Tough lessons for Putin in hostage showdown
The chronological details of the unfolding of the hostage crisis in the southern Russian town of Beslan in North Ossetia last Friday - in which 338 civilians, 156 of them children, perished - reveal the Russian security apparatus’ desperate lack of preparedness. This deficiency had its imprint on every stage of the drama - from the absence of intelligence information about the gunmens’ raid plans, the failure to track down and intercept the gunmen on their way to Beslan, the failure to build up negotiations during the two days of siege, the total lack of the special forces’ preparedness when storming the besieged school become imminent, and the rescue operation that would gone even more awry if local citizens had not volunteered their help. The official explanation for the planning and operational flaws during the storm and rescue operation was that no violent moves had been planned. However, after three other terrorist attacks within a week before the Beslan school raid on 1 September claimed more that 100 lives, such an excuse is not only sheepish, but close to criminal negligence. Control of the anti-terrorist operation had been handed over, in part, to the local authorities in North Ossetia, who apparently lacked the necessary organizational expertise for handling such a task. Russian President Vladimir Putin had also sent Federal Security Service (FSB) chief Nikolai Patrushev and Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev to Beslan to oversee the operation. It is likely that the two lacked the necessary authority to act decisively and independently. As a result, according to per-minute accounts of the Friday events reported by Russian media, the special services stormed the school 40 minutes after an explosion ripped through the gymnasium where more than 1’000 hostages were being held, triggering the ensuing bloodbath.
Putin’s possible scenarios as of Friday, 1pm
The most dramatic of all possible outcomes for the hostage situation would have been if Russian troops had stormed the school and gunmen had made good on their threat to blow the building, which was wired to explode, killing everyone inside. The Kremlin would have been blamed for such a tragedy, for allowing it and for mishandling, by everyone - by the West, Russian liberals, aggrieved locals, and the rebels. An only slightly less tragic scenario is the one that actually unfolded on Friday. It was an even clumsier repeat of the Moscow theater crisis situation in 2002, in which Russian special forces stormed the building and managed to kill the rebels before they blew up themselves and the building. In Beslan, the gunmen - it is unclear whether by accident of plan - blew the roof of the building first, while the special forces were unprepared to quickly stop the attackers who were gunning down hostages fleeing the burning school. However, by use of a tamed Russian television media the Kremlin was largely able to shift most of the blame on to the attackers, as it had managed to do after the theater situation in 2002. Another variant of the scenario could have seen Moscow agreeing to the attackers’ demands, allowing the gunmen to withdraw from the building along with the hostages, and then attacking their convoy. Again, hostage casualties would have been inevitable and North Ossetian locals - seeing their hopes of the hostages safe return betrayed - would have been outraged. A strong strategic move for the Kremlin would have been to respond by threatening the hostage-takers with the execution of their loved ones should they have refused to surrender. During the course of the last couple of years, that tactic has been effectively used by pro-Russian Chechen police to force several prominent Chechen rebels to surrender. It is also likely that such tactics would have been met with general public approval in Russia, but harshly criticized in the West. On the other hand, simply giving in to the terrorists’ demands - which were actually never put on the table - would have saved the hostages lives but destroyed the Kremlin’s authority and image.
Rebel power play
The gunmen were apparently seeking to eliminate the intermediate scenarios and force Putin to face the two extreme possibilities: either to take the blame for causing the death of hundreds of children, parents, and teachers, or to accept defeat and give in to rebel demands. And they were working hard to press Putin to opt for the latter. Having wired the school building to explode, the attackers had vowed to press the button if police dared to storm the premises. The use of female suicide bombers wearing explosive-laden belts also signaled the group’s readiness to die and take the hostages with them. Indeed, it was a powerful message coming after three Chechen female suicide bombers were announced as primary suspects in terrorist attacks a week before the Beslan raid in which twin Russian passenger jets were simultaneously downed, killing some 100 people. In an attempt to greatly reduce the chances of a repeat of the Moscow theater hostage crisis, when rebels where stunned by a toxic gas slipped in by Russian special forces, the hostage takers had refused food and water from outside for the hostages, and smashed windows in the gymnasium for better air circulation. Media reports said that the gunmen had two dogs with them, apparently to alert them to a possible chemical attack. The choice of target, vulnerable children, appealed to the public consciousness and was likely the biggest factor in the gunmen’s power play. Rescued hostages said in televised interviews that the gunmen had said that they had initially planned to seize a nearby orphanage. But there were only 150 children there, many without parents, and the attackers instead opted for a school with more than 1’000 hostages in it. Having potential suicide bombers in their ranks also was meant to give the gunmen the power to force the Kremlin not to place too much hope in the possibility of the attackers’ retreat. A suicide attack does not imply any exit strategy. The hostage takers had reduced their own chances of survival, thereby reducing the Kremlin’s choice of action, leaving Putin to choose whether to kill all or give in.
