Graduation day is a somber and painful time in Beslan. While across Russia school children celebrate one of life's major milestones by bringing flowers to school for their teachers, in this small community, entire classrooms head for a separate section of the town's cemetery.
Known as the City Of Angels, this sprawling plot of land is where most of the 333 people who died in Russia's worst ever terrorist attack, the Beslan school massacre, were laid to rest. More than half were children and every second headstone is adorned with toys.
Graduates gather silently around the tombs of their former classmates killed on what should have been the last school day of their life. White balloons, one for each missing graduate, are released into the sky. Last year sixteen children slain in the terrorist attack would have finished school. This year 13 balloons drifted above the tombs.
Even late at night, the cemetery is rarely without visitors. Like Milana Adirkhayeva, most relatives go there to speak to their dead. The nine year old and her elder sister Emilia survived the school siege. Their mother, 27 year-old Irina, died of gunshot wounds. Milana was only four then but the image of her mother stroking her head as their life hung in the balance during the hostage drama is forever etched in her memory.
"As soon as I think of mum I want to cry because I miss her so much," says Milana. "I speak to her on her tomb and then on my birthday, every year, I write "Mum I love you and will never forget you" on a note. I tie it to a balloon with a Fruitella sweet, then release it into the sky and hope it will reach her."
September 1st will mark the fifth anniversary of a massacre that killed more children - 186 of them - than any other terrorist attack in history. Seventeen children lost both parents and 72 were seriously disabled. One single block of flats close to the school lost 34 children.
In 2004, a disbelieving world reached out to Beslan with empathy and more than twenty million pounds of funding, though many could not comprehend just what had driven a gang of terrorists to take the lives of innocent children in a small community of just 35,000.
Since then the town's residents have not only had to cope with their loss but with other distorting aftershocks: anger over how some of that money was spent; distrust of the authorities who failed to protect the town and uncertainty about the future for survivors. Five years on, are there any signs Beslan will recover from its unimaginable grief or that anyone will be held to account for what happened?
I first came to Beslan two days after the school massacre. The agony of the bereaved hung over the town like a heavy cloak as the streets clogged with funeral processions. At the school building and the cemetery there were heartbreaking scenes as mothers screamed and fainted.
Today the town is typical of others in North Ossetia, a predominantly orthodox and strongly conservative region of Russia's north Caucasus. It is sleepy, provincial and rural. There is no obvious sign of the town's deep emotional scars, until one comes face to face with Beslan's School Number One.
The building has been left exactly the way it was after the ferocious gun-battle between the terrorists and Russia's special-forces which ended the 52 hour siege. It stands as a memorial to the dead and a poignant symbol of the town's divisions.
Former hostages and relatives of those who died at the school are still split over what should be done with the building. Many think it should have been pulled down; others would literally lie in front of the bulldozers to preserve it.
It was here in the school gym that three dozen terrorists armed with AK 47s, grenade launchers and explosives and demanding an end to the war in neighboring Chechnya, crammed more than 1100 hostages including 750 children into a space smaller than a basketball court.
The men from the Riyadus-Salikhin terror group who wired the gym with explosives, were exceptionally brutal. On the first day they executed a man in front of his two children and the other hostages simply because he had dared to speak. They then led several men at gunpoint to a classroom on the first floor, sprayed them with machine gun fire and threw their bodies out of a window.
The hostages were held for three days in soaring temperatures, without food or water. Most of those who died were killed when three explosions went off at noon on September 3rd. The first blast is thought to have been accidental, the other two were triggered by the terrorists.
The last and most powerful explosion set the gym on fire and brought down the roof trapping hostages under scorching debris, blazing beams, searing iron and burning plastic. As wounded and terror-stricken hostages scrambled over maimed bodies, a hail of bullets and rocket propelled grenades rained down on them.
