Beslan : Six Stories of the Siege [1 ed.] 9781526130211, 9780719085352

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SIX STORIES OF THE SIEGE Sue-Ann Harding

Beslan

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Beslan Six stories of the siege

Sue-Ann Harding

Manchester University Press Manchester

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Copyright © Sue-Ann Harding 2012 The right of Sue-Ann Harding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 0 7190 8535 2 hardback

First published 2012 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10.5/12.5pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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This book is for the children and residents of Beslan: those killed, and those that remain. It is dedicated to Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (1958–2006), who wrote: ‘Деталь – важнее образа. Подробность – характернее целого. По крайней мере, для меня.’ (Пyтинcкая Pоссия 2007) The detail matters more than the big picture. The particular tells you more than the whole. So, at least, it seems to me.

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Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Notes on translation and transliteration of Russian

viii ix x

Introduction 1. Socio-narrative theory: narratives, text, narrators 2. RIA-Novosti: ‘No front line and an invisible enemy’ 3. Kavkazcenter: ‘Mister Putin, you are a butcher’ 4. Caucasian Knot: ‘I have five children in that school, do you understand?’ 5. Translated narratives: a narrow gate Conclusions, reflections and conflict dissolution

1 20 60 106

Bibliography Index

231 245

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146 184 216

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List of figures

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8

A revised typology of narratives An intratextual model for analysis RIA-Novosti Russian primary narrative text (number of words) Kavkazcenter Russian primary narrative text (number of words) Caucasian Knot Russian primary narrative text (number of words) RIA-Novosti Russian and English primary narrative texts (number of words) Kavkazcenter Russian and English primary narrative texts (number of words) Caucasian Knot Russian and English primary narrative texts (number of words)

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25 51 62 107 148 186 187 188

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Acknowledgements

This book was made possible by the help and support of many people. My deepest thanks go to Professors Vera Tolz and Mona Baker for their assistance, encouragement, valuable insights and the time they gave to reading and commenting on earlier drafts. Your professional and personal generosity have set me fine examples that I shall always remember and seek to emulate. I am also grateful for the help and support of others who have responded to my questions and would like to thank Steve Assies, Ashraf Abdou, Valerii Dzutsev, Professor Stephen Hutchings, Arch Tait and Michael Storsjö for their kind and valued assistance. Thanks also to Tony Mason at MUP and Diane Wardle for her very fine work. Special thanks to Vladimir V. Voronov for his generous permission to use his photograph as the cover image. I am especially thankful for the financial support secured from the Arts and Humanities Research Council who funded two years of this work. Analysis of the reportage from the first day of the siege was originally presented at the Translation and Conflict II conference in Manchester in 2006 and has since been published in Meta, Vol. 56, No. 1 in 2011, in the article ‘Translation and the Circulation of Competing Narratives from the Wars in Chechnya: a case study from the 2004 Beslan Hostage Disaster’, and sections on the personal narratives have been combined into a paper, ‘Translating Eyewitness Accounts’, published in a special issue (11(2) 2012) of Language and Politics edited by Luis Perez-Gonzalez. Finally, special thanks must go in particular to my husband, Chris, for his excellent cooking and steady supply of fine wines and cut flowers, and to both Chris and Zephyr for their faithful support, patience and good humour.

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Note on translation and transliteration of Russian

The system of transliteration used in this book is the Library of Congress system without diacritic marks. Exceptions are made for words, usually proper nouns, that are commonly used with alternative spellings in the Anglophone press, such as North Ossetia-Alania (rather than OsetiiaAlaniia) and Chechnya (rather than Chechnia). All translations in English taken from the source material are quoted verbatim. Thus, incorrect English and the spelling of Russian proper nouns in alternative forms are not edited. All back translations are my own unless otherwise specified.

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Introduction

On the morning of Wednesday, 1 September 2004, an armed group seized a school in the town of Beslan in the southern Russian republic of North Ossetia-Alania, and held hostage over a thousand people: children, teachers, parents and grandparents. By the violent and chaotic end of the siege on Friday, 3 September, over three hundred people, including at least one hundred and eighty children, were reported dead. The events of Beslan ‘attracted significant international attention’ (Dunlop 2006: 18), and have been described as the worst, the bloodiest, terrorist attack in the world since 11 September 2001 (Buse et al. 2004; Baker and Glasser 2005: 34). The cruelty of the attack aimed at so many people, especially children, and the final, horrific conflagration, mark Beslan as Russia’s worst hostage crisis and, to date, there has not been another like it anywhere in the world. This is how the initial attack was first reported by three different Russian-language online news agencies: Report 1 School in North Ossetia Seized by boeviki 01/09/2004 10:11 VLADIKAVKAZ, RIA-Novosti. A school in North Ossetia has been seized by boeviki, the republic’s minister for Emergency Situations, Boris Dzgoev, reported to RIA-Novosti. He said that on Wednesday morning around 8:00 a school in the town of Beslan was seized by a group of boeviki. The motives and demands of the boeviki are as yet unclear. Dzgoev said that representatives of the security ministries had left for the scene of the event. They will try to negotiate with the bandits. Report 2 School Seized in North Ossetia 1 September 2004, 10:38 In North Ossetia a school has been seized by an armed unit, Reuters reports. According to the republic’s minister for Emergency Situations,

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Introduction Boris Dzgoev, on Wednesday morning around 8:00, one of the schools in the town of Beslan was seized by a group of unidentified [persons], reports RIA-Novosti. The motives and demands of those who seized the school are still unclear. Later, information said that shooting was taking place near the school. Report 3 School in North Ossetia seized by boeviki A school in North Ossetia has been seized by boeviki, the republic’s minister for Emergency Situations, Boris Dzgoev, reported to RIA-Novosti. He said that on Wednesday morning, 1 September, around 8:00, a school in the town of Beslan, 30 kilometres north-west of Vladikavkaz, was seized by boeviki. The minister specified that School Number 1 in Beslan had been seized. All schools in North Ossetia had cancelled their welcome assemblies, reported Dzgoev. According to several sources, there was shooting at the moment of the seizure.

While the three reports all share common elements, such as the time and location of the attack and the name and position of the official who ‘breaks the news’ to the media, they also differ in a number of respects. Report 1 is the only one to mention plans for negotiations. Report 3 mentions shooting at the time of the attack, Report 2 refers to ongoing shooting and Report 1 says nothing of shooting. Report 3 adds details about the location of Beslan and the other schools in the town. Report 1 refers to ‘boeviki’ (боевики) and ‘bandits’ (бандиты), Report 3 just to ‘boeviki’, while Report 2 refers only to an ‘armed unit’ and ‘unidentified’ persons. The similarities and differences in the reporting of such a violent, and ultimately calamitous, series of events are the focus of this book, which investigates ways in which different narratives are constructed from, and in response to, events emerging from situations of violent conflict. By situating these written texts within a field of social and political inquiry that assumes inextricable links between narratives and human agency, the book explores the relevance of narratives for, and the contributions of socio-narrative theory towards, understanding, explaining and challenging the behaviour of individuals and the practices of social units and institutions. By examining both the Russian and English texts published by three different websites, the book also explores issues of translation and ways in which translation impacts on the (re)construction of narratives. There are two major motivations behind the writing of this book. The first comes from the hostage-taking in Beslan itself and my belief

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that this is an event that deserves continued investigation and critical examination, not only because of the awfulness of the event, but because it is only one of countless awful events that have occurred to hundreds of thousands of civilians in Chechnya and the North Caucasus since the beginning of the First Chechen War in December 1994 (Gilligan 2010). This book is written as an act of anamnesis to engender recognition and recollection. The stories of Beslan, the questions and irresolution, the confusions and complications, should – like the human rights abuses in Chechnya – be kept in the public consciousness. They should be part of our collective memory, as a matter of humane respect due those who suffered and continue to suffer, and also so that the necessary resources, funding, public and institutional support, and political will can be found and maintained for the documentation and publication of abuses and the legal accountability of those responsible for war crimes. The second motivation for this book – a desire to engage with ideas – may appear to be unrelated and even irrelevant, a distraction. It stems, however, from a desire to understand how and why things happen, to hone the vocabulary and conceptual tool kit we have for knowing, for knowing what we know and how we know it. Narrative theory is the set of ideas used to make sense of the mediatisation of Beslan, but I also investigate and try to develop the theory itself. Chosen because of a moment of epiphany – How does she know that’s how I think? I wondered the first time I ever heard it expounded – narrative theory seems to me to be an intrinsically sound and intuitively satisfying way of striving to understand the world. This book is something of a test case to see whether, even when investigating something as incomprehensible as Beslan, narrative theory is a viable means of observation, analysis and refl ection in the pursuit not only of knowledge – narrative scholars will recall Hayden White’s etymology (1987) of the term from the Sanskrit gna (to know) – but of wisdom. This book is essentially a case study in that it investigates in depth a small sample of online reporting written in response to a particular set of events. It also develops a method of analysis that could be readily applied to other samples of media reporting on other violent, politically motivated events. The hostage-taking at Beslan was selected because there are several characteristics of the attack that make the media reportage it generated a particularly compelling and important object of inquiry. First, the appalling details of the capture of the school, the siege and its aftermath, which at first might suggest that these events lie beyond the limits of academic inquiry, are arguably the very factors that demand our attention. Research that aims to understand how knowledge about

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the world is constructed and that explores the intricacies of the human condition and human behaviour cannot afford to circumvent certain aspects and actions when we are horrified and repulsed by them. Lamentably, this book does nothing to change what happened in Beslan, yet it is written in the hope that it might offer a contribution, however small, towards an incremental understanding of the ways in which, and the reasons why, violence comes to be enacted. It is written also in the hope that understanding may lead to change, again however small; in the hope that understanding might lead to the discovery, creation and safeguarding of opportunities that enable us to revisit, renegotiate and rewrite the choices, actions and narratives that bring about violence such as that seen and experienced at Beslan. For (secondly) the attack in Beslan was not an ‘isolated’ incident. It came the morning after a bomb exploded at the Rizhskaia metro station in Moscow and just over a week after two Russian passenger planes, en route from Moscow to Volgograd and Sochi in Southern Russia, exploded and crashed within minutes of each other. Russian media coverage of these events and speculation as to their causes and perpetrators were already extensive when the attack in Beslan occurred. In June 2004, Chechen and Ingush fighters attacked several government buildings in Nazran, capital of North Ossetia’s neighbouring republic Ingushetia, capturing weapons and ammunition and killing almost a hundred people, including policemen, security officials and civilians. Officials responded to the raid by detaining, imprisoning and, according to some accounts, torturing local suspects. These violent acts, occurring within days and weeks of the attack in Beslan, are examples of violence which can be (and have been in various media) linked temporally and spatially to the events of Beslan. Other examples include a series, even a campaign (Russell 2005a: 99-101), of suicide-bombings used by (elements of) the Chechen armed resistance against Russian targets since the summer of 2000; the hostage-taking at the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow in October 2002; and the ad hoc and systematic use of violence and military aggression by Russia’s armed forces, Federal Security Service (FSB) and special forces against the civilian population of Chechnya since the republic was re-invaded in 1999, an act which was itself triggered by a series of explosions in Russian apartment buildings that killed hundreds of civilians. The repercussions of this violence have not, of course, been confined to Chechnya; inevitably, with the movement of refugees and the continued waging of guerrilla warfare, violence and its effects on civil society are found also in neighbouring republics – Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia-Alania, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia – and the provinces (края) of

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Southern Russia. North Ossetia has itself not been immune to armed conflict. Tensions with Ingushetia over the disputed Prigorodnyi district, a legacy of the forced deportations of the Ingush and Chechen nations in 1944 (Nekrich 1978), flared into a brief, brutal conflict in 1992 that has left its own legacy of refugees and mistrust between certain groups of ethnic Ingush and Ossetians (Tishkov 1997; Dementieva 1993; Orlov 1994). Such is the complex network of events, people and places, indeed narratives, that all intersect at Beslan. Any reportage, discussion or investigation of the attack will inevitably touch on one or more of these, each of which could be a further line of inquiry. In turn, any investigation of Beslan, such as this one, can, I believe, contribute to a more thorough understanding of these factors, including events which have occurred since the siege, such as the ‘suicide attacks’ allegedly carried out by two young women from Dagestan, Mariam Sharipova and Dzhennet Abdullaeva, at the Liubianka and Park Kultury metro stations in central Moscow on 29 March 2010, which killed forty people and wounded over a hundred. Or the explosion at Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport on 24 January 2011 that killed thirty-seven people. Or the capture by Russian forces in June 2010 of Ali Taziev (aka Ahmed Evloev or ‘Magas’), considered to be one of the major commanders, or ‘emirs’, in the Caucasus Emirate’s armed resistance, and wanted for numerous violent acts, including the attempted assassination of Ingush president Yunus-bek Yevkurov in June 2009 and the seizure of Beslan’s School No. 1 in September 2004. A third reason why the Beslan attack is an important object of study is that the event precipitated changes in the strategies and policies of both the Chechen resistance and the Russian government. On 13 September 2004, in a speech at a specially convened meeting with the government and heads of the regions, President Putin stressed the importance of ‘ensuring the unity of the country, strengthening state structures and trust in the authorities, [and] creating an effective system of internal security’ in order to conquer terror (победы над террором).1 To this end, Putin decreed a number of changes to strengthen the central or ‘vertical’ (вертикаль) structure of executive power favoured by his administration. Presidents of the republics (such as North Ossetia-Alania) would no longer be elected but appointed by the president, whose choice would then be ratified by regional legislative assemblies, effectively ‘rolling back fifteen years of Soviet/Russian reforms’ (Hahn 2005: 166; see also Lemaître 2006). A new government ministry for ‘issues of regional and ethnic policy’ was created, as was a ‘special Federal commission on the North Caucasus’, with ‘broad powers’ (широкие полномочия) to

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coordinate civic ministries, law-enforcement departments and security responses. Also proposed was an ‘anti-crisis management system’ to be capable of not only stopping terrorist acts and dealing with their consequences, but also of working on preventing terrorist invasions, diversions and manmade catastrophes organised by terrorists. [A] system that will be ahead of criminals to destroy them, so to speak, in their own lair. And if the situation requires it, to get them from abroad.

This last statement eventually resulted in the adoption, in 2006, of a law enabling the Russian Armed Forces to be used in ‘accomplishing tasks aimed at suppressing international terrorist activities outside the Russian Federation’.2 On the Chechen side, in an interview with The Jamestown Foundation published in July 2006, Chechen-Ichkerian president, Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev (who was killed on 17 June 2006), indicated that, since Beslan, the Chechen resistance had managed to convince all its fighters to abandon terrorism as a tactic, although, in the face of continued violence, including kidnappings, extra-judicial killings and torture perpetrated by Russian forces against Chechens, this was not always easy: We regard terrorist methods as unacceptable, and this is evidenced by the fact that for a year and a half now, we have managed to observe the agreements reached at [former Chechen-Ichkerian president] Maskhadov’s insistence for a unilateral rejection of terrorist acts. These are currently being observed. Yet, despite this gesture of good will and the efforts of the ChRI [Chechen-Ichkerian] leadership and the Military Committee of the Majlis-ul-Shura [Consultative Council], we do not see corresponding actions on the part of the Russian aggressors .  .  . Though the Russian aggressors have ignored this move of ours, we continue to adhere to it, although it has not been easy for me, the leader, the emir of the Majlis-ulShura and president of the ChRI, to restrain some hotheads who would like to act the same way the Russian militarists act in Chechnya and the North Caucasus.3

Probably the most infamous of such ‘hotheads’, Shamil Basaev claimed responsibility for the attack on Beslan in a letter published by Kavkazcenter on 17 September 2004,4 and in a 2005 interview with Russian journalist Andrei Babitskii.5 In the letter, Basaev makes no apology for waging war against Russia for Chechnya’s ‘Freedom and Independence’, and in the interview he refused to renounce terrorism as a tactic while the Russian side continued, in violation of international law, to use violence and ‘terrorism’ against him and his people. Yet Basaev also admitted his shock at the outcome of the hostage-taking

