Beslan

[blackngold]

I saw a documentary about the 2004 Chechnyan terrorist attack on a Beslan (Russia) school on HBO. It was told entirely from the point of view of the children who I guess are between 10 and 16 now. It was absolutely heartbreaking. If any of you have HBO, I would definitely recommend seeing it. The children matter-of-factly tell their experiences.

I bring this up for two reasons. One, the children talk about dreaming that heroes would come to rescue them. One dreamed that Harry Potter would come with his invisibility cloak to smuggle them out of the gym that they were being held in.

The second reason is because of the horrible damage to these children. They asked the terrorists why they, the terrorists, were doing this. One of them answered because the Russian soldiers had killed his family. At the end of the show, the children talked about how their lives had been affected. One girl constantly draws pictures of the terrorist in crayon. She then tears them up and lights them on fire. "You can never get too much revenge", she says. She expects that she will do this the rest of her life. Another boy whose father was executed wants to go to Chechnya and kill terrorists. So the Russians created terrorists based on their actions and the terrorists in their turn create people who want to kill them.

I can't help but feel that we are doing the same thing in Iraq. America will be a convenient scapegoat for people's whose lives have been turned upside down. We are just fortunate that we are separated from Iraq by huge oceans so they do not have the same opportunity for striking back at us.

The Russian government gave money to the survivors of the attack who had lost family members. One boy received 15,000 roubles. He said that parents that had lost children received 20,000 roubles and wondered "How do you measure someone's life in money."

[Richard]

BnG, very touching story, particularly the HP-reference. When it comes to the situation in Iraq, or the entire Middle-East, I don't think there'll ever be a solution, without one side defeating the other by brute force. I'm not a pessimist, on most things, though on this issue, I perhaps am.

The ending of the 2007 movie 'The Kingdom' has some similarities with this story. It ends with an FBI agent killing a terrorist leader under the eyes of his grandson. His last words to his grandson are something along the lines of 'avenge me'. In the following scene, we see the son of an American killed in Saudi-Arabia, and he sort of things the same thing.

The same can be said regarding the Israel - Palestinian conflict. hamas kills Israel citizens, the Israel army retaliates, killing Palestinians. It's an ongoing spiral, with no ending in sight.

Richard

[Amanda at work]

I'm going to look out for that documentary. Thanks for posting about it.

I focused on Russia (and post-Soviet areas) and the Middle East in my political science studies, probably because of my desire to have a little better insight into current events, especially conflicts and terrorist events, that were prominent in the media at the time.

As long as there is a desire for control, revenge, resources, and the presence of fear in society, we will have wars, terrorist attacks, and senseless deaths. Both physical deaths and mental injuries, like the surviving children now suffer, are inevitable side effects of conflict. No one society - or at the very least, not enough societies - seems to be willing to commit to ending this sort of massive scale of selfishness and arrogance.

We are doing to Iraq what Russia is doing to Chechnya. As you said, the Russians are the reason the Chechens are "terrorists"; the Chechens are struggling for control and the end of repression over their homeland, often by violent means, and Russia in turn responds, continuing the cycle. It's also the reason Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan are "terrorists" to Israel, etc. And the U.S.'s poor choices in the Middle East will continue to suffer consequences for decades. "Charlie Wilson's War", by the way, is an excellent example of this - I highly recommend the movie.

Russia and the U.S. have many, many similarities. They have a great desire and need to control vast resources, a need to assert themselves politically and militarily both at home and in the international sphere. Because of their size and influence, each of their tiny actions can have big, long-term effects.

Perhaps worst of all, they both have arrogant and detached societies. I recently read an article in the New Yorker about a young Russian fashion designer, the daughter of an immensely wealthy Muscovite investor, who cares for nothing but designing her own clothes to sell to the teeny-boppers of the world. She likes pink and wants a BMW for her 16th birthday. She now has a house in Malibu. I doubt she cares about Chechnya, just like I doubt Paris Hilton cares about Iraq.

And for those of us that do care, what do we do, anyways? We may care and have a great deal of insight into a situation but how do we do anything about it? Especially when we don't have vast amounts of wealth to run for public office or to get involved in the high-ends of the political sphere.

I do believe that education, tolerance and awareness and the spread of compassion helps. Such initiatives can start from the bottom-up and hopefully, higher values and expectations will one day infiltrate into the higher echelons of our political sphere.

One final thing, perhaps one of the biggest hindrances to education and acceptance. I once commented to my boyfriend that sometimes the media creates too much of a distance between audiences and the subjects of news reports. For instance, in all of the Iraq footage I've seen, it usually pictures strange, non-Western looking markets, Iraqi desert, just very odd, alien-looking places. Sometimes bodies or charred vehicles dot these foreign landscapes. Never once in all the coverage on Iraq have I seen an apartment furnished with, say, a kitchen with a microwave, fridge, and stove, a heart potholder made by the daughter in the family, a living room with family pictures and a TV, or a bedroom with an Ikea bed and lamp. But the truth is, such places in Iraq have been the settings of horrible massacres of innocent civilians. Imagine CNN showing an image of such an apartment - an apartment that looks like it could belong to any of us, right here in the West - splattered with blood and with bits of charred furniture.

I find the media alienates the viewer from the society its portraying this way. In consequence, leading audiences to believe that the country in question is "other" or "different" or "alien," making it harder for an audience to relate to the subjects being portrayed in the news stories and probably harder to be sympathetic. They're not us. They can't possibly have the same feelings or emotions or desire the same daily routine as us. So, are, perhaps, their lives less valuable or productive than ours? Conveying such settings as alien helps us distance ourselves from the events and impact of such events that our societies over here in the Western world cause.

The same is for the coverage of the attack on Lebanon. Images of Beirut were shown that were foreign and strange to Western audiences; people running through streets, light-colored buildings (vs. our darker N. American cityscapes), traditional markets, etc. But Beirut before Israel's attacks had Westernized restaurants and malls and Ikeas and clubs and so fourth. I know most large cities in Lebanon, Iran, Saudi, Pakistan, etc., (not sure if Beirut is included) have Western restaurants like Applebees or McDonalds, Western shopping malls and stores, and people wearing Gap clothes and eating hamburgers just like anyone in Anytown, USA would. Most individuals speak English, often better than Arabic. Many are educated at elite Western schools. I know; I went to school with several Lebanese, Pakistanis, Iranians, etc., all of whom wore trendy Western clothes, worked on Mac laptops, and probably had better English than I did.

But when there's a bomb explosion in one of these Middle East cities like Beirut, what do we see on TV? A traditional market or an aged man in traditional garb with no teeth sitting next to a rug. Perhaps Western media is contributing to the arrogance of the American people by not showing them that the populations of these countries have (or at least try to have) virtually the same lifestyle we in the States do. It makes it harder for us to connect and sympathize with them and in turn makes it easier for us to condone or be less affected by the negative ways in which our societies impact theirs.

And human lives, no matter where they are or what their setting is, are all valuable; and nothing should skew our views on that.

(Ok, I got into a bit of a tangent there...)