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‘Most people have little interest in the truth’ Twenty years after the Beslan school siege, victims’ relatives feel exploited and unheard

Source: Bereg

On September 5 and 6, 2004, the victims of the Beslan school siege were laid to rest. The terrorist attack was the deadliest in modern Russian history, killing 333 people, including 186 children, and injuring 783. While the authorities’ official investigation is effectively over, the victims’ relatives continue to insist that law enforcement made crucial mistakes that led to dozens of unnecessary deaths. (In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Russian authorities had “sufficiently specific information about a planned terrorist attack in the area” several days in advance to take preventive measures but failed to do so, and that they used “indiscriminate and disproportionate” force in their response.) This year marks the 20th anniversary of the attack, and like every year, the Beslan authorities organized a ceremony in memory of the victims — but relatives and survivors were highly skeptical of the event. The independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg traveled to the town to witness the memorial proceedings and speak to survivors and victims’ relatives about their memories from 2004 and their experiences in the two decades since. Meduza shares an abridged translation of their report.

‘Better us than them’

“Time has passed differently in Beslan. It feels like it’s only been five years — not 20. That shouldn’t be the case,” Agunda Vatayeva recounts one of her psychologists telling her. Agunda was starting the ninth grade on the day of the school siege. She’s now 33 and until recently, she says, she couldn’t discuss the attack without crying.

Agunda’s mother, Galina, was a teacher, and the two attended the back-to-school ceremony together. When they heard loud sounds coming from the school courtyard, Agunda and her classmates thought someone was setting off fireworks, and when they saw militants carrying machine guns, they presumed it was part of some military exercises. Only when she heard the men “yelling and talking to each other in some unfamiliar language” did Agunda realize that “something serious was going on.”

The terrorists rounded up everyone in the courtyard and forced them into School No. 1’s gymnasium. For the next two days, as law enforcement held negotiations with the attackers, Agunda and Galina sat on the floor with the 1,000 other hostages. “I really wish I could say that Mom supported everyone and tried to keep their spirits high, but [in reality] she acted depressed and apathetic. Now, when I see someone in despair, it’s very hard for me to watch. I see a parallel with my mother,” Agunda says.

On September 3, there were two explosions in the gym. According to independent investigators, Russian special forces fired grenades at the building in an attempt to take out the militants, sparking a fire. The terrorists ordered the hostages to run toward the school’s cafeteria, and Agunda and Galina complied. Agunda remembers seeing the body of one of the terrorists on a chair in the gym.

The Vatayevas reached the cafeteria together. The special forces officers began storming the school, and fighting broke out in the wing of the school where Agunda and her mother now found themselves. Galina, badly injured and unable to walk, told her daughter to leave her behind and run. For years afterward, Agunda felt a deep sense of guilt for not staying with her mother, who died in the attack. While it’s now been two decades since the siege, she says, her sense of guilt has become “a basic part of her behavior.”

According to Agunda, she often felt that she was getting special treatment after surviving the attack. For example, she missed nearly a year of school following the attack, but she was “given good grades” nonetheless, and at university, she says, she passed her classes simply because her teachers knew what she had been through. “After something like that, you can’t soberly assess your own skills, successes, and accomplishments — it just feels like everything’s been handed to you. I had no idea of my own worth,” she explains.

Every few years, Agunda visits the gym at her old school, which has now become a memorial, to reminisce about her happy memories in school — the ones before September 1, 2004. “I wouldn’t call it a place of strength, but I do have some warm memories from school,” she says. “Of course, if it were up to me, I would cover the floor of the gymnasium with glass — there’s still a lot of children’s blood there. It feels sacrilegious for us to walk there.”

For years, Agunda was waiting for Vladimir Putin to visit Beslan. “I’ve long felt offended and resentful towards the head of state. For not defending us, not listening to us, not helping us — just blowing us off and forgetting us,” she says. When the president finally traveled to the town last month, two weeks before the 20th anniversary of the attack, Agunda “no longer needed” it, she says — she had “matured” and decided to “focus on herself and her family.”

The memorial proceedings traditionally held in Beslan on September 1–3, in Agunda’s view, are too officious. “Everything follows the same script: they herd these poor officials and government workers and make them stand around and get fried [by the sun],” Agunda says.