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(which he nevertheless blamed wholly on President Putin), and the fact that, apart from the March 2010 Moscow metro explosions, there have been no ‘terrorism spectaculars’ since Beslan could indicate that Basaev was indeed restrained, not only by Chechen-Ichkerian presidential policy, but by the bloody end to the Beslan siege. It might also, of course, suggest that, along with certain policy steps, such as the appointment of Dmitri Kozak to the post of presidential representative to the Southern Federal District (Gorenburg 2009), Russian security forces became more efficient in preventing such attacks, but the evidence for this is, at best, inconclusive. Even the death of Basaev, killed in July 2006 when a truck carrying explosives blew up on the outskirts of a village in Ingushetia, cannot be unequivocally attributed to the work of Russian security forces – too many factors suggest the explosion was simply an accident. It remains to be seen whether the March 2010 Moscow metro explosions are indicative of a new campaign or, indeed, something else entirely (Dzutsev 2010). The siege at Beslan is commonly compared to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, not least in official Russian versions of the attack, ‘broadly accepted by Western leaders if not by all sections of the media in the West’ that claim the Beslan siege as ‘Russia’s 9/11, the latest manifestation within its borders of the assault by international (Islamic) terrorists on innocent citizens in a law-abiding society’ (Russell 2007: 114). Yet, in spite of the significance of the event for the Russian government and the Chechen resistance, in spite of the callousness and brutality of the attack and the widespread horror it provoked, the hostage crisis in Beslan is far from being ‘Russia’s 9/11’. The ways in which the United States embraced its tragedy through political rhetoric, high-profile public ceremonies, national advertising campaigns promoting unity and patriotism, and celebrations of the city and spirit of New York and the many ‘heroes’ caught up in the attacks (Silberstein 2002) were not repeated in Russia after the Beslan attack. An officially sanctioned rally held in Moscow during the official three-day mourning period seems not to have caught the public imagination (O’Flynn 2004), while unofficial protests in North Ossetia were marked by anger and demands for the resignation of the republic’s president (Voitova 2004). Beslan has made little impact on Russia’s national psyche, and it remains a marginalised tragedy fraught with conflict, bitterness, anger and indifference. Many ordinary Russians, with their own difficult lives to worry about and immersed in a Kremlin-controlled mass-media landscape, have little open concern for the people and politics of the North Caucasus, and international aid given to the victims of the siege, along with simmering feelings of resentment and powerlessness, have

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since divided and fractured the community of Beslan (Phillips 2007). Grassroots organisations from the town made up of mothers and relatives of the victims have long sought an objective inquiry and investigation into the disaster, and continue to seek what they call justice: answers to their questions about how the authorities handled and responded to the attack, and who was responsible for those decisions. Their efforts have been met with insensitivity, indifference, hostility and even charges of criminality from a government that has sought to divide them and dragged its feet in compiling its official report of the attack (Politkovskaya 2007). The website of the (All-Russian Public Organisation of Victims of Terrorist Attacks) Voice of Beslan6 is a catalogue of the groups’ appeals, letters, official complaints and statements to Russian and international politicians. In June 2007, relatives of those who died in the siege filed a lawsuit against the Russian government in the European Court of Human Rights, claiming the government failed in its obligations to protect and preserve life and that they have been denied the right to an objective investigation. Apart from the first anniversary, when President Putin met with Beslan residents in Moscow – a divisive, anxiety-provoking invitation that forced people to choose between being at home that day and finally gaining an audience with the president (Politkovskaya 2007: 289–90, 294–5) – each subsequent anniversary of the siege has so far attracted only minimal attention from Russia’s president: brief words of commemoration in a speech to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of the ordination of Alexei II, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (3 September 2006); words of remembrance made in response to a journalist’s question after a visit to a school in Astrakhan (1 September 2007), and a moment’s silence during a government cabinet meeting on 3 September 2007 to ‘honour the memory of victims of terrorist attacks’ (‘вспоминаем с вами о жертвах террористических актов’). In 2008, President Medvedev’s attention was on ‘Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia’ and the Beijing Olympic Games and neither he nor Prime Minister Putin, who was visiting Primorskii Krai in the Far East, mentioned Beslan. In 2009, the fifth anniversary of the attack, Medvedev met with teachers in a Moscow school; signed a decree creating the position of, and appointing the first, Commissioner for Children’s Rights; congratulated news agency ITAR-TASS on its one hundred and fifth anniversary; held a video-conference with the president of the Komi Republic (where there had been a fire in an elderly people’s home); hosted the tenth annual meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) heads of security and intelligence; congratulated Moscow on its annual City Day celebrations, and failed to refer

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to Beslan even once. The only mention of Beslan was on 3 September 2009, when a minute’s silence was observed at the beginning of a meeting between Putin and the Presidium of the Russian Federation. 2010 and 2011 saw the anniversary pass unmentioned by both Putin and Medvedev. This almost avoidance of official remembrance is in striking contrast to the official rituals developing around the remembrance of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, the first, fifth and seventh anniversaries of which were very publicly observed by President Bush, who attended memorial ceremonies held at New York’s ‘Ground Zero’. In 2008, campaigning for the presidential election was suspended on 11 September and both presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, also visited the site. In 2009, President Obama laid a wreath at the Pentagon and held a minute’s silence outside the White House while Vice-President Joe Biden was present at the site itself. Similar events at the Pentagon, New York and Pennsylvania were held in 2010, and, of course, in May 2011, four days after the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, President Obama returned again to Ground Zero where he laid a wreath and met with New York police and fire fighters, and relatives of the victims. The tenth anniversary of the attacks was marked by ceremonies and media commentaries across the world. President Putin visited Beslan briefly on the morning of 4 September 2004; he visited a local hospital and held a meeting in the administrative building used as headquarters during the siege, but he did not go to the school itself. Although both Putin and President Medvedev have since made working visits to North Ossetia-Alania – Putin met with President Taimuraz Mamsurov in Beslan in March 2010 and Medvedev visited the region in February 2011, paying his respects at two memorials in the local cemetery – neither has ever visited Beslan’s School No. 1. Scholarly discussions of the events of Beslan focus largely on the socio-political repercussions of the attack and its aftermath, particularly with regard to hostage-taking, terrorism, counter-terrorism, and conflict between Russia and Chechnya.7 A special issue of Johnson’s Russia List Research and Analytical Supplement8 brings together several very different perspectives on the attack, its root causes, contexts and political implications. John Dunlop’s The 2002 Dubrovka and 2004 Beslan Hostage Crises: a critique of Russian counter-terrorism (2006), his updated working paper on new findings (2009), and Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s ‘Placing Blame: making sense of Beslan’ (2009a) draw on multiple sources, including official reports and statements from key players, press reports, investigative journalism, interviews, survey data

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and the transcripts of the Nur-Pashi Kulaev trial (the only hostage-taker to be captured alive), and remain the most thorough investigations and analyses of the event to date. Others have also written about Beslan. There is a substantial body of work by several, particularly Russian and German, investigative journalists, whose material is often used in academic analysis. Dunlop mentions Elena Mishlina, writing for the intrepid Novaya Gazeta, Svetlana Meteleva (Moskovskii komsomolets), six German reporters (Buse et al. 2004), whose ‘Putin’s Ground Zero: Die Kinder von Beslan’, published in Der Spiegel, won a Henri Nannen Prize in 2005, and leading Russian military affairs specialist and journalist Pavel Felgengauer (Felgenhauer), but others include Andrei Kolesnikov (Kommersant), Igor Naidenov (Izvestiia), and Iurii Safronov and El’vira Goriukhina (Novaya Gazeta).9 Anna Politkovskaya (2007), who visited the town in December 2004, wrote compassionately of the victims and scathingly of the government in her discussion of the attack as part of the Putin political landscape. Phillips (2007) writes part history, part travelogue, and builds up a narrative reconstruction of the events of the attack and the siege using the stories of eyewitnesses and survivors (see also Iuzik 2006). Issues of trauma and health care in the aftermath of the attack have also been explored (Parfitt 2004; Moscardino et al. 2007, 2010; Scrimin et al. 2009, 2011), while Jenks and Smith (2008) draw on complexity theory to analyse aspects of the attack from a sociological perspective. Media coverage of the Beslan siege is also discussed in the literature (Politkovskaya 2007: 155; Russell 2007:67–70; Dzutsev 2008). A report published soon after the siege by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) (Haraszti 2004: 2) gives an overview of Russian media coverage of the event and the experiences of journalists working in Beslan at the time, concluding that ‘[a] triple credibility gap arose, between the government and the media, between the media and the citizens, and between the government and the people’. Other research analyses Russian and international mainstream print media (Asanova 2006; Sousa and Lima 2006; Snetkov 2009; Simons 2010; Macgilchrist 2011), international and domestic television coverage (von Brockhausen 2008; Burrett 2011) and documentary film (Michalski and Gow 2007). Hutchings (2009) offers a detailed textual analysis of the main evening news programme on Russian television broadcast from 1–6 September 2004 with reference to the (re)construction of national identity. There is still controversy over what happened at Beslan, how it happened and why. This book does not investigate these controversies, nor does it, or can it, set out to establish what ‘really’ happened. Rather, it

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investigates how three different news agencies constructed six different reports that relate, and respond to, what was happening at Beslan, even as events were still taking place, and this, in fact, is a further reason behind the selection of Beslan as a topic of investigation. The construction of narratives from events after they have occurred is arguably what much of history is about and has been dealt with extensively elsewhere, particularly in the work of Hayden White. Studying the construction of narratives as they are being constructed offers a different vantage point from the work of historians, and can contribute to our understanding of how narratives are constructed and the ways in which they work. Studying the reporting of Beslan generated during the three days of the siege, before anybody knew the outcome, before the details of who was doing what and why were known and made known, offers a different vantage point from the literature that examines the events of Beslan in light of what happened in the end. This book, then, offers, for the first time, an in-depth, sustained and systematic linguistic and textual analysis of online media generated during, and because of, the Beslan siege, drawing on data collected from both mainstream and ‘fringe’ or independent media outlets and, furthermore, specifically turning its attention to translated reportage. Why such reports are important comes from the study’s narrative theoretical frame, one in which rigorous narratological textual analysis is grounded in socio-political reflection. Like Gearóid Ó Tuathail (2009a, 2009b), who draws on the same theory, this study sees narrative as a robust means of understanding why things happen, how people make sense of what happens, how we act in response to what happens, justify those actions, and ‘specify enemies and attribute blame in consequential ways’ (Ó Tuathail 2009a:5). In 1966, Roland Barthes, in a now oft-quoted passage, described the universality of narrative, arguing that ‘narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself’ (see Sontag 1982:251). While this universality is ultimately open to question (Strawson 2004), the use of narrative as a tool for academic investigation beyond the confines of fiction and literature has gained ground from the late nineteenth century onwards. The role of narrative in psychology, for example, was explored in the work of French physician, psychiatrist and philosopher Pierre Janet (1859–1947), and the narrative form of the case study, developed in medicine, and in psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), contributed to the growth in the first half of the twentieth century of the study of life history as a method of psychological investigation.10

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An interdisciplinary symposium held at the University of Chicago in 1979 has come to be recognised as a determinative moment in the development of narrative theory. Those present recall from the symposium the aura of intellectual excitement and discovery, the common feeling that the study of narrative . . . has taken a quantum leap in the modern era. The study of narrative is no longer the province of literary specialists or folklorists borrowing their terms from psychology and linguistics but has now become a positive source of insight for all the branches of human and natural science. (Mitchell 1981: ix)

The special issue of Critical Inquiry (7(1) 1980) that grew out of the symposium led to the publication of an expanded version of the journal issue, ‘to carry thinking about the problem of narrative well beyond the province of the “aesthetic” .  .  . and to explore the role of narrative in social and psychological formations, particularly in structures of value and cognition’ (Mitchell 1981: vii). In a similar development, the ‘Synopsis 2’ conference held in June 1979 in Tel Aviv, with its subsequent special issues of Poetics Today (1(3) 1980, 1(4) 1980 and 2(2) 1981) also saw academics realising a cardinal shift in our conception of ‘Narratology’ .  .  . [as] neither one discipline nor one methodology nor a division of Poetics but rather a meeting point, an intersection, of a whole range of problems which are especially found in works of prose, although they are not restricted to them. (Hrushovski 1980: 208)

Margaret Somers and Gloria Gibson go so far as to claim that ‘a small revolution with potentially large consequences is occurring in our contemporary knowledge culture’, crucial to which is ‘the shift from a focus on representational to ontological narrativity’ (1994: 38). That is, rather than narrative being a mode, or a form, of representing knowledge, Somers and Gibson point to the work of scholars from a range of fields and disciplines that suggests something much more substantive about narrative: namely that social life is itself storied and that narrative is an ontological condition of social life. Their research is showing us that stories guide action; that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories . . . that people make sense of what has happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives; and that people are guided to act in certain ways, and not others, on the basis of the projections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiplicity but ultimately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives. (1994: 38)

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The ‘spectrum of disciplines’ to which Somers and Gibson refer as engaged in this shift towards ontological narrativity includes medicine, social psychology, anthropology, gender studies, law, biology and physics, to which Somers (1997: 82) adds psychoanalytic theory, education, philosophy and political science. With the concept of narrative now featuring in contemporary academic investigations of subjects ranging from computer gaming, street art and tattoos, to urban geography and geopolitics, it seems it might be easier to identify the disciplines that do not draw on narrative, rather than those that do. Mona Baker’s Translation and Conflict: a narrative account (2006) initiated the application of narrative in translation and interpreting studies. Baker draws expressly from Bruner (1991), Somers (1992, 1994, 1997), Somers and Gibson (1994) and Fisher (1987/1989, 1997), using a strand of narrative theory emerging primarily from psychology and the ideas of social and communication theory. This book is a direct response to Baker’s work and an attempt to further develop her application to translation studies of what I call ‘socio-narrative theory’, a term devised to distinguish the theory explored here from purely narratological approaches typically concerned with the structure of finite texts, and to emphasise its sociological perspective. In ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, Jerome Bruner sketches out ten ‘features of narrative’, proffered ‘rather in the spirit of constructing an armature on which a more systematic account might be constructed’ (1991: 5). Baker’s discussion, a broad-spectrum approach that exemplifies narrative theory and its relevance to issues of translation, is one such systematic account. This book, a focused and deliberately delineated textual analysis, aims to take up what Bruner suggests is the next step: ‘to show in detail how, in particular instances, narrative organizes the structure of human experience’ (1991: 21). Choosing the Beslan attack as a case study through which to explore and develop Baker’s approach is congruent with her focus on situations of political import and her emphasis on the centrality of both translation and narrative to issues of violent conflict and power. This book assumes not only the universality of narrative but the ubiquity of conflict and, in a globalised world connected and constructed through international and internet media, the inevitable presence of translation at those points where narratives and conflict intersect. At the same time, socio-narrative theory is also useful for addressing at least two key issues in the field of translation studies. The first of these is the traditional assumption found in the literature, and prevalent in the public sphere, that translators and translations are, or should be, if not ‘neutral’ – located in a theoretical space between, or

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Introduction

overlapped by, texts and cultures (Pym 1998) – then largely benevolent, acting as bridge builders ‘dedicated to . . . mediation, and promoting international understanding’ (Bassnett 2002). This assumption is reflected in common metaphors of translation, ‘translation as likeness, replica, duplicate, copy, portrait, reflection, reproduction, imitation, mimesis, mirror image or a transparent pane of glass’ (Hermans 2002: 10), and yet it is an assumption with which some scholars have become increasingly uncomfortable.11 As Baker argues, narrative theory enables scholarship to move beyond traditionally preoccupying issues of ‘accuracy’, patterns of norms, and dichotomies or taxonomies of translation strategies (such as Lawrence Venuti’s domestication vs. foreignisation) that can obscure both the shifting positions of translators ‘as they negotiate their way around various priorities and challenges’ (2010b: 350) and the social and political intents and pur-poses of translations. Secondly, as Hermans points out, if ‘translations are untidy and partial rather than transparent representations of their source texts’ (2002: 11), and if ‘our descriptions of translations are also translations of translation’ (2002: 19), it follows that the discourse on translation studies needs to develop a ‘critical self- refl exiveness [and] . . . a certain self- critical distance’ (2002: 20). Interestingly, refl ecting on theoretical developments in ethnography, Hermans suggests ‘narrativity’ as one way of bringing about such self- critical distance but, as Baker has also noted, ‘he does not discuss what form this potential shift [towards nar-rativity] might take’ (2006: 173 n3). Just as Somers and Gibson (1994) turned to the concept of narrative to resolve the discrepancies between social class theory and the empirical evidence which persistently exposed peculiarities, deviations or anomalies, so might the concept of narra-tive bring some clarity to translation studies, where theories frequently contend with deviations from a model and which, as a discipline, is itself ‘beset by epistemological paradoxes which have not received the atten-tion they deserve’ (Hermans 2002: 17). In this book, socio-narrative theory is not just an analytical tool but is itself an object of investigation. What perspective(s) can this revised version of narrative theory provide on the linguistic mediation and translations of violent conflict? What analytical models does it offer for the analysis of different narratives constructed out of a common set of reported events? These questions are developed in the next chapter, in which socio-narrative theory as a framework for textual and sociopolitical investigation is explored. The chapter begins with a discussion of the assumptions underlying a sociological approach to narrative, offers a revised typology of narrative, discusses relevant narratological

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terms and definitions (including the concepts of narrators and temporary narrators), and sets out an intratextual model of analysis, which is used to approach the data and structure Chapters 2 to 5. These chapters form the analytical heart of the book, a sustained textual analysis that aims to examine, describe, contrast and compare a sample of written narratives – the six stories of the title – constructed in response to the events of Beslan as those events were still unfolding on the ground. Each chapter investigates the Russian-language narrative texts published by a different online news agency: Chapter 2 analyses those texts published by the major Russian agency RIA-Novosti (Story 1), Chapter 3 examines the Chechen resistance website Kavkazcenter (Story 2), and Chapter 4 investigates the reports published by Caucasian Knot (Story 3), a charitably funded Russian civil society website. These chapters strive to determine what narratives these three Russian (-language) news agencies constructed from the reported events in Beslan, and how these narratives were constructed. The Moscow-based Russian News and Information Agency RIANovosti is a large, state-controlled Russian news agency, which, since its establishment in 1941 and through various incarnations since, has always been closely connected with the Soviet or Russian governments, with a client list that includes Russian presidential departments and government ministries. The Kavkazcenter News Agency describes itself as a ‘Chechen internet agency which is independent, international and Islamic’, founded in March 1999 to report on ‘events in the Islamic world, the Caucasus, and Russia’ with special emphasis on ‘events in the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria connected to the Russian military aggression against the CRI’.12 While it claims not to reflect the views of any states or governments, the site openly purports to present the position of the ‘Chechen Mujahedeen’ and, up until the unilateral declaration of the Caucasus Emirate in the autumn of 2007 that effectively split the Chechen resistance, the agency had strong links to, and was a key communication channel for, the Chechen-Ichkerian governmentin-exile. Caucasian Knot, established in August 2001, was founded by Memorial, the Russian and international historical and human rights non-governmental society nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. In June 2006, the site became a partner of Press Now, a Dutch organisation supporting independent media, which provides expertise in management, web development, and training of correspondents and editorial staff. Caucasian Knot was awarded the Gerd Bucerius Free Press of Eastern Europe Prize in June 2007 and, in 2009, the prize for ‘The Defence of the Interests of the Professional Community’ by the Russian Union of Journalists.

