical college.

The rally, organised by a pro-government trade union, was heavily advertised on state-controlled television, with prominent actors broadcasting appeals to citizens to turn out to say no to terror.

Meanwhile Beslan's streets were crowded with funeral processions yesterday. At the muddy cemetery gravediggers have opened up two new areas over the past three days.

In Vladikavkaz, the North Ossetian capital about 18 miles south of Beslan, hundreds of people gathered on central Freedom Square to protest against terrorism and to castigate local authorities for failing to prevent last week's tragedy.

The official death toll of the three-day siege stood at 335, plus 30 attackers. The emergencies ministry said 156 of the dead were children. Eleven special forces soldiers were killed, and some were buried yesterday in Moscow.

North Ossetia's deputy health minister, Taimuraz Revazov, said that 332 people remained in hospital yesterday, including 23 who had been sent to Moscow and 11 in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. At the morgue in Vladikavkaz, 110 bodies remained unidentified.

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The Chechens' American Friends

Published on Wednesday,
September 8, 2004 by the Guardian/UK

The Chechens' American Friends
The Washington neocons' commitment to the war on terror evaporates in Chechnya, whose cause they have made their own

by John Laughland
 <br>An enormous head of steam has built up behind the view that President Putin is somehow the main culprit in the grisly events in North Ossetia. Soundbites and headlines such as "Grief turns to anger", "Harsh words for government", and "Criticism mounting against Putin" have abounded, while TV and radio correspondents in Beslan have been pressed on air to say that the people there blame Moscow as much as the terrorists. There have been numerous editorials encouraging us to understand - to quote the Sunday Times - the "underlying causes" of Chechen terrorism (usually Russian authoritarianism), while the widespread use of the word "rebels" to describe people who shoot children shows a surprising indulgence in the face of extreme brutality.

On closer inspection, it turns out that this so-called "mounting criticism" is in fact being driven by a specific group in the Russian political spectrum - and by its American supporters. The leading Russian critics of Putin's handling of the Beslan crisis are the pro-US politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov - men associated with the extreme neoliberal market reforms which so devastated the Russian economy under the west's beloved Boris Yeltsin - and the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Center. Funded by its New York head office, this influential thinktank - which operates in tandem with the military-political Rand Corporation, for instance in producing policy papers on Russia's role in helping the US restructure the "Greater Middle East" - has been quoted repeatedly in recent days blaming Putin for the Chechen atrocities. The centre has also been assiduous over recent months in arguing against Moscow's claims that there is a link between the Chechens and al-Qaida.

These people peddle essentially the same line as that expressed by Chechen leaders themselves, such as Ahmed Zakaev, the London exile who wrote in these pages yesterday. Other prominent figures who use the Chechen rebellion as a stick with which to beat Putin include Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who, like Zakaev, was granted political asylum in this country, although the Russian authorities want him on numerous charges. Moscow has often accused Berezovsky of funding Chechen rebels in the past.

By the same token, the BBC and other media sources are putting it about that Russian TV played down the Beslan crisis, while only western channels reported live, the implication being that Putin's Russia remains a highly controlled police state. But this view of the Russian media is precisely the opposite of the impression I gained while watching both CNN and Russian TV over the past week: the Russian channels had far better information and images from Beslan than their western competitors. This harshness towards Putin is perhaps explained by the fact that, in the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled 'distinguished Americans" who are its members is a rollcall of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusastically support the "war on terror".

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be "a cakewalk"; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Center for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on NATO; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush's plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

The ACPC heavily promotes the idea that the Chechen rebellion shows the undemocratic nature of Putin's Russia, and cultivates support for the Chechen cause by emphasizing the seriousness of human rights violations in the tiny Caucasian republic. It compares the Chechen crisis to those other fashionable "Muslim" causes, Bosnia and Kosovo - implying that only international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilize the situation there. In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.

Although the White House issued a condemnation of the Beslan hostage-takers, its official view remains that the Chechen conflict must be solved politically. According to ACPC member Charles Fairbanks of Johns Hopkins University, US pressure will now increase on Moscow to achieve a political, rather than military, solution - in other words to negotiate with terrorists, a policy the US resolutely rejects elsewhere.

Allegations are even being made in Russia that the west itself is somehow behind the Chechen rebellion, and that the purpose of such support is to weaken Russia, and to drive her out of the Caucasus. The fact that the Chechens are believed to use as a base the Pankisi gorge in neighboring Georgia - a country which aspires to join NATO, has an extremely pro-American government, and where the US already has a significant military presence - only encourages such speculation. Putin himself even seemed to lend credence to the idea in his interview with foreign journalists on Monday.

