Terrorism’s Cult of Death Against Children in Beslan (article)

As a historian of Russian 20^th-century political violence, I have encountered death in all colors, shapes, and forms. Documents depict “oppressors and exploiters” torn to pieces in bomb explosions. Archival photographs show faces disfigured by the sulfuric acid terrorists poured on “despicable traitors,” time and again projecting deep fear and hatred onto designated political enemies. A key feature of modern-day terrorism, which escalated over the past century, is that “the enemy” has been predominantly the civilians, killed randomly and en masse. The extremists’ fundamental goal is no longer to punish individuals responsible for particular misdeeds, the way they had in the past.

Terrorists seek to inflict fear—to terrorize, cause anxiety, and demoralize—society at large. Witnesses of violence thus find themselves in an aberrant relationship with their potential killers, for whom terror has become a modern form of social communication. Acts of murder serve as perpetrators’ messages, circulated by sensational media coverage.

Justifications for terror vary in accordance with its proponents’ specific political agendas; yet, behind the rhetoric emerges an essential common incentive: terrorists find life outside their clandestine cells insufferable. Contemporary terrorism is a form of death-worship. Psychohistorian Moshe Hazani called it “modern secular instances of thanato-

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philia” (“Red Carpet, White Lilies: Love of Death in the Poetry of The Jewish Underground Leader Avraham Stern,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 89, 2002, p. 47). The Beslan massacre in North Ossetia stands as its metaphor.

It had begun on September 1, 2004, amid the annual back-to-school festivities across Russia, when 32 heavily armed, masked hostage-takers detained nearly 1,200 children, their relatives, and teachers inside School No. 1 in the town of Beslan. Vague television reports showed snapshots of horror-stricken parents waiting and praying in the schoolyard. Hours passed in fruitless negotiations; the captors refused to give children food or water. It was a stalemate.

In the gym, where hostages were assembled, people were crushed together, sitting on each other or standing for hours, barely able to breathe, and with automatic rifles pointed at them. Some children hallucinated and lost consciousness. The terrorists did not allow medical help, declaring, “Let him die. We are the terrorists, we’re here to kill.”

Chechen separatists in Beslan had nothing personal against the children, their parents, teachers, or the Ossetins generally, who were neutral in the lingering Russo-Chechen conflict. Success in hostage-taking presupposed that human beings were only a means to achieve political objectives. Organizers of the school seizure could not expect the crisis to cause Putin’s government to succumb to their main demand—evacuations of Russian troops from Chechnya. Still, they were prepared to stop at nothing because for the terrorist, the final end is struggle itself as the raison d’être. The all-out battle is a defining factor of his identity, which is affirmed by relentless violence.

Small children screamed for hours out of fear and cried for food, while older ones tried to be brave. They would have given up food for a drop of water, which was just around the corner, but their guards denied access to it. Moth-

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ers peed in empty baby bottles and offered their toddlers a drink of “beer.” Most people had almost no clothes on; even teenage girls had stripped to their underpants—the heat was so intense it felt like they were inside an oven.

Although they seemed to be familiar scenes from the Holocaust, they were not. Nor was it a replay of “Sophie’s Choice,” when the captors allowed 11 women to leave with their babies but did not permit them to take their other children to safety. Yet, Beslan School No. 1 became a mini-replica of a concentration camp.

When guards were bored, they entertained themselves by teasing children. They let someone drink and refused the others; they offered kids chocolate and said that it had been poisoned. The captors tore off the children’s baptismal crosses and laughed, “Pray to whoever you want. Those who’ll get out of here alive are beloved by Allah.” Like the Nazi servants of their 20^th century death cult, their successors in Beslan shot a video to commemorate death’s triumphant appearance in the 21^st century.