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These three websites were selected as sources of data because they all met certain criteria: they published material on the hostage-taking in Beslan while the crisis was unfolding; they published in both Russian and English;13 and, on a pragmatic level, they all have search facilities that enable material from September 2004 to be retrieved. Internet websites and online reportage were selected as the focus of the study (rather than newspapers, radio or television) because they are arenas in which both mainstream and non-mainstream media participate. The steady reduction in press freedoms and independence since the beginning of the Putin presidency in 2000, which shows little sign of abating since Dmitrii Medvedev’s assumption of the position in May 2008, means that, with the exception of the Moscow-based newspaper Novaya Gazeta and radio station Ekho Moskvy, there are virtually no independent media operating in Russia. This interference extends into online media, with the Russian government also interested in increasing state control over internet publications and evidence that it is not indifferent to the content of websites. Savva Ternetiev, a young man from Syktyvkar (Republic of Komi), was charged and tried under Russia’s Criminal Code for comments he wrote on a blog in 2007. Ingushetia.ru, the only remaining independent media outlet in the Republic of Ingushetia, saw repeated attempts in 2008 to have the site shut down, and on 31 August 2008 the site’s chief editor, Magomed Evloev, was shot dead while in police custody. Nevertheless, cyberspace still remains a site, albeit marginalised and potentially dangerous, for the expression of dissenting and alternative views. Having selected these three websites, six sets of material were compiled (defined in Chapter 1 as ‘primary narrative texts’): one Russian and one English from each of the three sites. The attack in Beslan occurred on the morning of Wednesday, 1 September 2004 and the siege lasted until just after one o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, 3 September, with fighting between hostage-takers and Russian special forces continuing late into that night. The material was manually selected for analysis by using archival searches and trawling through everything published by the three selected websites from the Wednesday morning (the first bulletins were posted around ten o’clock) up until midnight on Saturday, 4 September 2004, the day after the siege came to an end, and is made up of all texts, in Russian and in English, that refer directly to the hostagetaking. Texts published on the day following the end of the siege were included because it was felt this would add material concerning both the way the siege came to an end and the immediate aftermath of the hostage crisis, about which there remain conflicting accounts and significant controversy. Texts published over the next few days, as the first

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funerals were held in Beslan and as Russia officially observed three days of mourning, would no doubt also be of interest, but the amount of text produced, especially by RIA-Novosti, was too large to be adequately analysed within the limitations of this project. While Chapters 2, 3 and 4 analyse the Russian-language material, I am also interested in what happens to these Russian-language narratives when they are reconfigured into English. If it is the case that not everything is translated, how do the two texts, Russian and English, differ? What are the implications of these differences for readers, narrators, translators and editors? Chapter 5 analyses the English-language material published by the three selected websites (Stories 4, 5 and 6) within the same time frame as the publication of the Russian-language material.14 Comparisons are made between the two sets of material published by each site and between the three sets of English-language material, and conclusions are drawn regarding relationships between Russian and English material and the effects of translation on the narrative(s) related in the Russian texts. This focus on translation is rare in the literature, and remains all but absent from the traditionally monolingual approaches of narrative scholarship, media studies, area studies and critical discourse analysis. None of the references on Beslan cited above consider translation at all. Finally, how can a sustained textual analysis of the construction of narratives inform our understanding of the ways in which violent political conflict is initiated, sustained and resolved/dissolved? This is both an epistemological question, concerned with the construction and constitution of knowledge, and an ethical question, concerned with the consequences of that knowledge. The question underpins the rationale of the book, which, while focusing on a single case study, always endeavours to situate its material, and the theoretical framework used to analyse it, within a field of social and political inquiry. The concluding chapter reiterates the socio-narrative assumption that narratives are inextricably linked with human agency, and thereby explores the relevancy of narratives and the contributions of socio-narrative theory towards understanding, explaining and challenging the behaviour of individuals and the practices of social units and institutions, particularly with regards to issues of violence and power. Notes 1 ‘Заявления по важнейшим вопросам’, Вступительное слово на расширенном заседании Правительства с участием глав субъектов Российской Федерации, 13 September 2004, Moscow, http://kremlin.ru/

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2

3

4

5

6 7

8

9 10

11 12 13

Introduction appears/2004/09/13/1514_type63374type63378type82634_76651.shtml, and in English, http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2004/09/13/0000_ty pe82912type82913_76667.shtml [both accessed 18 July 2011]. See Article 10, Federal Law No. 35-FZ of 6 March 2006: On Counteraction of Terrorism. Adopted by the State Duma on 26 February 2006 and endorsed by the Federation Council on 1 March 2006. ‘Exclusive Interview with Former Chechen President Sadulaev’, North Caucasus Weekly, 7.27 (2006), www.jamestown.org/programs/ncw/ single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=3282&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D= 188&no_cache=1 [accessed 30 January 2009]. ‘Абдаллах Шамиль: “Операция Норд-Вест в Беслане . . .”’, Kavakzcenter, 17 September 2004, www.kavkazcenter.com/russ/content/2004/09/17/25985. shtml [accessed 18 July 2011]. Broadcast on Channel 4 (UK) in February 2005 and on US ABC television on 29 July 2005. A Russian translation of the script is posted by Chechenpress at www.chechenpress.info/events/2005/08/05/08.shtml [accessed 13 May 2008] and an English translation of this translation is posted by the FinlandChechen Society at www.kolumbus.fi/suomi-tshetshenia-seura/shamilb.htm [accessed 18 July 2011]. www.golosbeslana.ru [accessed 5 January 2012]. See, for example, Blandy (2004); Plater-Zyberk (2004); Smith (2004); Stepanova (2004); Kramer (2005); Lynch (2005); Cera (2006); Bukkvoll (2007); Dolnik (2007); Dolnik and Fitzgerald (2008); Russell (2007); Dzutsev (2008); Cheloukhine and Lieberman (2009); Gorenburg (2009); Gilligan (2010); and Soldatov and Borogan (2010). ‘Chechnya and Russia–West Relations: a post-Beslan symposium’, January 2005, Issue No. 29, www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/9024.cfm [accessed 18 July 2010]. Collections of reportage on Beslan include Safronov (2005) and Kalisher (2007). Although eclipsed after World War Two by the dominance in the United States of the epistemologies of the formal sciences (Polkinghorne 1988:101– 5), these psychological approaches could be considered the theoretical roots of what is now recognised as narrative identity theory and developed in the work of philosophers and psychologists such as MacIntyre (1981), Gergen and Gergen (1983), Mancuso and Sarbin (1983), Carr (1986), Taylor (1989), Ricoeur (1992), Rosenwald and Ochberg (1992), Freeman (1993), Cavarero (1997) and Bruner (2002). I am grateful to Drs Ursula Tidd and Deirdre Russell for their expertise in this area. See, for example, Tymoczko (2003); Baker (2006, 2010a, 2010b); Boéri (2008, 2009); and Inghilleri (2010, 2011). ‘About Us’, Kavkazcenter, www.kavkazcenter.net/eng/about [accessed 18 July 2011]. The absence of any Chechen or Ossetian language content stems not only from my own limitations but from that of online media in those languages,

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which, largely due to the history of social and political upheavals in the region, are rare. While there have been official efforts at various times to revive and promote the language, Chechen resistance websites all use Russian as the prime language of communication, with articles typically only containing a smattering of patriotic Chechen phrases (see Jaimoukha 2005). The situation is similar for North-Ossetian media. 14 English texts published on Sunday, 5 September that are considered to be direct translations of Russian texts published within the set time frame were also included.

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Socio-narrative theory: narratives, texts, narrators

This chapter, the theoretical foundation of the book, begins by offering a working definition of narrative from a sociological perspective, including the key concepts of ontological narrativity (the idea that narratives constitute rather than merely represent reality) and relationality (the idea that narratives are constructed by making meaningful connections). Four different types of narratives (personal, public, conceptual and metanarratives) are used as the basis for a revised typology of narratives, one that emphasises notions of individual and collective authorship (or narrative construction) and also the differences and relationships between particular, local narratives and general, abstract narratives. This broad, sociological focus then moves to a discussion of several narratological terms and concepts used in the close, textual analysis of online news, and here I set out an intratextual model of analysis, which, by separating out several different types of embedded texts, then acts as the organisational basis for each of the analytical chapters (Chapters 2–5). Finally, the chapter turns to the concepts of narrator and temporary narrator, little discussed in the literature on social narrativity, yet crucial when considering who may and who may not narrate, and how temporary narrators are controlled and re-narrated by narrators. Raising questions about power and authority and the abilities of individuals and social groups to elaborate their narratives in society, particularly in situations of violent political conflict, these considerations are also an integral part of the analyses. Defining narrative: a sociological approach While both narratology and sociological approaches to narrative have generated a variety of definitions of narrative, almost all invariably involve concepts of events or elements which, through some form of configuration, are related or connected into some sort of temporal (and often spatial) sequence or series. The concept of configuration is key to

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understanding sociological approaches because it avoids central narratological notions of representation and introduces focal sociological concerns of narrative construction beyond the bounds of, but without excluding, text(s), as well as the crucial issue of agency. Narratologists usually define narrative as a form of ‘representation’ and refer to some kind of (often broadly defined) ‘text’ within which all of the elements – events, actors, time and location (Bal 2009) – are arranged. Thus, ‘the representation of a real or fictitious event or series of events’ (Genette 1976: 1), ‘the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events’ (Scholes 1981: 205), ‘the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence’ (Prince 1982: 1) and ‘the representation of an event or series of events’ (Abbott 2002: 12) are all examples of definitions of narrative from some of the most respected and established scholars in the field. For sociologists and communication theorists, however, the idea of representation is problematic because it assumes some kind of stable, empirically knowable ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ that can be separated out from the narratives that claim to represent it. Somers and Gibson argue for a ‘shift from a focus on representational to ontological narrativity’ (1994: 38) which, in this book, is understood to mean that narratives constitute rather than merely represent reality. To say this is to adopt a constructivist view of reality (traceable back to the thinking of William Hume and Immanuel Kant), the central thesis of which is that ‘there is no unique “real world” that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language’ (Bruner 1986: 95). Instead, we live and act in constructed worlds, which are themselves constructed ‘always out of other worlds, created by others, which we have taken as given’ (ibid.). Yet, this is not to say that nothing exists outside of our minds; Nelson Goodman readily concedes that ‘making a true description of a chair . . . falls far short of making a chair’ (1984: 34). Donald Polkinghorne, in his wonderfully lucid Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1988), explains the relationship between real world events and narrative by drawing on the concept of evolutionary emergence developed in systems theory (Checkland 1981). He describes human existence as consisting of three differently organised realms of reality: the material realm, the organic realm and the mental realm, also referred to as the realm of meaning. Together, these realms include the ‘three basic structures of reality – matter, life and consciousness’ (1988: 2) and it is ‘the interaction of all these parts that produces the human realm’ (1988: 3). Real world events (such as those that occurred in Beslan in 2004) are part of the material realm, awareness of which

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comes through our senses and is ‘the work of the organic realm’ (1988: 4). In turn, the mental realm acts on this basic awareness by creating connections and relationships among its contents. Connection and relationality are key concepts of narrative; Somers defines narratives as ‘constellations of relationships (connected parts) embedded in time and space’ (1997: 82) and claims that the ‘fundamental trait’ of narrativity is ‘relationality’ (ibid.). This is strongly supported by the numerous definitions of narrative (like those given above), which include concepts of connection and relation, or sequence and series (which imply connection). Abbott, for example, defines story as ‘a sequence of events involving entities’ (2002: 195). For Ewick and Silbey, narratives are ‘sequences of statements connected by both a temporal and a moral ordering’ (1995: 198). Czarniawska writes, ‘a narrative is understood as . . . an account of an event/action or series of events/actions, chronologically connected’ (2004: 17). Hinchman and Hinchman provisionally define narratives in the human sciences as ‘discourses with a clear sequential order that connect events in a meaningful way’ (1997b: xvi). Polkinghorne thus argues that narrative is ‘the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful’ (1988: 1). The contents of awareness then or, to borrow a narratological term, the elements of these meaning-making narratives, are taken from the range of elements that surround us, ‘the infinite variety of events, experiences, characters, institutional promises and social factors that impinge on our lives’ (Somers 1997: 83) and used in the construction of narratives that are clearly not limited to single texts but that ‘cut across time and texts’ (Baker 2006: 12) and ‘across all genres and modes’ (Baker 2006: 13). These elements are both directly and indirectly perceived from the material world, for the mental realm acts not only on our firsthand experiences and sensory awareness of objects and actions, but on our ‘perceptions, rememberings, and imaginings’ (Sarbin 1998: 304), and on the words, texts and images of other people in other times and places (Bruner 1986: 68), the nature and extent of our exposure to which are deeply influenced by our geographical, social, temporal and cultural location, our ‘situated cognition’ or ‘distributed intelligence’ (Brown et al. 1989). These, too, are elements that are part of the content of our awareness upon which the activities of the mental realm work, that is, construct narratives, to create meaning. What we cannot know and do not experience directly, we can know and experience indirectly through texts, a broad definition of which I also accept, as in Bakhtin’s ‘any coherent complex of signs’ (1986: 103). Texts are able to import into a person’s ‘material realm’ elements that

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would otherwise be beyond that realm. Translation is crucial at this point because it acts either as a gateway or a gatekeeping device – one that is not always accidental and never neutral – that can determine what, that is, which of all available texts will be able to, and in what manner, be imported into the individual’s material realm.1 The meaning or reality, for, as Bruner concedes, ‘in the end the two are indistinguishable’ (1986:158), constructed from these is no less real than the meanings we create from direct perception. No less real and, moreover, paradoxically perhaps, often more strongly cherished and espoused. The god(s) we cannot hear or see, the leaders, politicians and heroes we have never met, the places we have never visited, the ancient texts and new reports we have not read, and the long dead relatives and figures of history we will never know – all feature in our awareness. They are all elements upon which narrative does its work as we create meaning of the worlds we inhabit. Thus, to say that narrative constitutes reality is not to say that the material and organic realms are created by the mental realm, but is to say that these, inextricable from human experience, are made meaningful by the activity of narrative which occurs in the mental realm. That is, ‘people make sense of what has happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives’ (Somers and Gibson 1994: 38). Theodore Sarbin uses a deceptively simple example of a brick wall, arguing that, it would be fatuous, for example, to say that the brick wall is only a social construction. One quickly learns that you cannot walk through brick walls. However, the meanings we assign are social constructions: Is the brick wall a form of protection, or is it a prison? (1998: 306)