Proof of any such western involvement would be difficult to obtain, but is it any wonder Russians are asking themselves such questions when the same people in Washington who demand the deployment of overwhelming military force against the US's so-called terrorist enemies also insist that Russia capitulate to hers?

John Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group www.oscewatch.org

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William Pfaff: The pattern is global, but the causes are local

Wednesday, September 8, 2004

Templates of terrorism

PARIS Terrorism and the measures adopted against it acquire reciprocal momentum that is all but impossible to stop once a certain threshold has been crossed. That threshold was crossed in Russia last week, with potentially enormous consequences for civil liberties in that country, for civil peace in the Caucasus and possibly for the existing peaceful relationship between Russia and America.
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This is why issues of nationalism, irredentism and religion - the usual motives for terrorist outrages - are so desperately dangerous. Ignored or misinterpreted, assigned to spurious international causes, they can do immense damage. They have to be dealt with in their natural dimensions.
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There is a competitive auction in terrorism. Righteously misdirected reactions to terrorism contribute to the dynamics of the terrorist interaction, reinforcing the next outrage, which is constructed to be more horrible than the retaliation suffered for the last one. This is an escalation of terror in which neither side can prevail since the possibilities are unlimited - as demonstrated at Beslan in North Ossetia.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has mistakenly (or culpably) assigned an international cause to his crisis. He has followed George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon in identifying his national problem as "international terrorism." This is not true. Putin's terrorism problem is specific to him and to Russia. America's terrorism problem is specific to the United States, its past, its foreign relationships and its policies. Israel's is a matter of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians.
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The source of terrorism in Russia since the late 1990s has been the ethnic nationalist uprising in Chechnya that Russian authorities have brutally been trying to stop.
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Today there certainly are international reinforcements fighting for the Chechens, and there are increasing numbers of radical Islamic teachers and clerics in the Caucasus. Like Iraq, the region has become a battlefront in the war of Islamic radicals against the infidels. But to hold them responsible for what has happened in Chechnya is like insisting that "regime remnants and foreign terrorists" are the only ones doing the fighting in Iraq.
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The affairs retain their national causes, and the only hope of solution remains national. But once the terrorist action-reaction auction begins, it is almost impossible to stop. Russia has already invaded Chechnya twice to "end terrorism," but terrorism simply got worse. Ariel Sharon's entire career has consisted in failed attempts to solve Israel's problem of national existence by brute destruction of what he considers its enemies. The United States invaded Afghanistan and overturned the Taliban government, but the terrorists took to the hills and the country is in political and social pieces. And now there is Iraq.
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If the terrorist auction has a tangible value, such as an independent Chechnya (if that is what the Beslan terrorists wanted: nobody has yet said what they wanted, assuming that they wanted anything tangible), there is no solution except to give it to them. Everyone knows how to solve the tangible and national part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An acceptable compromise of their national claims was agreed to long ago. The clash of eschatological expectations between some Israelis and some Palestinians is what continues to make that solution impossible.
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The religious fanatic has no tangible goal to be satisfied. He - or she, as we increasingly find - wants paradise and the destruction of heretics. For such a person, the terrorism auction has no earthly limit.
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Putin has made a second internationalized interpretation of the Beslan massacre. He implied in his address on Saturday that U.S. activity in Georgia, and elsewhere in the Caucasus, is partly behind separatist forces there and is part of an American effort to disarm Russia as a nuclear power and otherwise weaken it.
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The collapse of the USSR in 1991 had left Russia defenseless, he said. It had once been invulnerable, with unsurpassed power to protect its frontiers. Now, "we have shown ourselves to be weak, and the weak get beaten." The implication was obvious.
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Could Putin do anything now other than promise resistance, power, security, repression? Politically, probably not. Is what he said going to do any good? Again, the answer is no. Moscow, and Bush's Washington and Sharon's Jerusalem, have to prove their "resolve"; they can't be seen as "pitiful, helpless giants." Yet until they tell the truth to themselves, or their countrymen tell it to them, that is just what they are.

