Cruel unpredictability

Indians who have seen fundamentalism in J&K can sympathise with Putin's Chechnya crisis, writes Binay Kumar.

The macabre drama and tragedy that befell a Beslan school and its innocent children in Russia last week only served to underline the raison d’être of global terrorism: gruesome unpredictability. It is in the underlying philosophy - if one can use such a term - of terrorism that as soon as we have begun to think that their last act was the most cruel, like we did when we watched with horror the images of 9/11, that they conspire to inflict a more lethal blow, more heinous than the previous one. Nevertheless, taking helpless women and children as hostages in a faceless small town in Russia and eventually killing them in hundreds surely set a new low for the jehadis not seen since the terrorist take-over of a school in Maalot (Israel) in 1974.

We have read or heard several analyses of the gory events at Beslan in the last few days. Many commentators in the media have criticized the botched rescue attempts of Moscow without exhausting the scope for any political negotiation. Moscow on its part has argued that there are no acceptable negotiating leaders in the highly fragmented heterogeneous group that make up the Chechen resistance.

Several legitimate questions have been asked too. For example, Why doesn't Putin finally make peace in Chechnya? Why did the operation fail so miserably? What took him so long to go there? The list of accusations being hurled at Russia is as long as it is unjust.

Every Indian who has witnessed helplessly the naked dance of religious fundamentalism in Kashmir can only sympathize with Putin's dilemma in Chechnya. The western critics of Russia should not forget that Putin is fighting forces in Chechnya whose lack of scruples rules out any negotiation. It’s a position not entirely out of merit and we Indians recognize its efficacy more than most victims of terror.

Ham handed, hard headed, strong armed are only few of the many adjectives used to describe Putin’s handling of the situation in Chechnya. Let us accept a simple fact: There is no straightforward panacea for banishing the scourge of hydra headed terrorism. Moreover, whatever tactics that Russia has used against Chechnya do not in any manner obviate the need to crush such barbaric acts carried out in the name of a religion.