Considering the walls built in Berlin, Northern Ireland, Palestine, the Czech Republic and Western Sahara, the US–Mexico border fence and even advocates for a wall along Russia’s border with Chechnya (Russell 2007: 187n69; Gilligan 2010: 2), the object of a wall can be problematised still further: is a wall a form of law, order, security and stability or a form of racism, fear, abuse, expansionism, and environmental and cultural damage? Moreover, the assumption of an ontological status of narrative is that the very building of such walls, the acts that bring them into existence, whatever they are called, are always motivated, justified and legitimised by the narratives constructed by those who desire the wall. There can be no such wall if there is no narrative need for it. Narratives are not only the means by which we (attempt to) make sense of and evaluate the world(s) in which we live, but are

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fundamentally linked to human agency and behaviour.2 ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?”’, MacIntyre argues in After Virtue, ‘if I can answer the prior question “Of what stories or story do I find myself a part?”’ (1981: 216). Furthermore, because of the integral interaction between personal narratives (discussed below) and ‘the enormous spectrum of social and political relations that constitute our social world’ (Somers and Gibson 1994: 67), the concept of agency is not, in this book, restricted to the behaviours of individuals alone, but also includes the institutional practices and actions arising out of the consensual or dominant narratives of societal groups (Jackson 2005). Narratives are not just about making meaning of human experience but are about choosing how to act and then justifying and legitimising our choices and actions, particularly when these are contested by, or are in direct conflict with, other competing narratives. Whether narrative meaning is an imposition on, or a reflection of, the nature of life itself is well debated,3 as is the question of whether narrative is one of two or more modes of expression of human experience (Bruner 1986; Polkinghorne 1988; Kerby 1991) or ‘the principal and inescapable mode by which we experience the world’ (Baker 2006: 9).4 I accept the latter position, and agree with Somers and Gibson, who argue that, narrativity and relationality are conditions of social being, social consciousness, social action, institutions, structures, even society itself – that is, the self and the purposes of self are constructed and reconstructed in the context of internal and external relations of time and place and power that are constantly in flux. (1994: 65)

In other words, all identities, all social actions and interactions, including all communications, are narratively constructed. This is not to say that no other forms, genres or structures of communication exist (consider art,5 music, architecture, instructions, argument, description and historical annals, for example), but that ‘[w]e live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meanings of our past actions, anticipating the outcomes of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed’ (Polkinghorne 1988: 160). Thus, Fisher argues that ‘narration is the foundational, conceptual configuration of ideas for our species . . . [and] is the context for interpreting and assessing all communication’ (1987/1989: 193). If reality is constituted by the narrative construction of all human communication, then understanding what narratives are and how they work is a fundamental and powerful means to understanding and explaining the complex, conflicting worlds in which we live.

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A typology of narratives A cardinal assumption of a narrative approach to data is the position that the narrative is the unit of analysis. Somers and Gibson (1994) distinguish between four different dimensions, or kinds (Somers 1997), of narrative: ontological, public, conceptual and meta-narrative. Their definitions of these terms, along with Baker’s (2006), who also uses this typology, adapting it slightly, are discussed in the relevant sections below. They act as the basis for the revised, more detailed typology used in this study. Rather than differentiating between four types of narrative in a flat model, the model offered here begins with a typology of two: (a) personal narratives and (b) shared or collective narratives, which encompass the remaining three types from the original model (now called societal, theoretical and meta-narratives), plus an additional category of ‘local’ narratives (see Figure 1).6 Each of these types is defined and discussed in some detail below. This dual typology stems from the assumption, perhaps overlooked in the original model, that there is a difference between what Somers and Gibson call ontological narratives (and what in this book are called

Narratives

Personal

particular

Shared/Collective

Local

Societal

Theoretical general Meta

Figure 1 A revised typology of narratives

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personal narratives)7 and the other three narratives in their typology. Somers defi nes these personal narratives as ‘the stories that social actors use to make sense of – indeed, to act in – their lives’ (1997: 84) and, similarly, Baker defi nes them as ‘personal stories that we tell ourselves about our place in the world and our own personal history’ (2006: 28). Thus, these are narratives that individuals construct about the self (and use to construct the self) and, in doing so, assume a certain amount of individual responsibility and accountability for them. In contrast, shared or collective narratives include ‘the stories that are told and retold by numerous members of a society over a long period of time’ (Baker 2006: 29). They are ‘the narratives that underpin the social order’ (ibid.), that circulate in an individual’s environment, that make up ‘the narrative frameworks of the . . . community’ (2006: 31); in short, ‘any type of narrative that has currency in a given community’ (2006: 33). Thus, these are narratives that are constructed collectively about the collective (and which also ultimately construct the collective group), through processes of collaboration, consensus and, I think it is true to say, coercion. I acknowledge that personal narratives can never be constructed in isolation from the collective narratives in which individuals are embedded (Somers and Gibson 1994; Whitebrook 2001; Baker 2006), and, conversely, that collective narratives rely on ‘compatible personal narratives’ in order to ‘gain currency and acceptance’ (Baker 2006: 30). Yet ultimately, there remains a distinction between narratives that are authored (where authorship is understood to mean a sense of ownership and autonomy) by individuals (which may, or may not, be communicated to various degrees) and narratives that are authored collaboratively and consensually. A dual typology highlights both this distinction and the interplay between them. A further feature included in this revised typology is the idea of placing the four different categories of shared or collective narratives on a continuum stretching from ‘particular’ to ‘general’, as indicated by the dark, vertical line in Figure 1. While such a visual representation can only, at best, give a very approximate indication of the concepts which inspired it, the diagram is intended to draw attention to both the interconnectedness of the separate categories and their porous, indistinct boundaries as well as the clear differences between the types of narrative at either end of the continuum, namely local and meta-narratives. Particular narratives are routinely embedded into generic stories (Bruner 1991), also known as master plots, archetypes (Abbott 2002), skeletal stories or canonical stories (Baker 2006).8 These generic stories can be considered general narratives insofar as they are recognisable by their general, rather than specific, elements. Embedding a particular narrative into

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a generic story is a means of making sense of that narrative and filling in any missing details (Bruner 1991; Bennett and Edelman 1985), and will inevitably shape our interpretation (or re-narration) of a particular narrative, its specific events and actors. Conversely, a meta-narrative might be ‘particularised’ by linking it specifically to concrete characters and locations, often infusing them with the power of the meta-narrative. Examples might be ‘sacred sites’ in Australian Aboriginal cultures, sites of historic battlefields, of religious significance or pilgrimage. Conflict over the application of different meta-narratives to such sites is often a primary source of conflict over geographical space. The ways in which personal and local narratives are embedded into larger, general, meta-narratives or, from a different perspective, the appropriation, or framing,9 of local narratives into meta-narratives, forms a core part of the analysis of this book. Personal narratives Personal narratives – narratives that individuals construct about the self (and use to construct the self) – may be constructed from events drawn from a variety of time spans. They may relate and/or constitute an individual’s life story, may focus on significant periods in an individual’s life, such as childhood, parenthood, divorce (Riessman 1990), professional occupations, migration, illness (Williams 1984) or trauma, or may be constructed around single, particular events, as in the case of the eyewitness accounts from those who survived the hostage ordeal in Beslan. They may also be articulated or communicated to varying degrees. With particular reference to research and the analysis of oral narratives, Catherine Riessman’s ‘little blue book’ (1993), as she later calls it (2008: vii), suggests fi ve possible ‘levels or kinds of representation’ of experience, which are useful for understanding the notion of personal narratives and the ways in which they are constructed, communicated and reconstructed as they come into contact and interact with other narratives in society (Riessman 1993: 8). Riessman’s model begins with ‘primary’ or ‘prelinguistic’ experience, where a walk on the beach, for example, is encountered as ‘images, plays of colours and lights, noises, and fl eeting sensations’ (1993: 8– 9), which are taken for granted and not analysed or pondered upon in any way. The fi rst level of representing this primary experience is what Riessman calls ‘attending’, whereby features of the primary experience are made discrete through ‘refl ecting, remem-bering, recollecting them into observations’ (1993: 9). While Riessman does not initially use the term ‘personal narrative’ to account for this fi rst level of representation, she suggests that the process of attending makes ‘certain phenomena meaningful’, involves ‘a selection from the

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totality of the unreflected on’ and is a means of ‘actively construct[ing] reality in new ways’ (ibid.), all of which suggest that it is indeed personal narratives that are being constructed here, even if they remain vague and crudely articulated. While Riessman’s example of a walk along a beach contrasts abruptly with the experiences of those in Beslan and inside School No. 1 during the siege, the construction of reality is the same. It is in the telling of these personal narratives (level two in Riessman’s model) that opportunities for co-construction and consensus arise, as other individuals interact with and respond to the narrative. Factors such as to whom the story is told – or indeed not told, and there are several indications that opportunities for former hostages to speak to journalists were repeatedly restricted – in what situation and for what reason(s), all influence the co-authoring process and, crucially, considerations of power must be taken into account when determining the extent to which a narrative becomes co-opted rather than co-authored. Again, Riessman’s example of a dinner-party setting, where the interested promptings and questions from friends and colleagues refashion her personal narrative of the beach walk, is in stark contrast to the encounters of traumatised hostages and distraught eyewitnesses with journalists, police, politicians, members of the FSB, psychologists and medics on the streets of Beslan. At Riessman’s dinner party, it can be assumed that all those sitting around the table are more or less equally able to contribute to the co-construction and refashioning of Riessman’s beach narrative, whereas the power relationship between, for example, reporters and eyewitnesses is far from equal (Scollon 1998). ‘Transcribing’ the experience is the third level of representation in Riessman’s model, the point at which spoken language is transformed into written text, a process that includes all the associated theoretical choices of the transcriber. In the case of the eyewitnesses and surviving hostages in Beslan, this level may have included audio recordings, film footage, photographs and hurried note-taking. Whatever the processes, the interpretive practices of ‘transcribing’ are again ‘incomplete, partial, and selective’ (Riessman 1993: 11). Riessman’s fourth level of representing experience is ‘analysing’, and although her model focuses on the techniques of the researcher, it is still pertinent to journalists reporting the personal narratives of eyewitnesses. Riessman argues that ‘values, politics, and theoretical commitments enter once again’ into the picture as these narratives are woven into larger narratives. Finally, there is the level of ‘reading’, which itself can happen a number of times (by peers, editors, translators, who then return to the levels of analysing and transcribing) before the piece is published and released into the world.

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Thus, ‘personal narratives’ may be found at any of these levels of representation, and although Somers and Gibson’s and Baker’s definitions suggest the first level of attending, in their discussions they also emphasise the social and interpersonal nature of these personal narratives; in other words, the representation, (re)construction and circulation of personal narratives in all five levels of Riessman’s model. In this book, I use the term ‘personal narratives’ to refer specifically to the individual, communicated narratives of eyewitnesses and surviving hostages, and the study aims to analyse how these, through various levels of representation, are incorporated into the larger narratives of the texts and the socially elaborated narratives found therein. Shared or collective narratives These are narratives that are constructed collectively (and which also ultimately construct the collective group), through processes of collaboration, consensus and coercion. Although Baker refers to ‘shared’ or ‘collective narratives’ as ‘loose terms that tend to be used outside any specific model’ (2006: 33), the way she defines and discusses them suggests that, by using the terms to encompass other narrative types, shared or collective narratives can indeed be brought into the model. I use the terms ‘shared’, or ‘collective’, narratives to encompass local, societal, theoretical and meta-narratives, all of which are discussed in the following sections. Local narratives This category of narratives is additional to the original four found in Somers and Gibson (1994), Somers (1997) and Baker (2006), but may, in a sense, be thought of as the basis or ‘raw material’ of all the other subsequent categories. These are narratives relating particular events (and the particular actions of particular actors) in particular places at particular times. They may also be thought of as ‘bounded’ or ‘limited’ in the same way in which ‘local’ is used in medicine to describe something that is confined to a limited area or part. These are the narratives of everyday conversations, the replies to ‘what did you do today?’ and ‘what happened?’ They may be barely articulated, or they may be communicated at length, circulated, published, the stuff of arguments, disputes, newspaper stories, police reports, court transcripts, oral histories, journals, letters, emails, blog posts, texts, tweets, and so on. The hostage-taking in Beslan’s School No. 1 in September 2004 is considered to be a local narrative because it concerns specific times, places, people and events. Personal narratives might be conceptualised as the basis or ‘raw material’ of these local narratives. That they differ, contradict each other,

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seem incomplete, fragmented, or inconclusive, and might be poorly or powerfully or partially articulated, if communicated at all, reflects the complexity of our multivalent human experiences, the multifariousness of any single event. That in the co-authoring (or co-opting) process of becoming shared narratives they are selectively shaped and re-narrated to conform to other, inevitably more general, often reductionist narratives, reflects, I think, a widespread difficulty and/or reluctance to engage with the perplexities of problematic, complex, multi-narratives. Silberstein (2002), for example, examines how even in ‘live’ or ‘real time’ coverage, the personal narratives of eyewitnesses are selected, de-selected and framed, both verbally and non-verbally, to conform to the overall narrative of the narrators, or media agencies, reporting their stories. Similar examples from the data of this study are discussed in each chapter where the eyewitness accounts of former hostages are analysed. Societal narratives The second type of narrative in the original model is ‘public’ (Somers and Gibson 1994; Baker 2006) or ‘public, cultural and institutional’ (Somers 1997) narratives. Somers and Gibson define their public narratives as ‘those narratives attached to cultural and institutional formations larger than the single individual’ (1994: 62). This is a broad definition, which seems more appropriate for the inclusive category of shared or collective narratives, yet the examples Somers and Gibson give indicate that they are specifically concerned here with narratives circulating and operating in the units and institutions of society, ‘however local or grand, micro or macro’ (ibid.); hence the term ‘societal narratives’, which I use here. Somers and Gibson (1994) and Somers (1997) include in this category the narratives of the family, the workplace, church, media, government and nation, to which Baker (2006) adds advertising, cinema, political activism, literature and a society’s literary system. To the four types of narrative in the original typology, Boéri adds professional narratives, ‘stories and explanations that professionals elaborate for themselves and others about the nature and ethos of their activity’ (2008: 26), which could also be included here as examples of societal narratives. Others can be found in discourse that refers to narratives without any specifi c references to narrative theory as such. Russell, for example, in his study of Russo- Chechen conflict discusses the notion of ‘cultural narrative’, ‘[t]he collective “folk” memory of a people, commemorating its victories, tragedies, heroes and villains’ (2007: 17). Tölölyan (1987) discusses ‘projected narratives’ and the national and familial narratives that imbue Armenian diaspora cultures. Other examples are ‘national

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liberation narratives’ (Cromer 2006), ‘resistance’ and ‘mobilisational’ narratives (Hart 1992). The term ‘societal narratives’ adopted here avoids possible confusion arising from the term ‘public’ narratives, because not all of these societal narratives will necessarily be public, that is, in the public domain. Family narratives are usually unlikely to be public, unless, of course, the family comes under particular public scrutiny, and it is also often the case that social institutions, private companies, religious groups and government agencies will have, alongside their public narratives, narratives which they prefer to keep out of the public domain. ‘Leaked’ information that finds its way onto the front pages of newspapers could be said to be one or more societal narratives that were never or not yet intended to be public. ‘Public narratives’ is the term I use to indicate (any) narratives that circulate in the public sphere. Somers and Gibson acknowledge that the units and institutions of society range from the local or the micro (family, workplace, local church) to the grand or the macro (media, government and nation), yet they make no distinction between them, nor comment on the way local and grand, micro and macro might interact. Perhaps, though, the local and micro institutions and the societal narratives attached to them might be seen as feeding into the societal narratives of larger social units and institutions, comparable to the way personal narratives might be conceptualised as the ‘raw material’ of local narratives, and the way local narratives might be conceptualised as the ‘raw material’ of societal narratives. Somers offers ‘stories about American social mobility’ (1997: 85) as an example of a public (societal) narrative, yet it could be argued that, in fact, it is the local narratives about American social mobility that give rise to the societal narrative of American social mobility. The popular novels of the prolific North American author, Horatio Alger (1832–99), for example, with their stories of various heroes and heroines overcoming poverty and tribulation through hard work and honest living, arguably contributed directly to creating the narrative of the American ‘rags to riches’ Dream. Societal narratives, as they are picked up and elaborated by larger units of society, are commonly simplified, reduced, distilled or streamlined versions of a selection of local narratives. Most of Horatio Alger’s heroes end up not wealthy at all, but simply with steady jobs and stable personal lives. When events in Chechnya and the North Caucasus are reported in the press, articles commonly include a brief narrative that attempts to encapsulate events of the past decade or more. Some examples:

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Chechnya and the neighboring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia are plagued by violence, much of it seen as a spillover from Chechnya’s two wars. Major fighting in Chechnya died down years ago, but police and soldiers still come under small hit-and-run attacks.10 Moscow fought two wars against separatists and eventually tamed Chechnya by allowing rebels from a clan that switched sides to take over the local government. But the insurgency is on the rise again, fuelled by poverty and corruption.11 Pyatigorsk is the capital of Russia’s North Caucasus Federal District, which includes the volatile republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, where terrorist attacks and militant clashes are common.12 The pro-Kremlin authorities in Ingushetia, like other mainly Muslim regions of Russia’s Northern Caucasus, have been seeking to quell an Islamist insurgency over the past years that has claimed scores of lives. The roots of the conflict go back to the wars fought in neighbouring Chechnya in the past decade.13 Chechnya, an impoverished republic in the North Caucasus, has been plagued by violence since two separatist wars with Russia.14

These narratives oversimplify events in the North Caucasus by removing the protracted complexities of conflict in the region, yet it seems that they do so inevitably. It is impossible to recall all of the details all of the time, and anything recalled will unavoidably be summarised. Bennett and Edelman argue that, while they are not inherently destined to do so, more often than not, selection and omission lead to the elaboration and circulation of simplified ‘stock political plots and narratives’, ‘formulaic stories’ and ‘stereotypical political plots that bring old and simplistic formulas to bear on new and complex problems’ (1985: 157). War and violent conflict, political, ethnic, social, economic and geopolitical issues are fraught with ambiguity, specificity and uncertainty. Yet these are lost in the reductionist narratives which become divorced from the local narratives that originally generated them and which are reiterated by leaders and elites and in global media because of constraints on time, space and resources and the uncritical acceptance of prevailing norms, but also through ignorance, lazy or self-censoring journalism, and by those who prefer the reductionist narratives to the awkward details (Bhatia 2005). Issues become polarised, choices are presented as ‘either/or’, information gaps are filled by prejudices, and points of contestation and conflict become so ossified that there is little, if any, basis for accountability, justice and (re)conciliation.