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The Beslan hostage tragedy: the lies of the Putin government and its media

By Vladimir Volkov
8 September 2004

The hostage-taking tragedy in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia has demonstrated the lengths to which the ruling elite in Russia is prepared to go in deceiving its own people. Four days after the hostage drama began with terrorists seizing over 1,000 children, parents and teachers, elementary facts still remain unclear. The Russian government has denied the people the most important and elementary right—that of reliable, rapid and extensive information on what has taken place.

From the beginning of the crisis on the morning of September 1 to its tragic end two days later, leading politicians, representatives of the secret police and the major media outlets in Russia conducted a deliberate campaign of disinformation regarding the extent of the catastrophe and its dreadful consequences.


Lie number one: the number of hostages

From the outset, the number of hostages was deliberately underestimated. The official figure of 354 hostages was repeated by television channels and in the public appearances of government representatives up to the point of the storming of the school building.

Early on in the crisis, much higher figures for the hostages were provided by newspapers and Internet sources, yet the television networks held firm to their original claim. After talks September 2 between the hostage takers and the former president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Auschev—resulting in the release of 26 women and children—the media repeated its estimate, even though the real extent of the hostage taking could at that stage hardly be concealed.

Auschev had seen how many people had been incarcerated in the gymnasium hall. One of the women released September 2 told the press: “There are many hostages, very many. I think a thousand.” Another woman whose two children remained in the school said: “According to the list 860 children attend the school. Maybe half of them did not come to the school’s opening ceremony. Then there are the parents. Look around at how many people are standing here. Here in the House of Culture there are 1,000 people and all of them have at least one relative or child in the school.”<br>
Similar reports appeared in newspapers and Internet magazines. Nevertheless the television channels remained stubbornly attached to their original figure.


Lie Number Two: the terrorists had posed no demands

At the outset of the drama, a decision was made at the highest political level that under no circumstances would information be released concerning the terrorists’ demands. This was a lesson that the Putin government had drawn from the hostage drama at the Moscow Musical Theatre “Nordost” in 2002. Relatives of the hostages then held captive inside the theatre had demonstrated for an end to the Russian war in Chechnya. The demand met with widespread popular support, and the Kremlin has had great difficulty suppressing this political sentiment.

This time it was claimed that the terrorists had made no demands. A statement calling for an end to the Chechen war and the withdrawal of Russian troops made at the start of the hostage crisis by an Islamist group was kept secret. In addition, the government maintained that all of its efforts to make contact with the terrorists had been ignored.

On September 6, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that as early as the afternoon of September 1 and not far from the school, “Parents of children being held in the school had addressed the Russian president in a video. They called upon him to fulfill all the demands of the terrorists in order to save the lives of the children.”<br>
All the major television and other media outlets kept this information secret for a considerable period.

According to numerous witnesses, the hostage takers made no secret about their demands. For example, on September 3, Izvestia interviewed a teacher who had been released along with her three-year-old daughter. Question: “Did the terrorists tell you their demands?” Answer: “They said they had just one demand: the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya.”<br>

Lie number three: there were no plans for storming the building

Immediately after news of the hostage taking broke, leading to widespread popular anguish, representatives of the Russian government declared that everything would be done to avoid an armed assault on the school by security forces. In fact, nothing was done to prevent such a storming of the school.

According to a commentary in the newspaper Izvestia, the drama “took the worst possible turn.” The government sought to hide its own failure by claiming that the storming of the building had not been prepared, and even that there were no plans for such an action. This claim is contradicted by a series of facts and reports by witnesses.

On September 3, the paper Nezavicimaya Gazeta reported that “intelligence forces were preparing to storm the school.” The paper referred to the fact that on the night of September 1 specially equipped military transport planes had landed in North Ossetia. The paper also said it was presumed that the anti-terror unit “Alfa” had been flown in.

It is now known that “Alfa” and another anti-terror unit, “Vimpel,” played the decisive role in the storming of the building. The very fact that, following the unexpected exchange of fire on September 3, the terrorists immediately began shooting and set off previously installed explosives indicates that they were sure a storming of the building would take place.

Bearing these facts in mind—the demands of the terrorists that were never disclosed, the refusal of the government to undertake any discussions with the hostage-takers, the scale of the censorship of information regarding what was taking place inside the school and the positioning of the special forces units in the front line—thenewspaper Gazeta.ru concluded on September 4: “The storming had in fact been prepared and was to have been carried out within the next two days. Without water, the children could only have survived for three or four days, and then it would have no longer been possible to rescue most of the hostages. However, on Friday they were forced to take action.”<br>

Lie number four: the number of victims

Even after the catastrophe had taken place—bombs had gone off in the gym, part of which had collapsed—the government and the media continued to lie by minimizing the number of casualties.