For the 20th anniversary, the authorities planned something different: they would begin the proceedings with the survivors standing in a line, holding portraits of their deceased classmates. Agunda didn’t plan to attend. However, at the rehearsal in late August, it became clear that there weren’t enough participants to hold all the portraits. “Seven people from our grade were killed, and only two people showed up. In one of the other classes, 11 people were killed, and nobody showed up,” Agunda explains.

The organizers suggested having the survivors’ children join the ceremony, but this idea found little support among the survivors. The coordinators ultimately enlisted local students to join the ceremony, though none of them had lost relatives in the attack.

In the end, Agunda changed her mind and decided to join the proceedings after all. “Better us than them,” she said.

‘They’re destroying the small sprouts of civil society’

The road to the school is cordoned off, with police cars parked nearby. Outside the school gates is a metal detector, and officers check visitors’ bags as they go in. In the half hour since the doors opened, several hundred people have arrived (according to the Interior Ministry, more than 1,600 people visited the memorial that day). Near the school building, Emergency Services Ministry workers, riot police officers, traffic police, Federal Prison Service employees, and other law enforcement officers are lined up. Almost all of them are holding red carnations.

Across from the entrance to the gymnasium is a line of people wearing white T-shirts with a picture of a one-winged angel that was drawn in 2004 by 11-year-old Aza Gumetsova, one of the victims of the attack, and the words “Beslan: City of Angels.” In addition to former hostages, the line includes people who were clearly born after 2004, as well as several dozen children in the blue berets of Russia’s patriotic youth movement. The children are members of the same Yunarmiya unit that special forces officer Alexander Perov, who died during the rescue operation in Beslan in 2004, belonged to as a child. 

The school bell rings at 9:15 a.m., and the Yunarmiya members enter the gymnasium one after another. The deafening sobs of a woman inside intermittently interrupt the somber music playing in the schoolyard. “That’s probably the mother of that teacher,” one visitor whispers to another. Natalia Dzutseva lost her daughter Alyona, an Ossetian language teacher, in the attack, and was left raising Alyona’s one-year-old daughter. As she weeps, Natalia cries out angrily in Ossetian. “For the first few years after the attack, it was like this every day — not just on the anniversary,” another woman who lost her children in the attack tells Bereg. “I’ve cried my eyes out already.”

Federal officials also enter the gym, including North Ossetia Governor Sergey Menyaylo, LDPR chairman Leonid Slutsky, and senator Taymuraz Mamsurov (two of his children were injured in the 2004 siege, but both survived). Other visitors include State Duma deputy Maria Butina, who served nine months in a U.S. prison for acting as a Russian government agent, and former arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was serving a 25-year prison sentence in the U.S. before he was traded for American basketball player Brittney Griner in a 2022 prisoner exchange.

In a new administrative building erected on the site where the school’s southern wing used to stand, the Mothers of Beslan advocacy group holds a press conference to mark the anniversary. It was this part of the school that Russian special forces fired at with tanks, flamethrowers, and grenades when they stormed the school. On the night of September 3–4, this section of the building was demolished, and key evidence about the authorities’ response to the attack disappeared along with it.

The new building contains artifacts from the siege, such as bullet-riddled textbooks and charred children’s shoes. In the future, the authorities plan to add items from other major terrorist attacks, such as the Moscow theater hostage crisis and the September 11 attacks in New York.

During the nearly two-hour press conference, mothers who lost their children in the Beslan siege repeatedly call for the authorities to finish their investigation, which is officially still ongoing. Aneta Gadieva, who lost her daughter Alana in the siege, calls for a minute of silence to commemorate everyone who “died this year in terrorist attacks and on the battlefield.”

The mothers also recount the meeting three of them had with Vladimir Putin in mid-August. “Once again, we found ourselves serving as ’convenient extras,’” Gadieva says. “The people doing this are completely irresponsible and fail to understand that through their actions, they’re destroying the small sprouts of civil society that we represent.” At the end of her speech, Gadieva says that at the meeting, Putin promised he would finally meet, for the first time, with the students who survived the siege (though this has yet to occur).