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Independent media sites like Inter Press Service, Indymedia, Axis of Logic, Dissident Voice, Institute for Public Accuracy, The Institute for War and Peace Reporting and Open Democracy have arisen across the globe in an effort to provide some of these unfamiliar and ambiguous details. With today’s speed of communications and continuous output, the policies and approaches of such sites may well collectively be in a position to challenge the formats and conventions of mainstream news channels. The problem lies in whether alternative media can themselves avoid the lure of their own stock political narratives. Kavkazcenter, for example, appears unable or unwilling to avoid consistently characterising Russians as kafiry (infidels or unbelievers) and Chechens in the Moscow-backed government and armed forces as munafiki (hypocrites), puppets, marionettes, traitors, and so on, characterisations as firmly entrenched as the Russian government’s characterisations of all Chechen fighters, separatists and members of the resistance as terrorists. The polarisation of the conflicting and contested narratives is simply reinforced. Kavkazcenter offers no true alternative to the stalemate of persistent violence in the North Caucasus. It is, of course, an extreme example, but one that serves to illustrate that in itself, the increase of alternative, independent and oppositional media outlets is no guarantee of ‘new departures’ and ‘softening traditional lines of conflict’ (Bennett and Edelman 1985: 158). Activist groups from Beslan have set up websites in order to collect, preserve and publish personal and local narratives from Beslan in the hope of contributing to the larger societal narratives elaborated around the attack. Deeply unhappy and dissatisfied with government action and responses in regard to the hostage crisis, the Pravda Beslana (Truth of Beslan) site was ‘created to collect all factual materials connected with the tragedy’.15 It includes, for example, the scanned copies and complete texts of the notes from the hostage-takers delivered to operational headquarters during the siege; verbatim reports of State Duma sessions and meetings between members of Pravda Beslana and government officials; open letters, statements and appeals from residents of Beslan to various officials; the full texts of the North Ossetian parliamentary report, the Savelev report and the Torshin report, along with related interviews, press reports, transcripts and analyses, texts and documents from related court cases, medical reports and C.J. Chivers’ short story, ‘School’, in English16 and Russian translation. It also includes photographs and amateur video footage taken during and after the siege, and satellite photographs of the school and surrounding areas. Voice of Beslan17 regularly posts letters, appeals, and news of meetings and direct action as its members continue to campaign for justice and assistance.

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Another site, set up by The Mothers of Beslan Association of Victims of Terrorist Attacks,18 also publishes news, open letters, and details of official reports and legal proceedings, but, in addition, it contains material of a much more personal nature collected in memory of those who died and in celebration of their lives. Here are not just the photographs, names and dates of birth of everyone who died, but the intimate memorial galleries of eulogies, poems, letters, family photographs, children’s drawings and schoolwork, messages of sorrow and condolence. The site also contains photographs taken both inside and outside the school during and after the siege, photographs of wounded and surviving hostages, bodies of hostages, of hostage-takers and funerals of the victims. By gathering together these personal and local narratives – stories of children, families, friends, colleagues and neighbours, all centred around particular actors caught up in this specific attack – these sites, and others like them (such as Nord-Ost.org dedicated to the remembrance of those killed in the 2002 Moscow theatre siege), hope to contest the oversimplified public narratives of the attack that reduce it to a conflict between good and evil in ‘the international war on terror(ism)’, or the consequences of genocidal aggression between one nation and another, or even just the inevitable bad luck of living in a ‘volatile’, ‘impoverished’, ‘mainly Muslim’ region ‘plagued by violence’, as the North Caucasus are routinely described in the press. Societal narratives can be successfully contested, as Baker demonstrates in her discussion of Nelson Mandela’s re-characterisation from terrorist to ‘a symbol of resistance [and] an international hero’ (2006:  34), leading to his release from prison in 1990, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, his election to the post of president in 1994 and continual acclaim as ‘a beacon for the global community, and for all who work for democracy, justice and reconciliation’.19 Such processes invariably involve changes in the distribution of power, so attempts to control them are not surprising. When, after several delays, the final draft of the report on the Beslan tragedy from the official parliamentary commission chaired by Aleksandr Torshin was eventually released on Friday evening, 22 December 2006 (exonerating all but a few local authorities and contradicting several claims and figures found in earlier investigations), it was not published but was simply read aloud to the lower house of the State Duma. Marina Litvinovich, journalist and chief editor of the Pravda Beslana website, comments on the release: Nobody was invited to the presentation of the report, neither journalists, nor victims, nor hostages, nor relatives. Everything is being done in a hurry

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and in secret. On the eve of the holidays, on a Friday, so that nobody even noticed what was happening. Moreover, after the report, [it turned out that] the Federation Council had already voted to close the activities of the commission on the investigation of the terrorist act in Beslan. That is to say, for the Federation Council, the issue is closed.20

The Torshin report was presented as the Russian government’s final word, the public societal narrative on Beslan. With the issue considered closed and the report deliberatly avoiding the scrutiny of the public arena, its authors seem to be hoping that their societal narrative will not be seriously undermined by other parties. Theoretical narratives The third type of narrative in Somers and Gibson’s (1994) model is conceptual narrativity, expanded by Somers (1997) into conceptual/ analytical/sociological narrativity and defi ned as ‘the concepts and explanations that we construct as social researchers’ (1997: 85). Baker extends the category to include ‘disciplinary narratives in any field of study’ (2006: 39), and broadens the defi nition to ‘the stories and explanations that scholars in any fi eld elaborate for themselves and others about their object of inquiry’ (ibid.). Reconceptualising the category as theoreti-cal narratives, to include any narratives of theory, moves the category beyond the privileged confi nes of academia (see Baker 2006: 174n11) and focuses on the act of theorising that these narratives involve. Baker gives several examples of such narratives that have had ‘considerable impact beyond their disciplinary boundaries’ (2006: 40), including Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations (1993, 1996). John Russell discusses a number of ways in which ‘the popularisation of the notion of the “clash of civilisations”’ (2007: 18) has had an impact on the ongoing violent conflict in Chechnya and the North Caucasus. He argues that, coinciding with a Chechen shift towards Shari’a law, the rise of traditional violent Chechen practices ‘perceived by the modern world as medieval, barbaric and evil’ (2007: 37), and Russian state media restrictions allowing the reporting of only the ‘terrorist spectaculars’ of the Second Chechen War, this theoretical narrative of a ‘clash of civilisations’ – also picked up by the Russian press and resonating with Russian colonial narratives of bringing civilisation to the savage mountain tribes of the Caucasus (Ram 1999) – made it easy for the Putin regime to fortuitously cast itself as on the ‘right’ side and Chechens on the ‘wrong’ side of the so-called clash, and to secure international support for this narrative position. Somers argues that theoretical (what she calls ‘conceptual’) narra-

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tives necessarily include abstract notions, such as ‘social forces’ (1997: 85), but that other analytical categories, such as ‘society’, ‘actor’ and ‘culture’ have also been ‘intentionally abstracted from their historicity and concrete relationships’ (1997: 86), thus divorcing theorising from the particular personal and societal narratives that intersect with other social forces and inform the lives of actors. ‘The conceptual challenge that narrativity poses’, Somers argues, ‘is to develop a social analytic vocabulary that can retain its theoretical character yet still accommodate the contention that social life, social organisations, social actions, and social identities are narratively constructed’ (ibid.). Thus, with reference to the ‘particular–general’ continuum illustrated in Figure 1, theoretical narratives are the point at which the relationships between particular and general narratives become problematic. How can theory remain grounded in the specific narratives that inform it? How indeed, and surely this is the heart of the matter. The local, particular and concrete – what Jameson, in his introduction to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, calls ‘the vitality of small narrative units at work everywhere locally’ (Lyotard 1984: xi) – and the larger, abstract and generalised must be in constant and dynamic interaction with each other. As in bush craft, there are no shortcuts. For it is the ease with which the general can become detached from the specific that allows theories such as Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ to be (mis)appropriated across and beyond discourses (Baker 2006). MacIntyre also reflects on the hazardous relationship between particularity and generality: [I]t is in moving forward from such particularity that the search for the good, the universal, consists. Yet particularity can never be simply left behind or obliterated. The notion of escaping from it into a realm of entirely universal maxims which belong to man as such . . . is an illusion and an illusion with painful consequences. When men and women identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too completely with the cause of some universal principle, they usually behave worse than they would otherwise do. (1981: 221)

Meta-narrative The fourth type of narrativity in Somers and Gibson’s (1994) and Somers’ (1997) typology is meta-narrativity, a term they use to refer to ‘the master narratives in which we are embedded as contemporary actors in history’ (Somers 1997: 86). In place of a precise definition, these master narratives are described as the ‘epic dramas of our time’ and ‘progressive narratives of teleological unfolding’, with Capitalism vs. Communism, the Individual vs. Society and Barbarism/Nature vs. Civility given as examples of the former, and Marxism and the Triumph

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of Class Struggle and The Rise of Islam as examples of the latter. Baker, also using the terms meta- and master narrative interchangeably, cites Bourdieu’s ‘myth’ of globalisation and the narrative of economic rationality, the Cold War, the ‘War on Terror’ and the Holocaust as further examples (2006: 44–6). Jackson (2005) suggests that metanarratives are ‘historical analogies’ (2005: 40) used to explain current events and, although he does not define the term, identifies es four such ‘meta- narratives’ that the Bush administration deliberately connected discur-sively to the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the Cold War, civilisation versus barbarism, and globalisation. What makes these narratives ‘meta-narratives’, and how might the term be more accurately defined? Baker suggests that it is a (societal) narrative’s persistence across time and space resulting in its pervasive influence and impact on large numbers of people that qualifies it as a meta-narrative. How this comes about, Baker speculates, might be largely attributed to the economic and political dominance of the community in which the narrative is originally elaborated, particularly in the case of political meta-narratives such as the Cold War and the ‘War on Terror(ism)’,21 which are essentially inventions by the political elite of the United States. This is arguably true not only for political metanarratives, but also for others such as the ‘civilisation versus barbarism’ meta-narrative, or those found in and elaborated by world religions.22 Power and authority need not always be directly related to economic and political dominance, but historically there have always been dynamically close and complex relationships operating between them all. The widespread currency of meta-narratives is achieved not only through the power and authority of those who elaborate and promote them, but through the power of the story itself. While Baker is careful to distinguish between master or meta-narratives and ‘masterplots’, defined by Abbott as ‘stories that we tell over and over in myriad forms and that connect vitally with our deepest values, wishes, and fears’ (2002: 42), I would also argue that the success of a metanarrative depends on the rhetorical power, or the ‘enormous emotional capital’ of the masterplot that ‘undergirds’ it (ibid.). Abbott argues that much of the power of these masterplots is in ‘their moral force’, creating as they do a world ‘in which good and evil are clearly identifi able, and in which blame can fall squarely on one party or another’ (2002: 44–5). All of the meta- narratives given as examples above can be explored as elabo-rations of extremely compelling masterplots, compositions of fear and promise, which are capable of captivating the emotions of communities and societies in a far more convincing manner than the rationalities

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and reasoning of a dispassionate mind (Jamieson and Waldman 2002; Westen 2007). Part of the appeal of these meta-narratives and the masterplots that bolster them is the recurring, often stereotypical, characterisation of actors using the basic binary structures inherent in language, where oppositional terms imply the valuing of one term and the devaluing of the other. When we are encouraged to identify ourselves with actors in a meta-narrative, these are inevitably characterised as positive and the ‘other’ actors are characterised as negative. In the construction of the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative around the attacks on 11 September 2001, Jackson (2005) demonstrates the way the perpetrators of the attacks were persistently characterised in the political discourse of the Bush administration as barbaric, mad, treacherous, evil, alien and inhuman, while North Americans were characterised as good, generous, valuing freedom and human rights, peaceful, heroic, innocent and united. Even the phrase ‘war on terror(ism)’ implies that the ‘war’ is a ‘good war’, justified, legal and necessary in a way that terrorism can never be. In the official responses from governments and religious leaders around the world to the attack in Beslan (reported by RIANovosti and analysed in Chapter 2), the hostage-takers are repeatedly characterised as barbaric and odious, fanatics and monsters (нелюди), whose evil, inhuman, unprecedented attack placed them beyond, and in opposition to, all human and religious morals and values. In contrast, their victims (anybody not characterised as a terrorist, from the children, the hostages, the relatives and families of those who died, to the Russian people (народ), government and president) are always innocent, courageous, dignified, compassionate, heroic and humane, and are offered sympathy, solidarity and support. Reinforcing the characterisation of ourselves (the good) by so thoroughly uglifying and dehumanising the other23 removes from us any onus of self-scrutiny, as seen in official Russian outrage at the suggestion that the Russian government offer an explanation of how the tragedy at Beslan occurred (see Chapter 2), and negates the need to consider the actual human and political rights, grievances and demands of the other.24 A key, defining feature of meta-narratives is the abstract quality of their elements. That is, like theoretical narratives, they become detached from the specific time and location from which they began. Somers and Gibson (1994) and Somers (1997) discuss at length the difficulties of social theory in accounting for social action, difficulties which they attribute to the abstract concepts – class, society, social actors, social forces, tradition and modernity – found at the core of the classical Western meta-narrative of modernisation which was deeply encoded at

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the time in the emerging social theory. In Baker’s discussion of Jeffrey Alexander’s study of the Holocaust meta-narrative, the suggestion is that ‘any narrative restricted to a specific and situated set of events cannot turn into a meta-narrative’ (2006: 46). Alexander’s study shows how in the coding, weighting and narrating of events, it is the further and sustained move from specifics to abstractions that enables a public societal narrative to become a meta-narrative. The war-time atrocities disclosed with the liberation of Buchenwald and other camps became ‘a unique, historically unprecedented event, [understood] as evil on a scale that had never occurred before’ (Alexander 2002: 23). The mass murder of Jewish people is no longer interpreted as a ‘part of the Nazi scheme of world domination’ but as a ‘mysterious’ and ‘inexplicable’ ‘sacred evil’ (ibid.). Similarly, in the official responses to the terrorist attacks committed in the United States on 11 September 2001, from which the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative is elaborated, a specific set of events is very quickly inflated into abstractions. At 9.30 that morning, President Bush stated that ‘[t]wo airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center’, and described the events as ‘an apparent terrorist attack on our country’.25 By evening, these same events had become ‘evil, despicable acts of terror’, which were attacks on ‘our way of life’, ‘our very freedom’26 and ‘an assault on the security and the freedom of every American citizen’.27 The condemnations of the attacks from Congress and the condolences and assistance offered the president that day by world leaders were thus interpreted and appropriate as a unified response of solidarity and alliance prepared ‘to win the war against terrorism’.28 On 20 September, President Bush described the attacks as ‘an act of war against our country’ committed by ‘enemies of freedom’. He also expanded the war to the rest of the world: This is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.29