Large charred dents in the gym's wooden floorboards still clearly mark the spot where some of the hostages burnt to death. All around, neatly displayed in rows on the gym's blackened and bullet ridden walls, hang the portraits of the victims. Flowers and wreaths, candles and fluffy animal toys line the gym next to bottles of mineral water and fizzy cans left for those who died thirsty, denied water by the terrorists.
The walls are scrawled with hand-written messages, verses and poems from the grieving to the dead. A large wooden orthodox cross stands in the middle of the gym. It is a harrowing and deeply moving place.
The rest of the school is eerie and sinister. Walls are riddled with tens of thousands of bullet holes. The spots where two female suicide bombers, the only two women among the terrorists, exploded, splattering black hair and brain parts all over the ceiling, are also exactly they were five years ago, suspended in time. It is believed they were blown up by their leader after expressing doubts during the siege.
Graffiti across the punctured walls include words praising the slain special-forces officers, as well as graphic insults to the terrorists and Lidia Tsalieva, the elderly school’s director who was also taken hostage and wounded. Despite the passing of time there are still angry relatives of those killed who believe a wild conspiracy theory dismissed by investigators which blames in part Tsalieva for the terrorist attack. Now at least, she no longer receives death threats.
For a long time after Beslan buried its dead some bereaved families also vented their anger against the teachers who had survived. Why, they screamed at them, had they saved themselves instead of dying rescuing the children?
“A year after the siege I was laying flowers at the tomb of one of my pupils when her grandmother shouted insults at me,” said Lena Kasumova, a teacher who survived with her 8 year old son.
“People accused us of murder and of having a Swiss bank account stuffed with money meant for the victims. It was terrible. More than once I thought it would have been better to die in the school than hear such things. I felt I had to apologize for being alive. With time however the slander stopped.”
Now rotting and unsafe, the main school building was recently closed off. Many in Beslan want the gym preserved as a chapel and the rest of the building razed - an option some grieving mothers like Susanna Dudiyeva bitterly oppose. The strong-willed head of the Beslan Mothers' Committee, a group of relatives of the dead set up to press the government into properly investigating the massacre - Dudiyeva lost her 13 year old son Zaur in the siege.
"For me every year becomes harder because the more time passes, the more I think of how my dead son would have been now" said Dudiyeva, 48, whose block of flats looks directly on to the school. "The building should be made safe and preserved as a memorial to the dead, to stop the world from forgetting."
Her husband Elbrus, who until Sept 1st 2004 was a successful local businessman, has not worked since his son's death. He spends most days watching television and last year suffered a stroke.
"This is a deeply traumatized town where many men turned to the bottle after the tragedy because they couldn't cope with the sense of guilt and the feeling they'd failed their dead children. It will never be a normal place. I for one can't come to terms with my son's death. That's why I will fight to the end for the truth," said Dudiyeva who is one of a small group of relatives to have filed a case against the Russian government at the European Union's Court of Human Rights in Strasburg.
The state, they argue, is to blame for allowing the attack to happen and for failing to enter into proper negotiations with the terrorists to save more children.
A similar case is being brought by The Voice of Beslan, a rival group of mothers which split from the Mother's Committee. Its head, Ella Kesayeva, whose sister lost both sons and husband in the terrorist attack, once nearly came to blows with Dudiyeva during a heated row about whether or not they should accept an invitation to sit down with Vladimir Putin, the former president and current Prime Minister.
Prosecutors reacted by threatening to prosecute her for extremism. In Beslan however there is some criticism of both groups.
As I leave Dudiyeva, who almost always wears only black, Zaur Gaitov gives me a lift. Five minutes later the burly man stops his Volga by the side of the road. His eyes fill with tears and voice trembles as he shows me a photograph of his son Alan he always keeps in the glove box, taken as he died of two gunshot wounds. Bear chest he’s being held up by two men as he collapses outside the school.
He and his sister had survived the siege but Alan was killed as he ran back to save other children. His father is immensely proud of his courage but is tormented by the thought that he would have lived if he had run away.