Emma Tagaeva, one of the co-chairs of the organization Voice of Beslan, which describes itself as a “splinter group from Mothers of Beslan,” didn’t join the press conference and has never visited the Terrorism Prevention Center. She opposed the plan to build the office on the school grounds from the time she first learned of it.

But Tagaeva did visit the school to mark 20 years since the siege, in which she lost her husband and her two sons. “Time has gone on, but most people still have little interest in the truth,” she says quietly, shaking her head. In her view, the Russian government is not only trying to pay off the victims’ families but also wants to exploit them. “They’re spending hundreds of millions [of rubles] on the museum. They want to foster patriotism so people will be willing to sacrifice their lives for them, but they don't value human life,” she says.

‘It would be worse to live in fear’

On Beslan’s Komintern Street, there’s a small park created in memory of the children who died in the 2004 siege. The idea came from the mothers of some of the victims; before construction on the park began, there was a field at the site where several of the children used to play soccer.

The park isn’t complete yet. Tagaeva hopes it will eventually have a gazebo, outdoor workout equipment, and drinking fountains, as well as a new fence to keep out grazing livestock. However, she doesn’t expect the money for these additions to come from the government; when she asked Governor Sergey Menyaylo for support, she says, he was “completely indifferent.”

“You find hundreds of millions for the museum, but your main concern should be things that help real people,” Tagaeva says. “These people experienced such sorrow, and now they’re living out their days, but there’s no money for them.”

Tagaeva feels that state officials haven’t done nearly enough to help Beslan victims directly. Currently, the regional government is supposed to pay the survivors 120,000 rubles ($1,314) per year so they can visit sanatoriums. The region’s budget, however, only allocates enough for 350 people to take advantage of the program, despite there being more than 1,000 survivors in total. In Tagaeva’s view, all of the survivors should be given payments to spend as they see fit.

Tagaeva recalls a conversation she had with one of Menyailo’s aides, who said that Mothers of Beslan never has any complaints but that Voice of Beslan is constantly making demands. “Well then do something for people!” Tagaeva told him. “Not for me personally — you’ll do something for me. But I’m asking you to help others.”

“Yesterday, someone came up and gave me a big hug,” Tagaeva tells Bereg. “I turned around and saw Aneta Gadieva [from Mothers of Beslan]. She said to me, ’Emma, the years are going by, and we need to become wiser.’ I was shocked. I thought, did you get this ‘wisdom’ from Putin? Where’s the wisdom? Is it in the fact that you’re betraying your kids’ future?”

In 2016, Tagaeva helped stage a protest at the gym of School No. 1 in which she and four other women wore shirts reading “Putin is the executioner of Beslan.” Ever since then, she says, she’s noticed herself being followed, and before every September 1, FSB agents have called her in for a meeting to remind her not to hold any more protests. “It would be worse to live in fear,” she says.

The first time Tagaeva encountered someone afraid to speak openly about the attack came almost immediately after it happened. In September 2004, hoping to find out what had happened to her son, Tagaeva began asking everyone she knew who survived the siege. In a Vladikavkaz hospital, she met the mother of one of her son’s classmates who was also among the hostages.

“I won’t say anything — I’m afraid for my children!” the woman said, according to Tagaeva.

“Were they injured?” she asked.

“No, all three of them survived without any injuries,” the woman responded.

“I started crying,” Tagaeva tells Bereg. “I told her, your children are alive, they survived, and you’re alive too, thank God! What else are you afraid of?”

When Tagaeva finally found her son’s body, it was charred and riddled with bullet holes across the chest. He could only be identified from a DNA sample taken from his fingernails. “I can’t forgive the death of my children. And the person who sacrificed so many children is no authority to me — and [this] isn’t my homeland,” she says.

According to Tagaeva, she doesn’t expect Putin to ever acknowledge his role in the Beslan crisis and she’s not holding her breath for the authorities to finish their investigation. “We won Strasbourg; we know what happened. And they know they’re guilty,” she says. “All we need now is for people to remember the people we lost so that this doesn’t happen again — and so we might have peaceful skies overhead.”