Abstract concepts such as evil, freedom, unity, terror, security and international community, whose definitions in the media and political rhetoric are vague, tautologically argued or simply assumed, are routinely built into the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative. Pierre Bourdieu calls the abstract words that make up the ‘Globalisation’ myth euphemisms (1998: 31), and George Orwell, in his critique ‘Politics and the English Language’, deems words such as democracy, freedom, patriotic and justice simply meaningless. Each of them has several different meanings,

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he argues, ‘which cannot be reconciled with one another’ and they are often used dishonestly when ‘the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different’ (1953: 91). Edward Said (1981/1997) argues that North American media and scholarly discourse on Islam have failed to precisely define the terms fundamentalism, radicalism or extremism, and that the term Islam itself is an abstraction, questionable in its usefulness as a concept for understanding the (very many) particular peoples and countries to which it is so commonly applied. The word ‘terrorism’, he writes, is the vaguest and yet for that reason the most precise of concepts . . . The very indiscriminateness of terrorism, actual and described, its tautological and circular character, is anti-narrative. Sequence, the logic of cause and effect as between oppressors and victims, opposing pressures – all these vanish inside an enveloping cloud called ‘terrorism’. (1984: 36–7)

It is this extraction of abstract and ambiguous concepts from personal, local and societal narratives that gives them ‘the potential for universal application’ (Fisher 1997: 323) and so enables them to be constructed and reconstructed as broad, encompassing meta-narratives, which are then sustained and promoted by the channels of authority and political and economic power. This process, whereby a particular narrative becomes separated from its specific time and location as explicit language is replaced with abstract language, is evident in the international responses and condolences generated in the wake of the Beslan hostage crisis and reported so consistently by RIA-Novosti (see Chapter 2). Ironically, perhaps, the abstractions and ambiguities of the ‘war on terror(ism)’ mean that the meta-narrative itself is ambiguous, suggesting common ground between those who use it even when there is little common ground to be found.30 While US and Russian officials both use it to justify their military, domestic and foreign policies, Jackson’s (2005) thorough critical discourse analysis of the rhetoric of the Bush administration after the 11 September 2001 attacks and the subsequent military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrates how that particular ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative is elaborated and reinforced by references to other cultural and political narratives that resonate with the US public, but that would have almost the opposite effect on the Russian public. References to the Cold War, for example, are used to evoke the scale of the threat, the ‘firm moral purpose’ necessary for the struggle, and assurance that America ‘will ultimately triumph over terrorism in the same way it triumphed over communism’ (Jackson 2005:  46). In contrast, President Putin, in his televised address to the nation on 4 September 2004, recalls the ‘many tragic pages and difficult

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events’ in Russia’s history, including the ‘collapse of a vast, great state’ that left the heart of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, vulnerable to attacks by terrorists who consider themselves ‘stronger than us’. Russian officials are only too aware of the discrepancies between their ‘war on terror(ism)’ narrative and others in circulation. In their version of the meta-narrative, Akhmed Zakaev and Ilias Akhmadov, for example, are characterised not as Chechen-Ichkerian ministers but as terrorists, while the same people have been granted political asylum by Britain and the US. As we will see in Chapter 2, the Russian authorities call the discrepancies ‘double standards’ and are repeatedly aggrieved and outraged when their version is not accepted. A further defining characteristic of meta-narratives, Baker suggests, might be their ‘sense of inevitability or inescapability’ (2006: 45), the very thing that fuels postmodern objections to the idea that ‘there are’ mega-plots, grand, meta- and master narratives. Lyotard argues that ‘the grand narrative has lost its credibility’ (1984: 37) along with its ‘unifying and legitimating power’ (1984: 38). This view, however, fails to fully take into account the purely constructed character of meta-narratives and the way they achieve their ‘considerable temporal and geographical spread’ (Baker 2006: 168) not only through the economic and sociopolitical dominance of the groups that elaborate them, the rhetorical power and appeal of their underlying masterplots and the potential for universal, ambiguous application on account of their abstract language, but through the passive cooperation and active participation of politicians, journalists, intellectuals, business people, religious leaders, public figures and ordinary citizens. ‘Everywhere we hear it said, all day long,’ says Bourdieu (1998: 29), until the meta-narrative presents itself as selfevident with no alternative, a ‘permanent, insidious imposition, which produces, through impregnation, a real belief’ (ibid.). Could it be premature to call the ‘war on terror(ism)’ a metanarrative? Its geographical breadth is indeed considerable. Among the international responses to the Beslan hostage-taking reported by RIANovosti, for example, twenty-seven different countries and international organisations explicitly expressed their support in the ‘fight against terrorism’. Jackson argues that ‘the “war on terrorism” is more than just a passing phase of American foreign policy’: it is actually the most profound conflict since the cold war and it has already made an indelible mark on both international relations and the domestic politics of most countries. Its effects are horizontal and vertical, penetrating outwards towards other states and inwards into the belly of domestic politics. Its impacts can be clearly seen in security, policing,

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foreign policy, the legislative process, immigration, banking, travel, the media, race relations, popular culture, education, health and sport – to name just a few. Clearly no country or people can remain immune from its effects. (2005: 3)

Even after the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the ‘ongoing war on terror is as strong as ever’, Jackson argues, and ‘is now a materially and politically embedded structure of world politics that reproduces itself’.31 Yet this narrative is also very new, especially when compared with other meta-narratives that have endured for centuries or even millennia. It can be discursively traced from the George W. Bush presidency back to the Clinton and Reagan administrations, but it is still only decades old. Bennett and Edelman (1985) use words such as ‘stock’, ‘formulaic’, ‘stereotypical’ and ‘standard’ to describe recurring political narratives that simplify and polarise complex problems and reiterate selective information until it comes to be thought of as social truth. These words also characterise the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror(ism)’, with its uncompromising dualism (‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’), its simplifications (‘the only way to defeat terrorism . . . is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows’) and its repetitions (‘We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail’),32 suggesting that, rather than a meta-narrative, it is merely an unimaginative stock political narrative. The aggressive means of its proliferation and the rapidity with which it has gained currency prompt Baker to call it a ‘super-narrative’ (2006: 45), so perhaps it is, at best, a stock political super-narrative, maybe even a meganarrative, and by exposing it as such, by refusing to participate in its rhetoric, we can deprive it of its sense of inevitability. Meta-narratives, like all narratives, can be contested. Events can be renamed, and actors can be particularised and re-characterised. There are always alternatives. ‘The wars in the Caucasus,’ writes Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘were neither inevitable nor necessary. Things could have been otherwise’ (2009b: 31). As Sir Ken MacDonald, head of the Crown Prosecution Service in the UK, told members of the Criminal Bar Association: London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, ‘soldiers’. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a ‘war on terror’, just as there can be no such thing as a ‘war on drugs’. The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.33

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Approaching text: a narratological foundation Narratology, or ‘the systematic study of narrative’ (Abbott 2002: 193), has traditionally been concerned with the study of fairy tales (Propp 1968), fiction and literature (Barthes 1966; Scholes and Kellog 1966; Genette 1972/1980; Prince 1982, 1988; Rimmon-Kenan 1983), oral social expression (Labov 1972) and cinema (Chatman 1978). While there is little reference to narratology in the literature exploring narrative from a sociological perspective – Baker (2006), for example, makes a clear distinction between narratology and her own methodology – it does, in fact, provide terms and concepts useful for describing and conceptualising the narratives that are the focus of sociological approaches, narratives that are ‘diffuse, amorphous configurations’ (Baker 2006: 4) and not necessarily realised in individual texts. Both narratological and sociological strands of narrative theory are surely enriched by a socio-narrative approach that combines the two (Shen 2005), for, as narratology can supply a coherent, structuralist inventory of definitions and concepts for analysing narratives – ‘not . . . to hold the truth of their object; rather to make it accessible’ (Bal 2009: 3), conversely, sociological (and other) approaches that investigate ways in which narratives develop and operate in society might be considered constructive responses to what Bal has called ‘the major challenge posed to narratology: that of, precisely, the social embedding of narrative – in other words, its relationship to reality’ (2009: 189). Text–fabula–story A multiple, or conceptually layered, defi nition of narrative is common in narratology. Genette, for example, separates out three different mean-ings of the word ‘narrative’ (Fr. récit). Narrative discourse (récit) is ‘the narrative statement, the oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or series of events’ (1972/1980: 25). Prince describes this narrative discourse as ‘the “how” of a narrative as opposed to its “what”’ (1988: 21). It also corresponds to the Russian formalists’ sjužet, to Aristotle’s mythos (or muthos) and may further be referred to as the plot (1988: 71). Genette’s ‘story’ (histoire) refers to ‘the succession of events, real or fi ctitious that are the subject of this discourse’ (1972/1980: 25). This is ‘the “what” of narrative as opposed to its “how”’ (Prince 1988:91) and corresponds in the literature to the fabula of the Russian formalists. Narrating (narration), according to Genette, refers to ‘the event that consists of someone recounting something’ (1972/1980: 26), also called narration in the literature. The terminology is problematic, varying as it does from school to school and between languages. In English, for example, ‘plot’ is

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commonly used to refer not to the narrative discourse but to the story, which in turn is often used to refer to narrative, and indeed these two, narrative and story, are often used interchangeably. What is common to all narratologists and narrative theorists, however, is the fundamental premise of a conceptual distinction between story and ‘story told’, between narrative content and narrative form, the signified and the signifier, between the events or elements of a narrative and the story or narrative itself which always mediates the events. Mieke Bal also distinguishes between three conceptual layers, but in such a way as to clarify some of this terminological imprecision. I find her ‘text, story, and fabula’ to be useful distinctions, even as separating them out ‘does not mean that these layers “exist” independently of one another. They do not’ (Bal 2009: 7). All we have before us are the texts, language signs on screen or paper, and to look at the same thing as text, story and fabula is to simply look more than once, each time ‘from a certain, specific angle’ (Bal 2009: 75). For Bal, Genette’s ‘narrative discourse’ (the narrative statement) and ‘narrating’ (the event of someone recounting something) are effectively the same thing: the narrative text. Bal defi nes ‘text’ as ‘a finite, structured whole composed of language signs’34 and a ‘narrative text’ as ‘a text in which an agent conveys to an addressee (“tells” the reader) a story in a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a combination thereof’ (2009: 5). The reportage analysed in this book, even though somewhat arbitrarily selected – it could have included material published in the days following the 4 and 5 of September 2004 – is considered to be a collection of narrative texts. Critical to the analysis of narrative is the concept of the narrator, the agent that relates or tells the story in a particular medium, for, as Bal argues, ‘[t]he identity of the narrator, the degree to which and the manner in which that identity is indicated in the text, and the choices that are implied lend the text its specific character’ (2009: 18). Not to be confused with the author, or even the ‘implied author’ (Bal 2009: 17) of a narrative text, Bal is careful to define the narrator as ‘the (linguistic, visual, cinematic) subject, a function and not a person, which expresses itself in the language that constitutes the text’ (2009: 15). This linguistic subject may, or may not, correspond to a ‘real’ narrator on the ground functioning in ‘real’ time. The correspondent reporting from the scene of events in Beslan, for example, who narrates so clearly in Caucasian Knot’s Russian-language narrative on 2 September 2004, does not correspond at all to the ‘real’ correspondent, who, in fact, had gone home on 1 September and did not return until 3 September (see Chapter 4). The narrative text, however, perhaps because of delays in posting and a

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lack of clear temporal markers within the text, relates a different story, the only one available to readers unless they are able to access other sources and interrogate the ‘real’ narrators involved in its construction. Bal also points out that a narrator does not relate continually. Whenever direct speech occurs in the text, it is as if the narrator temporarily transfers this function to one of the actors. When describing the text layer, it is thus important to ascertain who is doing the narrating. (2009: 9)

Bal calls the narrator’s text ‘primary’ to indicate the hierarchical connections between the narrative text as a whole ‘into which .  .  . other texts are embedded’ (2009: 57). These notions of narrator, primary text, temporary narrators and embedded texts are essential to my analysis and are used to structure the book both as a whole and its individual chapters. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are each devoted to a separate narrator, and within each chapter (including Chapter 5) the focus of discussion and analysis moves from each primary text to the temporary narrators and texts embedded in it. Bal’s third conceptual layer of narrative is fabula,35 which she defines as ‘a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors’ (2009: 5). An event is an action, an incident or something that happens; Bal defines it as ‘the transition from one state to another state’ (2009: 6). Events always take up time and occur somewhere, hence, Bal argues, ‘[e]vents, actors, time and location together constitute the material of a fabula’; she calls these elements (2009: 8).36 Each of the six narrative texts analysed in this study relates the hostagetaking in Beslan, yet each one differs in its inclusion and omission, or ‘selective appropriation’ (Somers and Gibson 1994; Somers 1997; Baker 2006), of all possible elements. What governs these choices? Some say it is the plot (Ricoeur 1981; Bruner 1991) or theme (Somers and Gibson 1994; Polkinghorne 1995) of a narrative, with its evaluative stance (White 1981; Ricoeur 1984; Somers and Gibson 1994) and pattern of causal emplotment (Somers and Gibson 1994; Baker 2006). Parts are selected and arranged in order to function in a story, which simultaneously determines the selection and arrangement of parts. Elements of a narrative are understood and interpreted in the light of the whole narrative and the whole narrative is understood and interpreted in the light of its constituent elements. This very plausible, rational and theoretical explanation of how narratives are constructed assumes a fairly generous sense of logic and open-mindedness on the part of the person constructing the narrative. In the three examples Baker uses to demonstrate the impossibility of

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constructing coherent narratives from a ‘patchwork of elements from different narratives’ (2006: 62), she offers the refl ections of individuals who show considerable understanding of the effect that introducing such elements would have on the original narrative. ‘There could be no simple importation of a Western divinity into a Melanesian religious landscape,’ Clifford writes in reference to Bible translation (1998: 689 as quoted in Baker 2006: 61), implying that either the notion of the Western divinity or the Melanesian religious landscape would have to change in order to accommodate such an importation. Baker’s quote from anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt implies that only by modifying ‘our language and categories’ can we possibly ‘contain the thought [and sense] of a primitive society’ (ibid., emphases added). Finally, in Baker’s example from the sciences, Kuhn acknowledges that attempting to import some ‘Aristotelian generalizations’ into a Newtonian theory of physics would result in ‘a language which contained such contradictions [that it] could not successfully deal with nature’ (1999: 36 as quoted in Baker 2006: 62), and by logical implication, then, would have to be abandoned. In all three examples, it was acknowledged that attempting to import an element or event which is essentially incompatible with the overall narrative would lead to one of three outcomes: a) it would be impossible, in which case the element would be modifi ed or rejected; b) it would result in changing the original or receiving narrative; or c) it would result in the construction of a narrative that was essentially incoherent and unworkable. Yet many narratives are so strong, so powerful, so cherished by, and useful for, those who adhere to them that abandonment is inconceivable and change resolutely resisted. In these cases, it is more likely that the ‘incompatible element’ will either be interpreted as threatening, provocative or false and so rejected, or interpreted in such a way as to enable it to be incorporated into the overriding narrative without damaging that narrative in any way. Such potent narratives might be any personal or shared narrative, and the most persistent are those in which a narrator (a person, group or nation) has invested heavily. Why has the Second Chechen War continued for so long? Why has it been waged with such violence and brutality? How can it be stopped? The answers to questions such as these are usually sought in the spheres of history, politics and socio-economics, but answers might also be found in the narratives elaborated by the major, and perhaps even minor, players involved.37 Why these narratives are so powerful is difficult to explain. Baker suggests that rather than plot or theme alone, it is ‘our location in time and space, and our exposure to a particular set of public, conceptual and meta narratives that shape our sense of significance’ (2006: 72) and hence