Russian authorities built two new schools to re-house the children from School Number One But in an ill-judged move, one was erected only a few hundred yards away, in full view of the destroyed old school - its spectral silhouette weighing on the minds of former hostages from across the road.
One is twelve year old Karina Kusova, who cannot bear to look at the building on her way to class every day. Five years ago, excited and dressed in a pretty dress, she left home to go to school for the first time. Her cousin Albert, 19, was with her. The little girl was severely burnt in the siege. She spent two months in hospital, was operated on three times and is now horribly scarred along her left leg and waist.
She needs a new skin graft but her parents cannot afford the operation in Moscow.
"All I remember is running away with Albert after the explosions," recalled Karina who still has shrapnel lodged in her left foot. "I was scorched and in agony. Suddenly as we fled he was shot in the head. He fell to the ground and had blood gushing out of his eye. I was crying and screaming at him to get up." The young man died five days later in hospital.
As she speaks in a soft voice, Karina is visibly uncomfortable. She sighs heavily, tightly squeezes a teddy bear against her chest, stares at her feet. She blushes, fiddles and repeatedly gives her mother Larissa a hesitant look as the woman explains that, despite the passing of five years, Karina still wakes up screaming at night, curled up like an animal, so terrified she briefly fails to recognize her mother.
They live in a cramped three bedroom house where Karina uses an internal phone to call her mother in the kitchen from the living room to be sure she is in the house. Karina says she has nightmares of the terrorists and has imagined finding a severed leg in her bed. She often suffers from excruciating headaches but has yet to undergo a proper scan. Her mother gave up her job to look after Karina as the school has often called to say she had become agitated and should be picked up.
For a while Karina received some assistance from dozens of professional psychologists who descended on Beslan after the tragedy but the sessions appear to have been of little long-term help.
By contrast Bert Kusov seems to have made a near full recovery. The boy was seven the day of the siege when he went to school with his grandmother. He has not forgotten the searing thirst and the taste of urine, nor the bloody image of the terrorists dragging the body of Ruslan Betrosov across the gym floor, the man executed in front the hostages and his own two boys.
He also remembers well the chaos and screaming which followed the explosions and the moment he saw his dead grandmother by his side, covered in blood and debris. "For three days she kept telling me not to worry, that everything would be fine," said Bert. "Suddenly there was shooting everywhere and I ran as fast as I could but then felt something smash into me."
Bert was hit by two bullets, one pierced his leg, the second smashed through his arm but he was saved by rescuers. A photo taken during the gun battle shows a local man running to safety with Bert in his arms. Two of his closest friends died in the school.
Now 12, Bert is a keen and talented wrestler who proudly shows off his medals. He does well in school and wants to become a doctor. The nightmares have become far less frequent. His mother Tamara says, however, that he will still only sleep in the same bed as his parents.
Aida Sidakova also appears to have overcome her ordeal. Now 12 she was caught in the siege with her mother and grandfather. When the explosions went off she was helped out of the gym but then instinctively climbed back in to be with her mother, only minutes before the roof caved in and flames engulfed the hostages. She was shot but survived. Visibly shy, she nonetheless now acts like any ordinary 12 year old girl.
Like all other badly wounded hostages, Bert and Karina were awarded 1000 pounds (1500 dollars) each from the state and an additional 16,000 pounds (25,000 dollars) each by an aid fund which gathered donations sent to Beslan from Russian and foreign charities. The fund made one-off payments and was run by the local government.
Less than a year after the tragedy - when most donations ceased - it had received some 25 million pounds (38 million dollars), according to an official audit ordered by the local audit chamber and prosecutors’ office after locals expressed fears that money had been stolen. The audit failed to uncover large scale fraud. The fund was closed about a year after the tragedy when it finished paying out the money it had received.
Rumours that aid money was siphoned off by unscrupulous bureaucrats still persist however, fuelled in part by the 2006 murder of a man appointed as head of a local bank which received some of the victims' funds. The man, who had expressed an interest in investigating claims that funds were misappropriated, was killed on the orders of the bank's deputy head, a woman who had stolen some 4000 pounds from the bank’s coffers.
