Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn’t listening to even the most polite suggestion he and his government’s repressive policies in Chechnya might have had something to do with fomenting the hatred that was at the heart of the horrific slaughter of innocents at Middle School Number 1 in Beslan. Or that one way to deal with the root causes of that hatred and end the terrorism might be to change some of those policies.

“Why should we talk to people who are child killers?” Putin demanded.

His top general, Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the chief of the Russian General Staff, went even further. After putting a price on the heads of those he claimed were responsible for the most recent wave of airplane explosions, suicide bombings and hostage takings — including on the head of the former elected president of Chechnya who was driven from office by Russian troops five years ago — Baluyevsky invoked Russia’s absolute, inviolable, inherent right to “take all measures to liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world.”

In other words, to meet random acts of terror with even larger doses of state terror.

We have seen how well this policy works:

  • In Israel, where the Israeli government’s three decades-long punish-the-Palestinians’ policy for dealing with suicide bombings and other acts of resistance has led to a just and lasting peace between Arabs and Jews.
  • And in Iraq, where the post-9/11 Bush doctrine of preventive attack, prisoner abuse and American occupation has led to the creation of a “free and democratic” Iraq that is now a beacon for peace-loving nations of the Middle East.

Uhhhâe¦

You’d think our world leaders would know better by now. But they can’t, — or won’t, or don’t — ever seem to connect the dots of their own histories. Or understand the lessons written in the daily newspaper headlines.

Beslan is a terrible case in point.

There is a history of hatredbetween the Russians and the Chechens that dates back to even before the Russian’s bloody conquest of the Caucasus in the 1800s.

In the last century, that history got worse. In 1944, Stalin’s forces jammed more than 500,000 Chechens onto cattle cars and shipped them off to Siberia where those who survived — as many as half are said to have died — lived in exile for more than a decade.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chechnya, not surprisingly, declared its independence. But in 1994, the Russians responded by attacking the capital of Grozny. Over the next two years, the Russian army killed 80,000 Chechens, but lost the war. In 1999, they tried again. Since then, 50,000 more Chechens have been killed, and a third of the population are now refugees.

According to a Human Rights Watch briefing to the United Nations earlier this year, Russian forces routinely “round up thousands of men in raids, loot homes, physically abuse villagers, and frequently commit extrajudicial executions. Those detained face beatings and other forms of torture, aimed at coercing confessions or information about Chechen forces. Federal forces routinely extort money from detainees’ relatives as a condition for release.”

Given all that, should we really be surprised when a few of those who feel they have nothing left to lose, respond with the kind of savagery we saw in Beslan?

One of the teachers freed by the hostages the day before the final assault and shootout says a female hostage taker told her: “Russian soldiers are killing our children in Chechnya, so we are here to kill yours.”

None of that is to suggest that the barbarism of Beslan can, or should be, explained away. Or, similarly, to argue that the attack on the World Trade Centre, which occurred three years ago on Saturday, can ever be justified.

Even if Chechnya was suddenly granted its independence — or the Palestinians were handed their homeland, or the Iraqis were truly free to choose their own government — all acts of terror would not suddenly stop.

But if some of the conditions that give rise to the desperation that gives rise to terrorism were finally dealt with, the hatred that is the seed bed for these terrorists and — more importantly — for the widespread public support for them in some parts of the world would finally ease.

And we would all be safer as a result.

Stephen Kimber

Stephen Kimber

Stephen Kimber is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel and nine books of non-fiction, including the best-selling Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair...