In Ethnic Tinderbox, Fear of Revenge for School Killings

KARTSA, Russia, Sept. 19 - As grief begins to mutate into anger two weeks after the mass killings in Beslan, this drab little town not far away waits in fear for possible reprisals.

The people here are ethnic Ingush. The victims of the killings were mostly Ossetians. The feuds and hatreds between the groups go back too far to calculate.

Little has been made public about the backgrounds of the attackers, and none have been identified as Ingush, but there seems to be no doubt in the minds of the people of Beslan.

"Ingushis!" shouted a group of mourners when asked this weekend who was responsible. "Ingushis killed our children!"

The people of Kartsa knew this would happen and began to feel the danger even before the hostage-taking ended Sept. 3, said Zarema Tochiyeva, 40, a French teacher. "The word is that the Ossetians are preparing to attack us here," she said. "To them, Ingush is not a nationality but an enemy. Monsters. That's it. Once they've decided on that, they don't need to think any further."

The two peoples fought a brief, brutal war just 12 years ago and Kartsa, a lonely enclave of about 5,000 people, still bears the scars in ruined and abandoned buildings.

Both here and in Beslan, people are talking about Oct. 13, the end of a 40-day mourning period, when the traditional moment comes to contemplate revenge. Already, a local Ingush doctor said, there have been small eruptions of violence in almost every village in the Prigorodny region, disputed land along the border with Ingushetia.

Ms. Tochiyeva said some families were fleeing across the border into Ingushetia. Police officers at checkpoints have become more nervous, and border crossing points have been reinforced. The local agricultural institute has given its students an indefinite leave, residents said.

The fear now, expressed even by President Vladimir V. Putin, is that fighting could spread through the North Caucasus region of Russia, expanding the war in Chechnya and re-igniting other simmering conflicts.

"This is a rich, fertile ground for the growth of extremist propaganda and the recruitment of new supporters of terror," he said after the Beslan killings. "The North Caucasus is a key strategic region for Russia. It is a victim of terrorism and also a springboard for it."

Like a number of experts on the region, Mr. Putin suggested that touching off conflict might have been the aim of the people who seized the Beslan school, killing more than 300 people, half of them children. He said the attackers hoped to "rupture the fragile balance" of ethnic and religious differences in the region.

Kartsa and the nearby Ingush enclave of Mayski are the tinderbox. "It would take just one match and this whole place would go up in flames," said a policeman on the road into town. Already in recent months killings, kidnappings and bombings have increased in the republic of Ingushetia, which lies between North Ossetia and Chechnya, where a brutal 10-year war continues with no end in sight.

On June 22, hundreds of well-armed rebels took over part of Ingushetia's capital, Nazran, raided an armory and killed up to 100 people before withdrawing into the hills.

Long-running ethnic tensions have intensified recently in Dagestan, across the eastern border of Chechnya, where Chechen rebels briefly took over two villages in 1999.

To the west of North Ossetia, deeply rooted ethnic tensions divide two other republics whose names alone suggest the complexity of the region - Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachayevo-Cherkessia.

"The unique danger in my judgment is that there is a 'Chechen fuse' running to other ethnic conflicts," said Clifford Kupchan, vice president and senior fellow at the Nixon Center, a foreign policy research institute in Washington, in an e-mail interview. He said the Beslan siege might have been part of an attempt to ignite that fuse.

The most recent grievances in North Ossetia are a direct result of the brutality of Stalin, who deported the Ingush and Chechens to Central Asia in 1944 and gave parts of Ingush land to the Ossetians. The exiles returned in the mid-1950's, after Stalin's death, and many reclaimed their homes. But the Prigorodny region remained in dispute, and open warfare flared in 1992. Hundreds of people were killed and tens of thousands of Ingush became refugees.

Local enmities are age-old. Russian attempts to subdue Chechnya and the Northeast Caucasus may be newer, but they go back for two centuries, since Gen. Aleksei Yermolov tried the same strong-arm approach that is failing today.

"I desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses," he wrote to the czar in 1816.

He added a thought that Mr. Putin might embrace, "Moderation in the eyes of the Asiatics is a sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am inexorably severe."

One hostage-taker who has been identified was a hardened rebel who had been tortured so horribly by Russian soldiers that his father said he had gone mad, said Tanya Lokshina, a leading human rights campaigner with the Moscow Helsinki Group. The Beslan siege appears to have been his response.

The writer Mikhail Lermontov, who traveled the Caucasus in the 19th century, seems to have met people like this. In a poem, he wrote, "Friendship is true - revenge is truer still; There, good for good is paid, and blood for blood."

In a shed in Beslan not far from the school where their families died, a dozen mourners - men and women in black - gathered under two bare light bulbs to eat and talk. Their hatred for the Ingush was fierce.

"No one is going to forgive, that's certain," said Robert Khodov, 37, a truck driver. "This is the Caucasus. That doesn't happen." He said it was forbidden to touch a weapon during the mourning period. "But wait till the 40 days are over," he said, and made a cutting motion with one hand across the palm of the other.

I wonder how Beslan affected this story from RBC.ru:

Y. Budanov's Clemency Application is Withdrawn

The clemency application by the former colonel, tank regiment commander Yuriy Budanov, was withdrawn. Budanov for the present remains serving out his sentence in the Ul'yanovsk district prison.
According to NTV television, the decision was made by the district prosecutor's office. Withdrawal of the request was based on the fact that it was incorrectly made, in part because Y. Budanov has still not served half his sentence of incarceration, and because he has yet to completely pay compensation to the victims.
Now the clemency request depends on a decision by Vladimir Shamanov, governor of the Ul'yanovsk district.
Earlier several of the mass media reported that the clemency request was personnally withdrawn by Yuri Budanov.
Recall that former tank regiment commander Y. Budanov was sentenced to ten years for the murder of a 17 year old Chechnyan girl on July 25th, 2003, by the North Caucasus area military court. According to Budanov, the girl was a sniper for the (Chechnyan) fighters. On September 16th, however, the Ul'yanovsk district clemency commission was satisfied with Yuri Budanov's clemency application, and in accordance with the decision of the commission, 40 year old Y. Budanov was freed not just from serving the main sentence, but from others as well. That is, he was to have his rank and military decorations restored.
Budanov's clemency application was signed by Ul'yanovsk district governor Vladimir Shamanov and only needed the signature of Russian president Vladimir Putin to become effective.
We note that information about the possible pardon of Y. Budanov summoned a stormy reaction from the people. Though opinion was divided, a greater number were against the removal of the former colonel's punishment. Most unhappy were those in Chechnya, homeland of the murdered girl. At a meeting today in Grozny a few thousand people assembled to protest against the pardon of Y. Budanov.
According to radio station "Ehkho Moskvy", Chechnyan president Alu Alkhanov received with satisfaction the news that Yuriy Budanov had withdrawn his clemency request.
21.09.2004

Looks to me like the colonel took advantage of the anti-Chechnyan feeling after Beslan to make a clemency request, and was later pressured to withdraw it to prevent riots.

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