The state paid for Karina's three operations as they were considered urgent. Her parents used most of the compensation awarded to them to buy the house they live in. Many children are still in need of medical or psychological help, or both. But as in Karina’s case, getting it now that the Russian authorities have long ceased to pay attention to Beslan’s problem has become much harder. Incredibly, a central and coordinated rehabilitation program was never set up.
"Now that the money has dried up I don't feel like asking anyone for help," said Karina's mother Larisa. "To those who did not suffer in the siege we are now a pain in the neck whilst those who lost someone, deep down hate us because our girl survived."
Families who lost a loved one in the siege received 2,000 pounds (3000 dollars) as compensation from the state and 23,000 pounds (35,000 dollars) from the non-governmental fund for each relative killed, a considerable sum by local standards. Regrettably, in many cases the money which flowed was a source of tension and recrimination.
Teachers who set up their own small fund to gather private donations were unfairly accused of stealing money by bereaved parents twisted with grief who also criticized one another for the different ways in which they spent their compensation, with some accusing others of cashing in on their dead child.
Since 2004 international charities have invited many of Beslan's young on trips abroad. Whilst welcome by most, the free vacations have at times also caused tension among the victims' families, with some children going abroad many times and others not once - often because parents are too proud to apply.
The state has spent 11 million pounds on a new high-tech hospital built in a field almost opposite the cemetery. Now almost complete, it promises to be North Ossetia's best hospital but is still not open.
"In some cases grief brought people together but in many it divided them" said Zarema Koroyeva, who runs a small rehabilitation centre for children built mainly with funds from a German charity. The place takes in 20 children at a time for brief holidays during which they spend time drawing, playing music and acting. It took three years to build and has been open for less than two but is already at risk of closing down unless the local authorities agree to finance it.
"There have been divisions between those who lost someone and those who did not as well as conflicts between the bereaved about who is to blame, about compensation and how people spent it, about what to do with the school building, about the teachers and the work of the Beslan Mothers Committee. With time however people's positions have softened."
Survivors' guilt, says Koroyeva, has had a poisonous effect on the town's psyche. Parents are persecuted by a sense that they betrayed their dead children; the young who lived must come to terms with the deaths of siblings and friends as well as the overpowering personality cult they left behind. In some cases parents unwittingly demonstrate more love for their dead child than for those who survived.
Unlike their parents, most children rarely talk about the siege. Georgy Murtazov, a sensitive 11 year old boy I met at the centre run by Koroyeva who lost his mother, said discussing the attack makes it worse. He remembers a lot of blood and dead bodies and guts spilling onto the gym floor but does not recall being scared, he said. As soon as he talks of his mother however he begins to stutter.
"I don't have any memories of her, just her picture to stop me from forgetting her face," said Georgy. "I don't like going to the cemetery but when am there I put my hand on her tomb and think of her." Georgy's father recently re-married and the boy now lives with a step-brother, Vitaly. In a sign of how little the siege is discussed at home, Georgy does not know that Vitaly was also a hostage.
Tensions and division aside, the people of Beslan have shown remarkable resilience, dignity and self-restraint. Fears that the town's grief would spark a bloody revenge spree against neighboring Ingushetia, a region North Ossetia fought a brief but fierce ethnic war with in 1992, did not come true. This despite the fact that more than half the terrorists were from Ingushetia and that the people of Beslan blame their old foe more than Chechnya for their suffering.
In five years, 47 new children have been born into families directly affected by the tragedy. Elena and Yuri Zamesov have had three boys since the death of their 12 year old daughter Natalia and their son Igor who was ten. On September 1st 2004 they had wanted to take their two year old brother Kyrill to school with them but luckily their mother kept him at home and he survived. In all nine children and one adult died in her street.
