Beslan Mothers Get No Invitation from Putin
// But they're going any way
Ceremony
The mothers of Beslan announced yesterday that they are traveling to Moscow to see the president and tell him that “he bears the responsibility for what happened in Beslan.” President of North Ossetia Taimuraz Mamsurov is also going to the Kremlin. He wants to support his constituents and complain to the president about his neighbors in Ingushetia.
They held separate meets with journalists, the mothers of Beslan in the House of Culture in Beslan, where they gathered while their children were being held hostage, and Mamsurov in the House of the Arts in Vladikvkaz. Susanna Dudieva, head of the Mothers of Beslan, said that eight people delegated by the city to represent them will go to Moscow. Mamsurov said that it would be tactless of him to ask the president questions, but he had questions nonetheless:
“How could a band of terrorists be active in the neighboring republic and no one pay any attention to it? And why do they say that there were only 32 terrorists? There is something else I want to have elucidated. Putin has not invited the Mothers of Beslan to any meetings. I was informed that Putin can see victims on the second and I, as the head of the republic, was given the opportunity to make a list. I thought that it would be correct for representatives of the Beslan mothers to be there. But half the delegation is men who have nothing to do with that committee.”
The delegation, it turns out, will consist of four representatives of the mothers' committee, two victims of the tragedy whose children were seriously wounded, one member of the public committee to distribute humanitarian aid and Mamsurov. Originally, Putin was to meet with 20 victims.
“We will speak about the responsibility of the president and the security ministers,” Dudieva said. “We will speak of the guilt of the operative force to save the hostages, because not one hostage was saved by them. We say that, since we don't have our children any more, we will fight for the truth and for those who remained alive. Only the truth, which there was none of after Budennovsk and Nord-Ost, can stop the bloodshed.”
The mothers standing in front of the microphones looked distraught. They said they thought a lot about the president's offer to meet them on September 2 and were tortured by it.
“It's very painful for us, but we have gotten over it. We're going.”
“At the beginning of August, we said that we did not wish to see in Beslan the people who were supposed to save our children but did not do so,” Dudieva said. She has a whole list of them: FSB director Nikolay Patrushev, his deputies Vladimir Pronichev and Vladimir Anisimov, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev, former president of North Ossetia Alexander Dzasokhov, regional FSB head Valery Andreev, former North Ossetian Interior Minister Kazbek Dzantiev.
“We also said that we don't wish to see President Putin in Beslan during the mourning period, because he bears responsibility for what happened in Beslan and what happened in Russia. In response, we got an invitation to go to Moscow on September 2. We decided to go as a group to speak in the name of all the victims about what worries and hurts us all.”
That strange press conference lasted only 15 minutes. Afterward, Ella Kesaeva, who lost two nephews in the school, came up to the journalists and said that many of the mothers of Beslan were deeply against the trip to the Kremlin.
“It is a mourning period. We can't go see Putin, we can't raise his image, we can't go see the man guilty of the deaths of our children and it is cruel not to understand that,” she said.
Olga Allenova, Beslan; Zaur Farinev, Vladikavkaz
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 01, 2005
|