Terrorism: war and theater
A terrorist attack is largely a combination of war and theater, to which public attention is firmly glued by the means of the media to an ongoing drama that allows the terrorists to frame their operation as a one-off game. The terrorists almost never threaten new terrorist attacks, but only vow to aggravate the existing one. This aspect of the game is one of terrorism’s fundamental vantage points, as a horrified public desperate for an immediate solution to the current drama presses the government to give in to terrorist demands. Thus has it worked well for Chechen rebels twice so far, in 1995 and 1996, when they seized maternity hospitals in the southern Russian cities of Budyonnvsk and Kizlyar. In Moscow in 2002, Putin formidably broke that pattern by ordering the storming the Moscow theater with 800 hostages in it. Although 129 hostages died in the special forces operation, Putin’s high public rating sank only briefly and recovered rapidly. Many observers in Russia decided then and there that rebels would abandon hostage-taking raids as an ineffective type of terrorist warfare. But that has not been the case, though there have been modifications to hostage-taking operations. The switch to the use of female suicide bombers could signify the rebels’ discovery of a much more cost-effective and politically rewarding strategy. Despite the setbacks for the rebels in the face of Putin’s tough action, the Beslan raid was made possible in part because of its timing, on the heels of last week’s twin plane crashes, in which the planes were allegedly blown up by Chechen female suicide bombers. The crashes have sent Russia’s air transport industry into turmoil. Just a day before the Beslan raid, another suicide bomber blew herself up in a crowd outside a Moscow metro station, killing 11 people and forcing Moscow to cancel City Day celebrations scheduled for 5 September. The Beslan raid on the first day of school was conducted at a moment of national dismay and against its most vulnerable people, children - facts that have contributed tremendously to public fear and loathing across the country.
Kremlin’s small strategic victories
By demanding that the UN Security Council convene on the day after the school’s seizure, Moscow managed to secure in advance a scenario in which the blame would fall on the gunmen and those who support them for any hostage casualties, at least in the eyes of world leaders. So far, neither group in the anti-government Islamist underground in the Northern Caucasus has claimed complicity in the raid. Unlike in the Moscow theater hostage crisis - which was carried out by the Chechen rebels and triggered anti-Chechen crackdowns in Russian cities - this time around, Russian officials did everything possible to preempt ethnic tensions by insisting that the attackers belonged to different nationalities, including not only Chechens and Ingush, but also Slavs and Ossetians. The Ossetians and Ingush were engaged in a short but bloody territorial conflict in early 1990’s, and the relations between the two people remain sour. According to the official version of the hostage crisis events, the gunmen, led by Ingush Wahhabi leader Magomed Yevloev, known under the rebel nom-de-guerre of Magas, had come to North Ossetia from Ingushetia. Also, according to Russian officials, 10 of the 32 gunmen were Arabs, with one “dark-skinned” person among them. This version - which has not been supported by any concrete evidence - has already made it into most media reports. The alleged Arab involvement will once again allow the Kremlin to tie the rebels in the North Caucasus to international terrorists networks and to demand support in its crackdown on rebels in Chechnya.
Kremlin needs anti-terror strategy rethink
On Saturday, one day after the end of the hostage drama, Putin addressed the public, acknowledging that the existing Russian law enforcement and security services were not adequate to meet modern day challenges, and that corruption among the officers had further compounded the problem. It took four major terrorist attacks in 10 days and 450 dead civilians to bring the Russian leadership to acknowledge a fact that observers have been pointing out for many years. Having conceded the poor state of the country’s security forces, Putin said that that an effective system of crisis-management needed to be created, which would include new approaches in the work of the law enforcers. In Russia, where the security community is already occupying the critical positions in government and business and seems to enjoy the status quo, the proposed overhaul promises to be an extremely tough managerial task for Putin. So far, as a result of the Beslan hostage crisis, only the Ossetian interior minister has handed in his resignation. In the meantime, the rebel websites, Kavkazcenter.com and Chechenpress.com, and the Ingush independent news agency, Ingushetiya.ru, reported on Sunday that the relatives of former Chechen separatist president and rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov had been arrested, along with relatives of one of the suspected Beslan gunmen in Ingushetia. These developments were not reported by Russian television on Sunday. It is questionable how strong a deterrent such “relative arrests” could have for gunmen contemplating new hostage raids, given their fanatical adherence to jihad against Russia. What is clear is that eventually such harsh tactics will push more people into the embrace of jihadists. For the Chechen rebels, who have not acknowledged complicity in the Beslan raid but are certainly keeping a close eye on the unfolding drama, a brutal response by the Kremlin without changing its core anti-terrorist and political strategies in the region would only confirm their need to escalate their own attack methods and begin contemplating large-scale terrorist operations. If Moscow does not begin focusing on eliminating the terror threat by different means - from engaging some rebels politically to buying others off and conducting sting operations against still others - a catastrophic terrorist attack would be the likely eventual outcome in Russia. The Beslan raid was merely the next step towards that eventuality and another brightly flashing signal to Putin that the Kremlin must rethink its strategy.
Nabi Abdullaev is a Dagestani journalist and researcher working with The Moscow Times daily. He holds a degree in public administration from Harvard University, where he studied terrorism and international security. Presently, he is a researcher at the Washington-based Transnational Crime and Corruption Center.