Two months after they buried their children, the Zamesovs were told the remains were so badly charred that there had been a mix-up. Instead of Igor they had buried another boy. The body had to be exhumed for DNA tests which confirmed the mistake and the distraught family buried their son a second time.
"I thought many times of killing myself," said Zamesova, 37. "What kept me alive is my religious belief that suicide is a sin. If I sinned I'd end up in hell and would not be with my dead children. My small son Kyrill was also of help. I soon understood that the only way for us to face the future was to have more children."
Large portraits of Natalia and Igor, both in school uniform, hang in the kitchen and the living room. Their favorite toys and school books are neatly laid out on their desks in what used to be their room. Elena wears a small ring which came with a packet of chewing gum her daughter bought. She tells her children that their dead siblings are always watching over them.
Zamesova said she once dreamt of being reunited with Natalia at the cemetery, when the girl told her that she was being allowed home. The next day Elena found out she was pregnant and took the dream as a sign that her dead daughter's soul had returned in the body of one of her little brothers.
"Having other children has given us some joy and distraction but in no way diminished my pain. They say time heals. Truth is it gets only worse. I go insane when I imagine what they went through in those three days. Only people who've lost a child can truly understand us."
The Kulov family too feels there is an otherworldly bond between their son Oleg, who was only eight when he burnt to death in the gym, and the two children they had since, especially his 3 year old sister Angelina. Oleg was caught in the hostage drama with his brother Alan, then 11. They spent most of the siege together, often remembering a Black Sea holiday they had just come back from and dreaming of cold soft drinks.
Alan was very badly wounded in the explosions and gun-battle which followed. He spent four months in hospital and later underwent nine hours of brain surgery in Germany, paid for by the Red Cross, to remove shrapnel. His father found Oleg in a morgue, identifying his charred remains only by the small orthodox cross he wore.
For two years, Zhanna, the boys' mother, would only leave the house to visit the cemetery. She received some professional counselling but at night would often be seized by terrifying fits in which she screamed that she wanted to die to join her son.
"Oleg once came to me in my dreams while I was pregnant," said Zhanna, 42. "He was all bandaged up and asked me to buy him a dress. I did and now his sister wears it. At times I look at her and think Oleg is still with us." Her husband Igor still sleeps in Alan's room to reassure him, although the boy now rarely has nightmares.
Their strong religious faith made some parents especially vulnerable. Last year a Russian court handed down an 11 year sentence for fraud against Grigory Grabovoi, a controversial cult leader who claimed to have the power to resurrect some of Beslan's children, a claim some desperate mothers readily believed.
A wild rumour, a premonition, a strange dream, is all it takes in Beslan for collective panic to break out. In May, a woman at the local market told people she had visions of a second mass hostage taking. Guards at the new school opposite "number one" as locals refer to the old one, decided to carry out a safety drill, but the alarm went off before teachers and pupils were warned.
Worse still, camouflaged local securityforces with guns and dogs came to search the building for explosives. Mass hysteria erupted. Frantic parents raced to the school - which last spring was left without electricity for two months because of lack of funds and now has only two working phones.
Beslan’s grief and strong religious faith made some bereaved parents especially vulnerable. Last year a Russian court handed down an 11 year sentence for fraud against Grigory Grabovoi, a controversial cult leader who had claimed to have the power to resurrect the dead, including some of Beslan’s children, a claim which some desperate mothers readily believed.
Most families of the dead are angry at the authorities' apparent unwillingness to properly investigate the terrorist attack. Five years on, they are still waiting for the prosecutors' inquiry to reach its conclusion. It has been postponed thirty times. A lengthy parliamentary probe published three years ago was widely dismissed as a whitewash by people in Beslan, because it failed to blame the Russian government in any way.
In 2005 Nurpashi Kulayev, an unemployed carpenter from Chechnya and the only terrorist caught alive, was sentenced to life. Some of the terrorists are thought to have escaped. A court case against three local senior police officers accused of negligence ended with an amnesty without them giving evidence in public. Not a single Russian state official resigned or was sacked as a result of Russia's worst ever terrorist attack. Instead some senior local security officers were promoted.