On September 3, several blasts shook the school. Minutes later, as the Russian security forces were making their way inside the burning building amid smoke, screams, and confusion, cameras followed scores of half-naked boys and girls jumping out of windows and running to safety. Children ran for their lives; the terrorists aimed and methodically shot them in the back from the rooftop. Casualty estimates escalated, multiplying with every passing hour. Altogether, at least 339 people died, including 176 children, and over 700 were wounded.

What is one to think about armed men shooting point-blank at boys and girls stripped of their clothes? Where before have we seen the children’s defenseless nakedness and the scores of stunningly composed, otherworldly faces? Their ash- and blood-covered bodies all looked so skinny af-

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ter only three days in captivity. The ruins of that school, where hundreds of people suffered from unbearable heat and dozens perished in flames are not just the site of another terrorist act; they are a symbol of mass homicide, akin to the chimneys of Auschwitz.

A CNN report on February 3, 2005 quoted Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev: his men were planning operations similar to the school seizure in the future. Beslan was not “an accident,” but a “normal,” if imperfectly handled, terrorist act, he said. Nor was it “a tragedy,” maintained journalist David Brooks, “It was a carefully planned mass murder operation.” Whatever the Russians’ “ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up” (“Cult of Death,” New York Times, 9/ 7, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/opinion/07brooks. html).

The first victims of terrorism—even before it strikes against “the enemy”—are terrorists themselves, exactly the way the first victims of Nazism were ordinary Germans, turned into homicidal tools. Before the SS men could start the process of murdering children, terrible things had to happen to the killers—dehumanization, which barred them from acknowledging humanity in a living child. Psychiatrist Salman Akhtar underscores that a salient sign of dehumanization is the deprivation of empathy, which the masterminds of terrorism employ as its integral feature.

The first doctor to enter the building described in his diary: every inch of the floor is covered with “bits and pieces of kids’ holiday clothes, shoes, aprons, ribbons, school supplies…ripped and charred bodies of children and adults…” Many Beslan residents blame Russian security forces for the

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botched rescue effort because numerous hostages lost their lives in “friendly fire” directed against the terrorists. Yet, “it wasn’t Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away” (Brooks). The longer the hostage crisis lasted, the greater was the chance for a catastrophe; one of several explosive devices had to go off sooner or later. A bomb that the terrorists sloppily attached to the basketball hoop miraculously did not fall down for two days; on the third day it did.

Terrorism, as it revealed itself in Beslan, is a form of genocide. It is essentially different from terrorist acts in the past, including several against children, such as the 1974 assault on a school in the northern Israeli town of Ma’alot and the 2001 suicide attack in the “Delphinarium” discotheque in Tel Aviv. Beslan is a town of relatives; everyone has familial ties to everyone else. By orchestrating a school seizure, the terrorists aimed at the entire population, at every family. Psychologists refer to Beslan as a “special place,” a “death zone,” where everyone has experienced dying. Theirs is an “infected space,” explain the locals; it’s like living in a cemetery. Even the live feel dead—at least a part of them is. Every resident is affected for life, as are Holocaust survivors.

Throughout the 20^th century, terrorism evolved as a particularly brutal form of counterculture. It directed itself persistently, if not always explicitly, against the epoch’s intrinsic principles. The health and safety of children are among the few remaining values, impervious, perhaps sacred, in our skeptical post-modern reality. The choice of targets in Beslan could not have been more explicit in the terrorists’ message about the profundity of intended destruction.

The adherents of a universal murder cult loathe life’s spontaneous mobility, “filled with ambiguities,” noted Jungian psychologist John Haule during our conversation in the summer of 2004. They want “a static thing, where every

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piece of reality is pinned down. And that would be death,” to which terrorists cater, as they seek to recast dynamic living—complex, filled with contradictions and ironies—into the stillness and single-mindedness of a graveyard. In their primitive belligerence, they strive to obliterate being, with all its perplexing, yet vibrant, manifestations. Predictably, terrorism as a form of thanatophilia strikes against children—the quintessence of vitality, of sparkling aliveness, the very symbol of life.

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