The official death toll rose only as the bodies began to be counted. According to government sources on Monday morning, September 6, 335 dead had been counted. At the same time it became clear there existed a list of missing persons totaling 260. According to the radio station “Echo Moscow,” these victims feature neither on the lists of those who have died nor on the list of those who have been hospitalized.

On Saturday, inhabitants of Beslan, who observed coffins with victims inside being transported from the burnt out ruins of the school, reported that they had counted a total of between 500 and 600.

Against this background it is hardly necessary to examine the other lies broadcast by the Russian media about the number of terrorists involved—which was also minimized—or the course of events that was officially reported in wildly varying versions.

continued on next post

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continues from previous post

The overall conduct of the Russian media, in particular the major television networks, was shameful. While in the West many television stations devoted special coverage to the events in North Ossetia, often working with Russian cameramen, Russian television refused to interrupt its regular programming.

At one point in the crisis, a correspondent for the Russian television channel NTW addressed the camera and bluntly declared, “We cannot say what is happening; we cannot comment on the actions of those involved in the fighting!”<br>
It is no wonder that television journalists have been physically assaulted by Beslan inhabitants. As the first information emerged on the real extent of the casualties, outraged bystanders turned on television journalists, lashing out at their cameras and the reporters themselves.

The role played by Russian television, however, only expressed the iron-fisted control exerted over the major media outlets by Putin’s Kremlin, which has brought every television channel under either direct or indirect state control. The Russian regime has enforced media subservience with intimidation and state gangsterism, which is backed by much of Russia’s ruling strata of corrupt businessmen and ex-Stalinist bureaucrats.

Putin used the hostage-taking crisis at the Moscow theatre two years ago to consolidate this grip over the media, claiming that it had abused freedom of the press in its coverage. He demanded that the news outlets report nothing that could conceivably aid the terrorists, including their statements or demands, analysis of the events or coverage of Russian military and police operations.

This noose is tightening. The editor in chief of Izvestia, Raf Shakirov, announced his forced resignation Monday after coming under fire from the Kremlin and the newspaper’s corporate publishers over its coverage of the Beslan events. The paper filled its entire front page last Saturday with a photograph of a man carrying a wounded child from the besieged school. The newspaper also raised pointed questions about the official claim that only 350 people were held hostage and published a stinging column denouncing the self-censorship by the television channels.

Meanwhile, a prominent Russian journalist who has reported critically on the war in Chechnya was prevented from reaching the scene of the latest hostage-taking tragedy under circumstances that can only be described as ominous.

Novaya Gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya fell sick after drinking tea during the first leg of her flight to Beslan. Rushed to the hospital after landing in Rostov, she was diagnosed with acute food poisoning. According to one report, authorities had blocked her from boarding her original flight, but the captain of another airliner recognized her and invited her aboard.

The suppression of the media, together with the impotence of the Russian parliament—the Duma chose not to meet during the crisis, with its leaders affirming that all they could do was issue another statement—are hallmarks of the authoritarian state that Putin is consolidating in Russia.

The president’s resort to the methods of state censorship, however, is a manifestation of the general impotence and political isolation of the regime as a whole. Under conditions of historically unprecedented social inequality between a thin layer of “new Russian” entrepreneurs and masses of impoverished working people, democratic forms of rule are not possible.

While capable of buying off or intimidating his political opponents and much of the media, Putin has proven unable to resolve any of the deepening crises wracking Russia, from the war in Chechnya and other outbreaks of regional separatism, to the generalized corruption and breakdown that characterizes the entire state apparatus and the economy. All of these crises came together to produce the tragedy in Beslan.

While these failures are behind the drive to control the media, the ham-fisted censorship carried out in the latest crisis has provoked widespread anger and opposition within the former Soviet Union. The “democratic reforms” that were touted as a byproduct of the collapse of the USSR and the introduction of capitalism have produced instead a media that is in many ways reminiscent of the worst of the Stalinist period, based on lies and deception and dedicated to the suppression of any news that casts the head of state in a bad light.

Putin has seized upon the atrocity in Beslan to claim even more authoritarian power and to reject any suggestion of negotiating an end to the brutal war in Chechnya. His transparent aim is to emulate Bush in claiming unlimited power to carry out repression in the name of a “war on terror.”<br>
While hundreds of thousands turned out at rallies against terrorism that were organized with state support on Tuesday, the mood of outrage was directed not only at the terrorists, but at the government itself.