Secret interior ministry documents which have emerged since the siege revealed that two weeks before the attack, local security forces warned of an imminent mass hostage taking at the hands of Chechen terrorists. A subsequent urgent directive ordered for security at schools in the region to be stepped up.
Why, many families of the victims still demand to know, were both warnings ignored? Why did the Russians fail to negotiate at once with the terrorists and what concessions was the Kremlin prepared to make? "Who is to blame for the death of so many children?" said Dudiyeva of The Mothers' Committee which on the first anniversary of the tragedy had a tense and emotional three hour meeting with president Putin - which Kesayeva refused to attend.
"We want to know what could have been done to save them. We want the truth. Putin seemed truly moved when we met him. He promised to get to the bottom of it and to punish those responsible but has done nothing. He has no honour."
Many share Dudiyeva's criticism of Putin, who visited Beslan only once for a few hours the night the siege ended but has never visited the memorial at the school gym.
By contrast, others like Kaspolat Ramonov argue the former president did all he could to save the town's children. The former customs officer lost his 15 year old daughter Marianna in the siege. His son, who now has ambitions to become an antiterrorism officer, was shot twice but survived.
After his daughter's death, Ramonov kept watch over his daughter's tomb day and night. He soon began to look after the cemetery and three years ago was made its official caretaker. He is intimately familiar with the story of each victim buried there. If a mother needs to leave town for a couple of days, Ramonov will talk over her child's tomb. "Don't worry" I say "Your mum will be back soon and she's thinking of you," said Ramonov. "This is not a job," he added. "I live here to look after the children."
He recalled how in the first year after the tragedy several grieving mothers told him they wanted to kill themselves – one even asked is he could procure her a suicide explosives belt so that she could seek revenge in neighboring Ingushetia. He dissuaded them with the same argument which saved Elena Zamesova; if they sinned they would never be reunited with their children.
Since his daughter’s death Ramonov turns down all invitations to weddings and birthdays and will leave a restaurant if music is playing because “it’s a sin for me to have a good time while Marianna is not here anymore.” He avoids driving by schools as the sight of many children makes him search for his own daughter among them.
“For me and many others life stopped on September 3rd 2004,” said Ramonov. “Now all I do is think of my daughter, of how much I loved her and how much I would have done for her if she were alive.”
A relative once told him that he had seen Marianna in his sleep. She asked why her father had a cheap wrist watch and said he deserves better. The next day Ramonov bought a gold-plated watch and had "to my dearest father. Marianna" inscribed on its back. "It's what Marianna wanted," he said.
On my last day in Beslan I visit the school gym with Milana Adirkhayeva, the nine year old who on her birthday sends her dead mother a note and a fruitella attached to a balloon. She is with her sister Emilia, 12, and their father Alan, whose own mother died of a heart attack ten days after the siege.
The two girls sleep only with the light on and like most children who were held hostage in Beslan, they are especially scared of thunder.
Occasionally, they also still have nightmares involving violence. As the two sisters place a few red carnations by the large cross in the middle of the gym, Alan shows me a letter his daughter Emilia wrote and posted to him at work last year, when she was eleven.
"Dedicated to mama Ira. Four years have passed but we have not forgotten you," wrote Emila. "Your smile, eyes and tender voice will be in our hearts forever. We'll never find someone as intelligent, beautiful and gentle as you. Everyone loved you mummy and you are an angel for everyone. Don't be sad. I know for sure that one day we'll all be together again, we'll embrace and live together until we die. I know that in the afterlife, it's not death but heaven, and that whereas here it's tough, there it's easy."
Then, before signing off, the young girl turned her attention to the people most in Beslan still hold responsible for their terrible pain - their neighbors across the border nearby.
"The Ingush did not want to understand how difficult it was for you to die so early. So let the Ingush be killed by Russians, just like they killed our Beslan."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6740885.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093