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govern selective appropriation. Bruner suggests two processes that work to create the illusion that narratives need no interpretation: narrative seduction, whereby skilled storytellers who ‘have the artifices of narrative reality construction so well masked that their telling pre-empts momentarily the possibility of any but a single interpretation – however bizarre it may be’ (1991: 9); and narrative banalisation, which functions when ‘we can take a narrative as so socially conventional, so well known, so in keeping with the canon, that we can assign it to some well-rehearsed and virtually automatic interpretive routine’ (ibid.).38 Another possibility is the desirability of the narrative proffered, a narrative that people want to be true, so much so that they come to believe (or at least act as if they believe) that the narrative must be true, and that it has no need of interpretation. Consider the appeal of a just and mighty god (or gods), or an economic or political system that rewards the righteous (us), punishes the evil (them) and vindicates the wronged. The seduction need not be, and usually is not, just a momentary illusion, as Bruner describes, but, through the consistent use of skill and artifice, and the magnetism of desirability, our inability to change our temporal and spatial location, or unwillingness to expose ourselves to other sets of narratives, can be much more durable. Bal’s second conceptual layer of narrative (presented here as the third) is story, defined as ‘the fabula . . . presented in a certain manner’ (2009: 5). The six primary narrative texts share common elements, yet differ in ‘the way in which these events are presented’ (Bal 1997: 6), resulting in very different stories. Elements can be attributed varying degrees of significance – Baker calls this ‘weighting’ (2006: 28) – for example, amplified through the inclusion of greater details, allotted a greater proportion of the whole narrative through repetition and reiteration, or interpreted ‘as crises of a particular magnitude or as turning points in the context of the overall narrative’ (Baker 2006: 68). The way elements are temporally and spatially related to each other is a regular means of making story from fabula. In any given narrative text, the chronological sequence of a fabula, which can normally be deduced from the laws and norms of everyday logic – Bal’s example is that ‘one cannot arrive in a place before one has set out to go there’ (2009: 79) – can, and often does, differ from the sequential ordering of events in a story. Bal calls these differences chronological deviations, or anachronies (Genette also uses ‘anachrony’), and argues that, [p]laying with sequential ordering is not just a literary convention; it is also a means of drawing attention to certain things, to emphasize, to bring about aesthetic or psychological effects, to show various interpretations of an event, to indicate the subtle difference between expectation and realization, and much else besides. (2009: 81)

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The same is true in a news narrative, where the chronological sequence of the fabula may be thought of as the real events occurring in real time, which the news reporter relates. The sequential ordering of the reporter’s story is likely to trace or reflect the chronological sequence of those real time events, particularly when a story is ‘live’ or when attempting to report events as they are happening, but it is also likely to be frequently interrupted in order to relate events that happened prior to those events. Bal calls such an interruption ‘retroversion’ (2009: 83).39 External retroversion occurs when the anachronic events related originally took place prior to the time span of the primary narrative and internal retroversion occurs when the anachronic events related took place within the time span of the primary narrative.40 Retroversions are a means of selectively appropriating elements from other narratives into the primary narrative text, and how far back in time the retroversion reaches can be highly significant. An external retroversion that has a long ‘distance’ (Bal 2009: 88) or ‘reach’ (Genette 1972/1980: 48), such as the recollection of hostilities between nations or ethnic groups that occurred hundreds of years ago, will place those hostilities and the current news story into a single narrative arc. In news reporting, there will always be internal retroversions of a sort, with temporal ‘gaps’ in the narrative ‘filled in’ as new information comes to light. RIA-Novosti’s first descriptions of the initial attack on School No. 1, for example, are reported over two hours after the story began and about three and a half hours after the attack occurred. This is because these anachronic descriptions come from fifteen people who hid in the boiler room during the attack and managed only later to escape. Media outlets will generally try to minimise the reach of these internal retroversions as much as possible and be instead ‘the first to break the news’. Arguably, the shorter the reach of the internal retroversion, the more significant the narrator considers the event or element. Repetitions, that is, when the sequential ordering of the events in a story is momentarily interrupted from tracing the chronological course of the fabula in order to re-narrate a prior event, are also an indication of the degree of significance placed on elements by the narrator, with those considered to be more significant more likely to be repeated more often. When both the reach of an internal retroversion is very short and the element is repeated, then it can be argued that the narrator considers such elements to be highly significant. Thus, the manner in which RIANovosti reports President Putin’s televised speech on the evening of 4 September, with updates every few minutes and sections of the speech repeated as well as the speech in its entirety posted twice, indicates that RIA-Novosti considers the speech and its contents to be highly signifi-

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cant. Other examples are the amount of detail reported by RIA-Novosti regarding Putin’s brief early morning visit to Beslan on 4 September, and also the two Il-76 Ministry of Emergency Situations airplanes that flew from Moscow to Beslan in the early hours of 4 September and then back to Moscow with six wounded children and their parents. If, in contrast, the reach of the internal retroversion is longer and cannot be accounted for by the lack of available information, then this is likely to indicate that the narrator does not deem the event to be of great significance. The apparent poisoning of Novaya Gazeta journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who was on her way to Beslan by plane, occurred on the evening of Wednesday, 1 September41 but was not reported by RIANovosti until 18:56 on Friday, 3 September, and then only indirectly through the disclaimer of the Karat aviation company. Similarly, the arrest of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist, Andrei Babitskii, in Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, took place on the morning of Thursday, 2 September but was not reported by RIA-Novosti until 17:45 on Friday, 3 September. His court appearance on Friday was only reported on the Saturday afternoon.42 Other ways in which story differs from fabula can be seen in the differences between an actor (an element) and a character (or similarly, the differences between a place and a space), that is, the effect that is created when the narrator provides an actor (or a place) with distinctive characteristics. Leonid Roshal, one of three people with whom the hostage-takers demand to meet, is an actor common to all three Russian primary narrative texts. On 1 September, Caucasian Knot describes him as the well-known paediatrician, ‘who in 2002 went to the hostages in the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow’, and reports his arrival at operation headquarters at Beslan later that day. RIA-Novosti describes Dr Roshal as ‘the well-known paediatrician’ who, in October 2002 took part in the release of the hostages seized by boeviki in the building of the Dubrovka theatre centre. The doctor conducted negotiations with the terrorists about the release of children, and about the relaying of food, water and medicines to the hostages.

RIA-Novosti follows his movements throughout the day, beginning with an interview in Moscow as he declares his readiness to fly to Beslan, his flight to Beslan, and his arrival and presence in operation headquarters. The interview and his arrival are also included in the RIA-Novosti English narrative (he is missing altogether from the Kavkazcenter and Caucasian Knot English narratives), where Roshal’s role in the Dubrovka theatre hostage crisis is described in glowing terms, using language that almost depicts ‘[t]he selfless physician’ as a compassionate,

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even Christ-like figure. Compare this excerpt from the English narrative with the back translation above. Notable differences in the text are underlined. Leonid Roshal appeared in the tragic limelight when he volunteered to negotiate in the Dubrovka Theatre plight in Moscow as terrorists took a full house hostage during a sensational musical in autumn 2002. At the risk of his own life, he was attending to the sick and interceded for the captives.

In contrast, Kavkazcenter simply describes Roshal as ‘a participant in the negotiations at Nord-Ost’. Rather than tracking his movements throughout the day, at 20:06, just a few minutes before RIA-Novosti reports his arrival in Beslan, Kavkazcenter reports Valerii Andreev, head of the FSB in North Ossetia, as saying that ‘at present, measures are being taken to search for Doctor Leonid Roshal in order to bring him to Beslan and continue the negotiating process,’ to which Kavkazcenter adds that ‘it is not quite clear why the FSB is stating that it is looking for Doctor Roshal when it is well known that Roshal is a member of [состоит в штате] the FSB.’ One actor, Leonid Roshal, is also three different characters: doctor, hero and secret police. An intratextual model for analysis What to do with text? While the six primary narrative texts (one Russian and one English for each of the three websites) are the basic units of analysis, it also became apparent that different texts are embedded within each primary narrative text. Separating these out created an ‘intratextual’ model that first differentiates between narrative and non-narrative material, and further differentiates the narrative material according to time and then place (see Figure 2). This model is used to compare and contrast the construction of the six primary narrative texts, and forms the structural basis for each analytical chapter. In the same way that single, integral narrative texts can include nonnarrative comments such as description or argument, each primary narrative text includes non-narrative material such as official statements and condemnations, letters of appeal, commentaries and opinion pieces.43 Bal argues that identifying such passages ‘often helps to assess the ideological or aesthetic thrust of a narrative’ (2009: 9) because it is often in the non-narrative comments ‘that ideological statements are made’ (2009: 31). This is not to say, Bal acknowledges, that the rest of the narrative is ‘innocent’ of ideology, on the contrary. The reason for examining these alternations is precisely to measure the difference between the text’s overt ideology, as stated in such comments,

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Primary narrative text

Non-narrative texts

Narrative texts

Anachronic (external retroversions)

Synchronal

Located beyond Beslan School No. 1

Located in or near Beslan School No. 1 (core narrative)

Figure 2 An intratextual model for analysis and its more hidden or naturalized ideology, as embodied in the narrative representations. (ibid.)

This is true of the primary narrative texts in this study, where nonnarrative comments are often quite explicit expressions of various opinions and allegations, which are embodied, to differing degrees, in the remaining narrative material. This narrative material can be categorised as either synchronal (occurring within the same time frame as the primary narrative text, that is, between the morning of Wednesday, 1 September and midnight on Saturday, 4 September 2004) or anachronic (occurring outside of the time frame of the primary narrative text). While all three news agencies consistently reported events in Beslan as they were unfolding, they also included narrative texts relating events, such as other hostage-takings, that happened before the attack on Beslan. Finally, all the synchronal narrative material within each primary narrative text is further categorised according to spatial position, that is, narratives that relate events occurring beyond Beslan’s School No. 1 and narratives that relate events occurring near or in Beslan’s School No. 1. The school in Beslan becomes the site of events that constitute what might be thought of as the core narrative, for without it, without those events, there would be no other material and no narrative texts. Yet access to this site is severely restricted; all three narrators are

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positioned outside of the school, and so the core narrative must instead be constructed from the events and elements that occur in its immediate vicinity. Thus, the nearby Palace of Culture and city administrative buildings where operation headquarters is established, the Palace of Culture garden square and the adjacent streets where relatives of the hostages and journalists gather, also become central sites of core events in the Beslan narratives. The boundaries, however, between the school itself and its immediate vicinity, are porous, and so allow the narrators indirect access to events occurring within the school: hostages escape, or are released, bringing with them their own narratives; they are sent to the boundary with messages to be delivered across the line; telephone connections are made; shooting can be heard; shots are fired across the border; former president of Ingushetia Ruslan Aushev walks in and out again; television images (of the school) reach inside the building and are watched by the hostage-takers. On the Friday, as the emergency personnel enter the school in order to bring out the dead, this boundary seems to collapse, with special forces firing and moving into the school, hostages fleeing into nearby apartment blocks or speeding off in cars to various hospitals, and hostage-takers escaping into those same apartment blocks and across the railway lines into other parts of the town. Yet the narrators remain outside the inner site of the school as the official cordon surrounding the school is pushed further back and remains in place. The cordon is also metaphorically enforced throughout the siege and its aftermath. Events occurring both in the inner site of the school and in the adjacent site of the immediate surrounds are mostly related to the narrators by officials rather than by ordinary people. The contents of messages sent by the hostage-takers across the boundary are not divulged and their demands are dismissed and ignored. Journalists interviewing residents on the streets are removed and are not permitted into hospitals to speak to surviving hostages. This physical and metaphorical cordon is reflected in the location of the events included in the RIA-Novosti Russian primary narrative text. On the first two days of the siege, less than half of each day’s posts report directly on the events unfolding in Beslan. On 3 September, when the physical cordon temporarily collapses, this becomes more than half of the day’s posts, but with the reestablishment of restrictions reverts to less than a quarter of the day’s posts on 4 September. Narrators and temporary narrators The narrator of each primary narrative text is the news agency that relates each story through the narrative texts posted on its website:

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RIA-Novosti, Kavkazcenter and Caucasian Knot. While all construct narrative texts from the events in Beslan, their narrative positions, and hence their narrative texts, are far from alike. In accordance with Bal’s description of the way narrators temporarily transfer the function of narrating to actors, direct speech occurs frequently in all of the primary narrative texts and in addition texts penned by commentators and texts attributed to other media sources are also included. All three narrators enlist several different temporary narrators – government officials, other media, experts, commentators, translators, correspondents and eyewitnesses44 – to contribute to the construction of their primary narrative texts, and the distinct narratives constructed by these three news agencies can partly be accounted for by identifying to whom each narrator temporarily passes the function of narrating and the manner in which this is done. This book investigates these differences and asks who may narrate and who may not narrate? How do narrators control or re-narrate their temporary narrators? Which potential narrators may choose not to narrate on specific occasions and what are the implications of this silence? Questions asked about narrators are essentially questions about authority and power, and concern issues of conflict, dominance, resistance and subversion. In addition to the examples that took place during the siege and immediately afterwards, which are discussed in the analysis, instances abound of the obstruction of potential narrators to relate the events of Beslan and others besides. Caucasian Knot correspondent Valerii Dzutsev, for example, who was also working at the time for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting, was investigated by police in February 2007 for alleged tax evasion and two of his office computers seized. After similar action was taken against Dzutsev’s successor, IWPR temporarily withdrew its operations in the North Caucasus.45 In January 2008, criminal charges of ‘extremism’ were brought against the Voice of Beslan, a grassroots non-governmental organisation (NGO) created by relatives of those who died in the school, for its appeal in 2005 to the US president, US Congress, European Union, European Parliament and editors of global mass media for a full investigation into the incident.46 To date, four cases have been brought against the Voice of Beslan, and the group was forcibly disbanded in December 2007 with another of the same name registered in its place.47 The charges of extremism were upheld in a local court in 2009 and the group included in an updated version (22 April 2010) of the ‘Federal List of Extremist Materials’ published by the Russian Ministry of Justice on 31 May 2010.48 Yet the concept of the narrator is little discussed in the literature on social narrativity. Bruner acknowledges, but does not explore in any

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depth, the power of ‘great storytellers’ to either relate a narrative so well as to create the illusion that their story needs no interpretation, or alternatively, to lead people ‘to see human happenings in a fresh way . . . in a way they had never before “noticed” or even dreamed’ (1991: 12). Somers and Gibson (1994), Somers (1997) and Baker (2006) discuss the concept of narrator only indirectly, in their considerations of personal (or ontological) and public narratives, and the construction of narratives by ‘social actors’, including individuals and social institutions. Conclusions This chapter began by discussing the main assumptions of the strand of narrative theory adopted as the conceptual framework of this study. A sociological approach to narrative (hence socio-narrative) regards narrative – the configuration of events and elements into a temporal, and often spatial, sequence or series – as the primary, if not the only, means by which human experience is made meaningful. Thus, the approach assumes a shift from representational to ontological narrativity, that is, it assumes that narratives do not merely represent, but constitute reality. The elements of these narratives are not confined to single texts, which is the working assumption of narratologists, but are drawn from the elements of life that surround us, including texts, which are elements themselves and which present elements of which we (can) have no direct experience. Crucial to understanding the significance and import of these narratives is the assumption that narratives are fundamentally linked to human agency and behaviour. We configure narratives not only to make meaning of human experience, but also to decide how to act, and then to explain, justify and legitimise our choices and actions. Thus, understanding narrative is key to understanding human behaviour and the means by which people and social institutions justify and legitimise that behaviour. To this end, the chapter then discussed a typology of narratives, based on a typology found in the literature but revised to highlight both differences between types of narratives and the ways in which they relate to each other. Personal narratives, or narratives that individuals construct about the self, are distinguished from shared or collective narratives, which are constructed collectively about the collective. These include local, societal, theoretical and meta-narratives, all of which can be public narratives, that is, circulating in the public domain. Finally, because close textual analysis forms the focus of this study, and because both sociological and narratological approaches might be enriched by a combined approach, relevant narratological terms and

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concepts were also discussed. Mieke Bal’s (2009) three conceptual layers of narrative – text, fabula and story – along with the notion of narrators and temporary narrators, were defined and explained, creating a conceptual model and providing lexical tools for data analysis and also a basis for reflection on ways in which ontological narratives are constructed. Thus, each news agency is defined as a narrator and the data are defined as a set of primary narrative texts, each of which includes several different types of embedded texts which can be separated out for analysis using an intratextual model. These primary narrative texts can be further analysed by investigating ways in which narrators select and re-narrate their temporary narrators, raising questions about power and the abilities of individuals and societal groups to elaborate their narratives in society. This model forms the basis for the analysis undertaken in the next four chapters, and while it focuses on close textual analysis, the investigation is firmly grounded in the sociological assumptions of socionarrative theory. Narratives exist and circulate not only as text but as the primary means of human engagement with, and consequent impact on, the personal, social, political and physical worlds in which we live.

