President's brief visit angers Beslan: Moscow on the rack over hostage crisis
BESLAN, Sept 4: The people of Beslan, which Russian President Vladimir Putin visited briefly before dawn on Saturday to condole the school bloodbath
, vented their anger against the Kremlin leader for visiting the town so briefly and accused him of posturing for television cameras instead of meeting its traumatized residents.
"He saw no one and talked to no one," said Boris, whose neighbour and her family disappeared. "He just wanted to show the world how young and handsome he is but he hasn't helped and he won't help and he can't stop this happening again."
In the nearby city of Vladikavkaz, hundreds of distraught Ossetians queued outside the overwhelmed morgue to look for missing relatives among the lines of bodies.
Dozens of corpses, their skin the colour of powdered milk, lay outside the morgue on stretchers. Most were children or women, their naked bodies covered with black tarpaulin or plastic sheets.
Relatives accompanied by nurses picked their way along row after row of stretchers, holding handkerchieves or gauze masks to their faces against the stench.
Many of the victims had been held inside the school gym by their captors for two days without food or water before being killed. It was the grimmest outcome of a hostage-taking in modern times.
In a sombre television address President Putin, dressed in a dark suit and standing beside a Russian flag, denounced the gunmen who attacked "defenceless children".
Officials announced they had completed their search of the charred ruins of Middle School No 1, and confirmed for the first time media reports that the gunmen had taken more than 1,000 people hostage when they stormed the school on Wednesday.
OFFICIALS ON THE RACK: Mediators who were should have come but never did, news of the unfolding drama withheld from the public ... the Russian authorities are being put through the mill over their handling of the crisis in which 320 hostages died - half of them children.
The bloody and traumatic intervention by Russian security forces may not have been planned for Friday, but the "decision to launch an assault had been taken," said online daily Gazeta.ru on Saturday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had assured anguished parents waiting outside the school and the rest of the Russian population that force was not among the options being considered and that the priority was "to save the lives of the children."
But the hostage standoff ended in explosions, a barrage of machine gun fire and the screams of terrified youngsters.
Special forces said they had been forced to act after a huge explosion from inside the school and the shooting of some hostages.
But "no one was really in charge of leading negotiations with the hostage takers" between Wednesday and Friday, and "their requests were ignored", said Gazeta.ru.
The presidents of North Ossetia and Ingushetia, Alexander Dzassokhov and Murat Ziazikov, whose presence had been demanded by the pro-Chechen militants, never turned up.
Kremlin aide Aslambek Aslakhanov, a Chechen, who had also been called for by the militants, only arrived 48 hours after the siege began.
One former hostage, identified as Zalina, said: "As early as Friday the terrorists warned that an assault would be launched."
"They telephoned regional leaders but no one would take their calls. They understood that our government was fooling them, and that's when they stopped us from drinking," she said.
"There was an alternative," said military expert Pavel Felgenhauer. "They could have started serious negotiations, found out what the commando group's demands were and achieve a peaceful outcome," he added.
The authorities sat on the hostage-takers' basic demands for a full two days, saying there had been no clear demands made and that they were happy to remain in the school.
It was only on Friday morning, moments before the tragic climax, that the Russian crisis cell announced that the militants wanted nothing less than "the independence of Chechnya".
This demand is unacceptable for the Kremlin and considerably more radical than those relayed in several statements by former hostages, who had said "the terrorists had clearly expressed their desire from the start that their only demand was that Russian troops be withdrawn from Chechnya".
Once again the authorities "showed that there were incapable of planning and managing anything. Or that they did not want to", said the communist newspaper Sovietskaya Rossia.
Figures on the number of hostages trapped in the school were played down, as the long list of 1,000 dead and wounded reveals. And the people of Beslan fear the official death toll may rise further.
Russian television stations were given orders. Journalists at the commercial channel NTV "had been told not to mention the number of dead before the announcement of official figures", according to daily Kommersant.
Public channel Rossia was not able to film what it wanted to, let alone broadcast the images, said columnist Irina Petrovskaya in the daily Izvestia.
She said that if the authorities had learned one thing from the 2002 theatre hostage drama in Moscow in which 129 hostages died, it was "that journalists had to be prevented from working", she said.
In spite of the carnage "it is very unlikely that Russian society's attitude to Putin will change in any dramatic way", said sociologist Alexei Levinson. "He will remain for them a symbol of national unity."
"The official version of an unplanned assault is quite convincing, and at a national level Putin's popularity rating will not move," said political analyst Andrei Piontkovski. -AFP
