Vengeance in the air as Beslan ends mourning
Residents of the grief-stricken Russian school siege town marked the end of the traditional 40-day mourning period for the hundreds of victims of the massacre today.
Wailing and pounding their hands on dirt graves, hundreds of black-clad Ossetians wept for the children and adults killed after terrorists seized the school on the first day of term.
With the end of the mourning, fears are rising that fits of grief may become outbursts of violence against the Ingush, a rival ethnic group whose members were among the raiders who seized School No 1 in Beslan.
Top federal and regional officials have appealed for calm, but seething anger is replacing sorrow felt by nearly all Ossetians.
“I can promise you there will be violence,” said a 47-year-old man outside the school who gave only his first name, Ruslan. “The Ingush are all bandits.”
The school’s broken and shattered remains yet again became the epicentre for the anguish of those whose relatives and friends died in the September 1 to 3 hostage-taking.
The corridors of the school – rank with mildew and smoke and rife with angry graffiti – echoed with women’s wails and sobs.
In the charred ruins of the gymnasium – where more than 1,000 people were held without food or water in sweltering heat for three days – schoolchildren lit thin prayer candles and people propped up small religious icons and photographs among the flowers and stuffed animals.
One woman shook with sobs as she read the graffiti scrawled on the walls: “Children, Forgive Us.”
“Many of us are afraid to go to school now. Many of us can’t even sleep at night,” said 16-year-old Alona Pliyeva, who came with about two dozen classmates from a village about six miles away.
In the surrounding streets, families set up long tables and lit bonfires for mourning meals. Mourning families could be identified by their men, wearing beards that they planned to shave at the end of the 40 days.
At the town cemetery, where hundreds of freshly-dug graves lie adorned with flowers, bricks and wooden marking posts, Ossetian women began exchanging their black head scarves for dark-coloured scarves to mark the end of the 40-day period.
Red-eyed men sombrely poured drops of water or beer on the graves as offerings to the dead.
The sounds of a chorus of Orthodox Christian priests offering sung prayers and blessings mixed with the wails of Ossetian women pounding the dirt graves, and yelling in Ossetian or in Russian: “How can this be?! How can this be?!”
“I can barely even look at her grave. I have no words to express it,” said Vitaly, as he stood near the grave of his 12-year-old niece, Zarina.
Across Russia, priests read Mass in Orthodox churches and cathedrals, while regional politicians urged calm amid rumours that the end of the mourning period would bring a wave of revenge killings.
Some Ossetians have vowed to seek revenge on the Ingush for the deaths of nearly 340 victims.
The hostage-takers, apparently acting under orders from Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, included some Ingush.
Officials fear a repeat of the ten day war fought between Ossetians and Ingush in the autumn of 1992 over rights to land as Ingush tried to return to their homes half a century after being exiled together with the Chechens under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Hundreds were killed and thousands of Ingush were forced to flee the eastern regions of North Ossetia, the republic in southern Russia where Beslan is located.
Thousands of Ingush live in squalid settlements and refugee camps along the border between North Ossetia and Ingushetia.
Those in North Ossetia are subject to harassment, discrimination and, after Beslan, death threats. Many Ingush still claim title to land and homes now occupied by Ossetians.
Former Ingush President Ruslan Aushev has repeatedly warned that revenge attacks could destabilise the entire Caucasus. But Russian authorities have vowed to prevent acts of vengeance, dispatching hundreds of extra police and troops to the region.
“The seizure of the school in Beslan was the latest attempt to destabilise the situation in the North Caucasus,” the southern Russian area that includes Chechnya, Ingushetia and North Ossetia, Ingush President Murat Zyazikov said.
“My friends’ children died. My relatives’ children died. We are all dying from this,” said David Alexeyev, 36. “Time will pass but that won’t heal our wounds. One hundred years, 500 years – it won’t help.”