Tagaeva’s husband and sons are buried in a village about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Beslan, but the “City of Angels” memorial complex, where most of the other victims are buried, still contains their names and photos. “One day I’ll be gone, but the memory of them will remain,” Tagaeva says. To this day, she wears a badge with their pictures on her chest. Over the years, the photos have faded in the sun.

‘I know who’s at fault’

Rustam Kabaloyev usually visits the City of Angels complex on the evening of September 3, the last day of the commemoration events. This allows him to avoid meeting with officials and journalists. This year, however, he has to work that evening, so he’s visiting the cemetery on the afternoon of September 2. He brings a large bouquet of roses with him.

On September 1, 2004, Kabaloyev was supposed to start the sixth grade. He was dreading it, and he hoped to use a leg injury he’d gotten a few days earlier as an excuse to stay home. His mother wouldn’t hear it, however, and drove him to the school herself before leaving to run errands.

Even as the terrorist attack began unfolding around him, Kabaloyev refused to believe his eyes. He thought he was witnessing some kind of joke, or perhaps that someone was making a movie. When the body of Ruslan Betrozov — Emma Tagaeva’s husband — was carried past him, he still “couldn’t believe that something terrible was happening.”

Occasionally over the next two days, he says, one of the terrorists would enter the gym and fire at the ceiling, but there wouldn’t be any bullet holes afterward. “[I thought] they were firing blanks, which meant everything was definitely fine,” he tells Bereg. Only later did he realize the ceiling was covered by a soft lining that concealed the holes.

After a series of explosions in the gym, Kabaloyev noticed that the doors had opened, and he ran through them. When he made it outside, a woman took him by the arm; he then noticed that his pants were on fire. He pulled them off and then ran towards some nearby apartment buildings.

In the days that followed, Kabaloyev was hospitalized and diagnosed with lung damage, numerous shrapnel wounds, extensive burns, a traumatic brain injury, a concussion, and ruptures of both eardrums.

Kabaloyev parks his car in front of the cemetery, picks up the flowers he brought, and walks firmly toward the memorials to his friends and classmates. In the cemetery, relatives of the deceased clean up the gravesites and talk quietly amongst themselves. When Kabaloyev reaches the grave of Olesya Guldaeva, he takes a rose, puts it in a vase, places his palm on her memorial, and freezes for a few seconds. He then does the same thing at the memorials to Zarina Bolloyeva, Lyuba Totieva, and Madina Pukhaeva. He hoped to visit each of the friends he lost in the attack individually, but he eventually realizes this isn’t feasible. He leaves the remaining roses in front of the memorial to the FSB officers and Emergency Services Ministry employees who died storming the school.

On the way to the city, Kabaloyev talks about his Uncle Ruslan (name changed), who helped rescue hostages from the school. During the operation, he was photographed by a reporter as he carried a young girl, the barrel of a firearm hanging over his shoulder sticking out from behind him. “They raided our home afterward, ransacking everything!” Kabaloyev recounts. At the time, he says, he felt ashamed of the Beslan security forces searching for his uncle’s weapon. Ruslan had worked for years in the security services and had all of the proper documents for his gun, Kabaloyev says. “Some scoundrel said that if it weren’t for the [armed civilians who helped save hostages], the FSB would have done its work much more effectively,” he continues. “But what work? The terrorist attack itself was the result of your work!”

After graduating from high school, Kabaloyev dreamed of fighting corruption, uncovering economic crimes, and addressing abuses within Russia’s security forces. “I wanted to punish the bad guys!” he recalls with a laugh. But after talking to some security officers he knows, he realized that it’s “hard to remain a human being there.” Today, Kabaloyev works in the food service industry and hopes to eventually open his own restaurant.

“The best thing the government could do would be to take care of all [of the former hostages] so that they don’t have to deal with any other problems,” Kabaloyev says. “You ruined people’s lives — now do everything you can to fix it.” Still, he says he’s not optimistic about this ever actually happening.

Kabaloyev says that even if Putin eventually acknowledges his responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of people, it won’t make him respect the president more. At the same time, he explains, it’s still important to him that Putin do this — because it might help more people understand how the authorities mishandled the crisis. “I know who’s at fault, but a lot of people are living in ignorance to this day,” he says. “The people should be informed — maybe it’ll change how they see things.”