John Kampfner :: author, broadcaster & commentator

Why it was right to broadcast the horror of Beslan
Daily Express, 9th September 2004

When crimes are committed we search for words to describe them. For murders of individuals we might use the terms vicious or senseless. When those planes crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, we described the perpetrators as depraved and inhuman. Somehow I still cannot find what I am looking for when I see those pictures of the children of Beslan.

I was in Russia when the drama unfolded. The events were carried live on television, something that is taken for granted in countries like ours. But there it was new and even for a people who have known so much hardship for so many generations it was an experience beyond parallel.

From the sight of those half-naked bloodied children fleeing for their lives, to the mothers and fathers wailing as the tiny coffins were lowered into the freshly dug ground, we thought we had seen it all. But Tuesday evening’s footage of the ordeal of the hostages, herded like animals into the gymnasium of the school with wires and explosives hanging from walls and ceilings, unable to move even as some of them were taken away to be shot simply does not lend itself to words.

There is of course something ghoulish about watching every development beamed by satellite to screens around the world. There are obviously downsides: the oxygen of such publicity might encourage potential terrorists. In truth, such is the sickness of certain minds that they would probably do it anyway. We are now in an inflation of horror – each attack seems predicated on the aim of killing the maximum number of people in the most horrific of circumstances.

But it is vital, in my view, that people everywhere see what is being done in the name of warped political causes. It might be gut wrenching but it is important to hear the accounts of those young boys, of how they and their school friends were denied water and told to drink their own urine if they were thirsty.

It is vital so as to ensure that people do not in any way associate anything that has been done with any grievance or any cause. If there is such a thing as pure evil, then this was it.

On Monday night, three days after the carnage, I was invited to see President Putin. I was amazed that he had agreed to see our group of mainly academics, with a few journalists like myself, foreigners who had lived in Russia and who care for its future.

He talked to us for nearly four hours, sometimes icily, sometimes passionately. He spent so long, because he wanted to convince us of his case – if only he would be so open and so candid with his own people.

Many of us would disagree with much of what he said. Russia’s policies towards Chechnya have been little short of disastrous. The Russian army has committed human rights abuses time and again. The Kremlin should have long ago sought outside help into trying to resolve the dispute by political means.

All of that is true. The same should equally apply to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to other theatres of war. Everyone has his view about the war in Iraq. I was against it. Children have always been victims of war and violence, sometimes deliberately targeted, sometimes “human collateral” to use that horrible phrase.

But there is no moral equivalence here. I cannot think of a single cause in human history that might have justified what was done in Beslan. Putin was right when he told us that these were not “freedom fighters” or “rebels”, these were terrorists through and through. Inviting them to talks would be the equivalent, he said, of receiving Osama Bin Laden in Brussels or at the White House.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was right earlier on the same day when he said that sometimes we seek too quickly to move on, to draw logical political conclusions from events like this. Sometimes we should just stop and remember.

Thanks to modern communications images are immediate and ever lasting. The history of the last dozen years will be told through pictures. I was lucky enough to witness first hand the joyous East Berliners clambering onto the Wall in 1989 and the determined people of Moscow climbing onto tanks in 1991 to defeat the coup leaders. Those televised dramas ushered in a period of hope.

Now what sights and sounds are etched indelibly on our minds? The screams of affluent New Yorkers in 9/11 and the screams of the simple inhabitants of a small town in the faraway region of North Ossetia called Beslan, two very different groups of people brought together in shared suffering.

This article first appeared in the Daily Express and may not be reproduced without permission.