The harshest anger was expressed at a rally in the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz, about 18 miles north of Beslan. The crowd that turned out in the city’s central square protested not only against terrorism, but the state authorities as well.

“Today, we will bury our children and tomorrow we will come here and throw these devils out of their seats, from the lowest director up to ministers and the president,” a speaker at the rally declared.

A protest sign raised above the crowd read, “Corrupt authority is a source of terrorism.”<br>

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Condemnation is a luxury we can afford

The New Statesman
Leader
Monday 13th September 2004

Are we right, when faced with atrocity, simply to compete in voicing expressions of denunciation and outrage? Do all attempts to understand the motives of the perpetrators, or to reflect on what drove them to act so abominably, risk moral equivalence and compromise our own humanity? Certainly, no reasonable person can attempt to excuse what happened in Beslan. The Archbishop of Canterbury rightly describes the mass killing of children as "the most evil kind of action we can imagine". All very well to point out that, even as the world watched the ghastly climax of the school siege in north Ossetia, around 4,000 more children across the world died for lack of clean drinking water and sanitation. Or to observe that western sanctions on Iraq led, according to some estimates, to the deaths of half a million children. Or to enumerate, from Hiroshima through Vietnam to the latest Gulf war, the occasions when the US has killed indiscriminately from the air. What set Beslan apart, as the archbishop suggested, was that people not only calculated that the deaths of children in particular would serve their purpose, but that they could sit with them for days, deliberately denying them water, watching the terror in their eyes, ignoring their cries.

At this stage, we have to acknowledge profound moral ambiguities. First, if the terrorists wished to raise awareness of their cause, their calculation was undeniably right. Three or four hundred deaths in a Russian office block might detain the western media for a day or two. Children, however, will still make the front pages of the British tabloids nearly a week after the event. Millions across the world who may never before have heard of Chechnya now know about the 100,000 or more deaths in its decade of wars; about the "black widows" who have lost husbands and children and turned to suicide bombing; about the rapes and humiliations inflicted by Russian troops; about the ruined buildings of Grozny; about the 70 per cent unemployment. They may even learn a little about the Chechens' history and about how Stalin once forcibly moved a third of them to Siberia. Here is the heart of the case of those who deplore attempts to "understand" and "contextualise". In doing so, in going beyond simple expressions of horror, they argue, we may give terrorists the recognition and sympathy they crave.

But we must then turn to a second question. Powerful states can achieve their ends through other means, and if they kill, they do so at a distance. George W Bush, Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon do not need to look into the eyes of Iraqi or Chechen or Palestinian children as they are bombed, gunned down or blown to pieces by landmines. Nor, with rare exceptions, do their soldiers and airmen. The more advanced the military technology, the more it is possible to sanitise killing, to disclaim direct responsibility, to call a child's death collateral damage. The rich and powerful have no motives for dirtying their hands. A Chechen child is no more likely to wake up and find President Putin pointing a gun at her head than you are to find the chief executive of Enron running off with your DVD player in the middle of the night. Each has (or had) other ways of getting what he wants. Only the weak have to plumb the moral depths.

To those depths, there appear to be no limits. However insouciant most of us are about African children starving to death, few of us could kill a child at close quarters. Still fewer would glory in it. Yet the Beslan hostage-takers not only staged their acts deliberately as a media event, but also took photographs of their terrified captives. In the same way, US soldiers took pictures of their torture victims in Abu Ghraib prison. Once, the instincts of people who did terrible things were to destroy the evidence; even the Nazis tried to cover up the Holocaust. Now, depravity shows its face proudly to the world, partly as a kind of existential statement, partly as another branch of the public relations industry. My grievance must be greater than yours, people seem to say, because I will go to greater lengths in pursuit of it. Just as other sections of the media industry resort to ever greater sensation to command attention - bigger newspaper headlines, more violent films, more pornographic advertisements, more intimate reality TV - so now do terrorists.

Thus, brutality breeds brutality - a perfectly obvious point, but one worth restating all the same. Just as the intensive US bombing of Cambodia bred the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot and the killing fields, so a decade of Russian-instigated wars in Chechnya bred suicide bombers, plane hijackers and hostage-takers. Let us condemn them by all means. In our comfortable, secure world, it is a luxury we can afford.