Notes 1 See, for example, observations and studies on the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), such as Whitaker (2002, 2005, 2007), Baker (2005, 2006, 2010b) and Hijazi Al Sharif (2009). For a defence of MEMRI’s translations, see ‘Email Debate: Yigal Carmon and Brian Whitaker’, Guardian.co.uk, 28 January 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/ jan/28/israel2 [accessed 20 July 2011]. 2 See Taylor (1989), MacIntyre (1981), Somers and Gibson (1994), Whitebrook (2001) and Baker (2006, 2007). 3 See Barthes (1966), Kermode (1968/2000), Chatman (1978), White (1981, 1984, 1987), Mink (1966, 1970, 1978), and Bell (1990) for the former view and Bruner (1986, 1991), Carr (1986), Crites (1986), Fisher (1987/1989), Kerby (1991), MacIntyre (1981), Ricoeur (1979, 1981, 1984, 1985, 1988) and Polkinghorne (1988, 1995) for the latter. 4 See also White (1987) and Fisher (1987/1989). 5 See Abbott (2002: 6–11), Goodman (1980) and Bal (2009) for discussions on the narrative perception of images and paintings. 6 For these shared narratives, Hinchman and Hinchman use the term ‘cultural macronarratives’ (1997a: 121), as opposed to ‘our micronarratives’ (ibid.), but the concepts of micro and macro weaken the idea of the strong interdependence that operates between personal and shared narratives (MacIntyre 1981; Gergen and Gergen 1983; Somers and Gibson 1994; Whitebrook

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Beslan: six stories of the siege 2001; Baker 2006) and which is intended to be emphasised by the dual typology adopted here. While Somers and Gibson (1994), Somers (1997) and Baker (2006) use the term ‘ontological’, the word is problematic given its use in this book to distinguish ontological from representational narrativity. Furthermore, the notion of an ontologically stable and describable self is at odds with the dynamic nature of narratives and the ‘multiple, ambiguous, ephemeral or conflicting . . . identities with which they endow us’ (Somers 1997: 84). Because of similar problems with the concept of ‘self’, a term that can invoke the idea of a ‘substantial self or agent that exists ontologically prior to the particular acts of the human subject’ (Kerby 1991:4), such as the act of narrating, the expression ‘narratives of the self’, an alternative proposed by Baker (2006: 28), may be equally unsuitable. The term ‘personal narratives’, which Baker comes to use in her later work (2010b), also resonates with Hinchman and Hinchman’s definition of first-order narratives as ‘the personal stories we tell ourselves’ (1997b: xvii), although their second-order narratives, defined as those that ‘involve refl ection by a (usually) uninvolved spectator upon the doings and stories of participants in the events themselves’ (1997b: xvii), as in the case of historians narratively reconstructing the past, are something different again. Baker (2006: 174n1) suggests that this category overlaps to some extent with conceptual, or theoretical, narratives. See Baker (2006) for her discussion of ‘particularity’ as a feature of narrative. Baker’s understanding of framing as ‘an active strategy that implies agency and by means of which we consciously participate in the construction of reality’ (2006: 106) is that adopted in this study. See Baker (2006: 105–40) for her discussion of framing. ‘Policeman Killed in Attack in Capital of Restive Chechnya’, Associated Press, 24 January 2008, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chechnya-sl/ message/54519 [accessed 20 July 2011]. Maria Golovnina, ‘New “Chechen Rebel Leader” Is No Terrorist, Says Zakayev’, Reuters, 4 August 2010, http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia50606820100803 [accessed 20 July 2011]. ‘Police Operation Underway in Southern Russia after Recent Terrorist Attack’, RIA-Novosti, 18 August 2010, http://en.rian.ru/russia/ 20100818/160246865.html [accessed 20 July 2011]. ‘Russia Arrests Islamist Caucasus Rebel Leader, Takes Him to Moscow’, AFP/Moscow, 10 June 2010. Available at www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/ article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=367158&version=1&template_id=39& parent_id=21# [accessed 20 July 2011]. Monika Scislowska, ‘AP Interview: Chechen Hails Polish Court Decision’, Associated Press, 18 September 2010. Quoted from the English version of the site, which contains only a very small proportion of the material on the Russian site, www.pravdabeslana. ru [both accessed 20 July 2011]. First published in Esquire, 14 March 2007.

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17 www.golosbeslana.ru/index.htm [accessed 20 July 2011]. 18 www.materibeslana.com/rus/index.php [accessed 20 July 2011]. 19 ‘Statement by the President and Mrs. Obama on Nelson Mandela International Day’, 17 July 2011, www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2011/07/17/statement-president-and-mrs-obama-nelson-mandelainternational-day [accessed 20 July 2011]. 20 From ‘Все это делается с одной единственной целью – закрыть вопрос о Беслане’, Ежедневный Журнал, 22 December 2006, www.ej. ru/vision/ entry/5723/. Also available in English, trans. by David McDuff, http:// halldor2.wordpress.com/2006/12/23/inversions-of-the-truth-ii [both accessed 20 July 2011]. 21 This term is adopted from Glover (2002: 208), who uses it to reflect the various and non-standardised usages of both the War on Terrorism and the War on Terror found in the media and in political rhetoric. 22 While I consider religious narratives to be examples of theoretical narratives, Baker discusses them under the rubric of public (here, societal) narratives, while still acknowledging that they may be considered meta-narratives (2006: 175n7). That the borders are porous and difficult to draw reflects not only the nature of narratives but the complex nature of religion, which is never a homogeneous phenomenon or even creed, but a mixture of theological, eschatological, cultural, social, historical, political and literary narratives. 23 See Russell (2007) and (2005b) for a discussion of ‘demonisation’ in RussoChechen conflict. 24 There are other ways to negate this need and the onus of self-scrutiny. See Bar and Ben-Ari’s study of Israeli snipers in which the authors find ‘[i]t may thus be possible to recognise the humanity of an enemy and concurrently be deeply persuaded about the justice of your cause so that you can kill time and again’ (2005: 149). 25 ‘Remarks by the President After Two Planes Crash Into World Trade Center’, Emma Booker Elementary School, Sarasota, Florida, 9.30am EDT, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911.html [accessed 9 January 2007]. 26 ‘Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation’, 8.30pm EDT, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html [accessed 9 January 2007]. 27 Attorney General Ashcroft in ‘Press Briefing by Attorney General, Secretary of HHS, Secretary of Transportation, and FEMA Director’, 7.15pm EDT, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-10.html [accessed 9 January 2007]. 28 ‘Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation’, 8.30pm EDT, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html [accessed 9 January 2007]. 29 ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C. 9:00pm EDT, www.whitehouse.gov/ news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html [accessed 9 January 2007].

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30 In a further irony, Jackson points out that ‘it passes almost unnoticed that both sides (the American administration and al Qaeda) are employing exactly the same discursive strategies – both appeal to victimhood and grievance, both enlist religion as supreme justification, both frame the struggle as one of good versus evil, both demonise and dehumanise the other and both claim the mantle of a just/holy war/jihad. The result of this discursive mirroring is predictable: the killing of civilians without pity or remorse . . . whether by suicide bombers . . . or by US helicopter gunships’ (2005: 183). 31 ‘The “War on Terror” After Bin Laden’, interview with Tom Mills, New Left Project, 10 May 2011, www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_ comments/the_war_on_terror_after_bin_laden [accessed 20 July 2011]. 32 All quotes are from the Presidential Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, Washington, D.C., 20 September 2001, 9:00pm EDT, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8. html [accessed 12 January 2007]. 33 As quoted by Clare Dyer, ‘There Is No War on Terror’, Guardian, 24 January 2007, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1997247,00. html [accessed 20 July 2011]. 34 Bal qualifies this definition with acknowledgement that the text does not exist or function in isolation: ‘The finite ensemble of signs does not mean that the text itself is finite, for its meanings, effects, functions, and background are not. It only means that there is a first and a last word to be identified; a first and a last image of a film; a frame of a painting, even if those boundaries . . . are provisional and porous’ (2009: 5). 35 Originally presented as ‘fabula, story, text’ (Bal 1985), Bal later inverted the order to ‘text, story, fabula’ (1997, 2009) to emphasise the heuristic nature of her theory, arguing that ‘[i]t is by way of the text that the reader has access to the story, of which the fabula is, so to speak, a memorial trace that remains with the reader after completion of the reading’ (1997: xv). I have inverted the order of fabula and story because Bal’s definition of story relies on first understanding the notion of fabula, and also because I believe that in news reportage the text is the reader’s access to the fabula and it is the story which lingers. 36 Comparable to units or functions as found in the work of Propp (1968) and Barthes (1966). 37 Russell argues for the necessity of changing attitudes and understanding ‘the cultural contradictions that underpin them’ (2007: 156) if violent behaviour is to be prevented. 38 This ‘naturalisation’ is frequently the focus in critical language study which seeks to reveal ‘how ideologies are embedded in features of discourse which are taken for granted as matters of common sense’ (Fairclough 1989/2001: 64). Fairclough argues that because naturalisation so effectively constrains not only ‘the contents of discourse and, in the long term, knowledge and beliefs’ but also the ways discourse impacts on social relations, it is ‘the most formidable weapon in the armoury of power, and therefore a signifi cant focus of struggle’ (2001: 87).

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39 Also called ‘analepsis’ (Genette 1972/1980: 40; Abbott 2002). 40 A third type, mixed, refers to a retroversion that returns to events which begin prior to the primary narrative but end within the time frame of the primary narrative. The duration of the anachronic events may be called the anachrony’s ‘extent’ (Genette 1972/1980: 48) or its ‘span’ (Bal 2009: 91). 41 See ‘Russian Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Poisoned’ for Politkovskaya’s account published by PEN USA, http://penusa.org/go/news/comments/110 [accessed 30 January 2009]. 42 See ‘Another Journalist Detained at Moscow Airport’, http://cpj. org/2004/09/another-journalist-detained-at-moscow-airport.php, and ‘Prominent Russian Journalist Sentenced to Prison for Hooliganism’, http:// cpj.org/2004/09/prominent-russian-journalist-sentenced-to-prison-f.php, from the Committee to Protect Journalists [both accessed 20 July 2010]. 43 The distinction between non-narrative and narrative material is a pragmatic one based on definitions of narrative that stress the relation of events, and is used here to acknowledge the qualitative differences between material that relates events and material that merely describes or comments upon those events. Of course, all material is ultimately understood through narrative configuration, but I do not think it helpful if differences are obscured by considering everything to be narrative. 44 These categories of temporary narrators are, like any category adopted for the purpose of analysis, porous and in flux rather than fixed. Correspondents may also narrate as eyewitnesses, and a government official may also be a relative of a hostage, as in the case of Taimuraz Mamsurov, chair of the North Ossetian Parliament, whose two children were among the hostages. 45 ‘Валерий Дзуцев называет проблемы IWPR на Кавказе выдавливанием независимых журналистов’, Regnum Information Agency, 3 March 2008, www.regnum.ru/news/965753.html [accessed 20 July 2011]. 46 ‘Всем, кто сочувствует жертвам бесланского теракта!’, 30 November 2005, www.golosbeslana.ru/2005/301105.htm [accessed 20 July 2011]. 47 Oksana Chelysheva, ‘Extreme Injustice’, 24 January 2008, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/oksana_chelysheva/2008/01/extreme_injustice.html [accessed 20 July 2011]. 48 The full list is posted on the Ministry of Justice website, www.minjust.ru/ru/ activity/nko/fedspisok, and the update was published in Rossiskaia Gazeta Federal Issue No. 5195, www.rg.ru/2010/05/31/spisok-dok.html [both accessed 20 July 2011].

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RIA-Novosti: ‘No front line and an invisible enemy’

The history of the Moscow-based Russian News and Information Agency (Российское агенство международной информации) RIA-Novosti can be traced back to 1941 when the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinform) was set up ‘to compile reports on the situation on the frontline of the war, work on the home front, and the partisan movement for the radio, newspapers and magazines’. In 1944, a foreign bureau was added to Sovinform, which distributed reports through newspapers, magazines and radio stations in twenty-three countries. In 1961, Sovinform became the Novosti Press Agency, ‘the leading information and press body of Soviet public organizations’ with the chartered aim of contributing to ‘mutual understanding, trust and friendship among peoples in every possible way by broadly publishing accurate information about the USSR abroad and familiarizing the Soviet public with the life of the peoples of foreign countries’. In turn, this was succeeded in 1990 by the Information Agency Novosti, created by a decree of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev with a remit ‘to provide information support for the USSR’s state domestic and foreign policies’. Further presidential decrees continued to firmly anchor the agency to the state: in 1991, as part of the Press and Information Ministry, in 1993, as a state news-analytical agency, and in 1998, as part of the VGTRK (All-Russia State TV and Radio Company) state information holding. In 2004, the agency was again renamed, becoming the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Russian News and Information Agency RIA-Novosti.1 The agency describes itself as ‘the leading multimedia information agency in Russia’ and where it once cited ‘promptness, objectiveness, authenticity and its own opinion regardless of the political situation’ as the main criteria of its information services,2 it now boasts that its ‘[m]odern multimedia newsroom . . . is without parallel in Russia and is the epitome (воплощение) of the most advanced technologies for the collection, processing and dissemination of news’.3 RIA-Novosti carries out a wide range of activities, including foreign media monitoring,

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organising press tours for Russian and foreign journalists and highprofile press events abroad, and using its Moscow, regional and foreign press-centres to host press conferences, briefings and video-linked round table discussions. Its website is published in Russian, English, German, French, Arabic, Persian, Spanish, Japanese, and, since March 2006, in two versions of Mandarin, claiming to be the first Chinese-language site set up by a Russian news agency.4 The site publishes an array of interlinking materials including news bulletins, commentaries and analyses, interviews, online press conferences, image galleries, video clips and extended broadcasts with transcripts, ‘infographics’, audio slideshows, and interactive quizzes and opinion polls. Articles and news are posted every few minutes around the clock, generating enormous amounts of material every day. In this study, the RIA-Novosti website is used as an example of a dominant, mainstream media outlet. Not only is the site controlled by the state and supportive of government policy and action but, as a large, federal and international agency, it has the resources to widely circulate its content and editorial opinion. My analysis of the data published by RIA-Novosti in Russian is guided by the intratextual model offered in Chapter 1. It begins with a quantitive and qualitative description of the primary narrative text, discusses the RIA-Novosti narrator as a linguistic function of the text and the temporary narrators selected to contribute to the narrative, and then discusses the different categories of textual material according to the model. The structure of this discussion moves from a temporal and spatial distance towards Beslan’s School No. 1 during the siege and its immediate aftermath, the spatial and temporal site of the core narrative, insofar as such a narrative can be identified. Because the narrator has limited access to this site, narration comes from temporary narrators located nearby, from temporary narrators who relate the narratives of surviving hostages and, finally, from surviving hostages themselves. Primary narrative text On Wednesday, 1 September 2004, RIA-Novosti published one hundred and twenty-four postings (just under 14,000 words) that mention the hostage-taking in Beslan. The bulletins are brief, usually only three or four paragraphs long, with no more than three sentences in each paragraph. Typically, each post consists of a headline, which is then repeated and extended in the first paragraph, followed by a quote (using both direct and indirect speech) from a spokesperson of some kind, and a brief conclusion of either further or repeated information. Repetition in the narrative text is common, with earlier postings sometimes amalgamated

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25000 20000 15000 RIA‐Novosti Russian Primary Narrative Text

10000 5000 0 Wed 1 Sep Thur 2 Sep

Fri 3 Sep

Sat 4 Sep

Figure 3 RIA-Novosti Russian primary narrative text (number of words)

and reposted as summaries (обобщения), as part of ‘News of the Day’ bulletins or repeated in their entirety with updated information added. The composition of the text remains similar over the next three days, even as the amount of material, after a small initial reduction, steadily increases (see Figure 3). Thus, on Thursday, 2 September, RIA-Novosti published one hundred postings (just over 13,000 words) that mention the hostage-taking in Beslan, one hundred and sixty-five (about 16,500 words) on Friday, 3 September, and one hundred and sixty-five postings (about 22,000 words) on Saturday, 4 September. It is the longest of the six primary narrative texts, with a total of more than sixty-five thousand words. The pattern of repetition found in the first day of reporting continues over all four days, particularly during the nights and in the early morning hours. On 3 September, a chronicle of events outlining the ‘liberation [освобождение] of the hostages’ is posted in reverse order, listing events and official statements reported from 12:55 that day, when the pre-arranged evacuation of the bodies began, to 23:32 that night, when the combat between the hostage-takers and the Russian special forces was declared over.5 Narrators The name RIA-Novosti is present in almost every bulletin, with statements and information frequently cited as communicated (сообщили) or announced (заявили) to the agency, perhaps by telephone, in an interview, in a statement made available to the agency or given directly to a RIA-Novosti correspondent. Thus, RIA-Novosti establishes itself as an official, credible and knowledgeable narrator, not only with direct access to a range of information sources, but entrusted with this information by those sources. The constant repetition of the agency’s name and its association with the privileged acquisition of information emphasise the reliability of the narrator and hence the reliability of the information

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and, by implication, the story narrated. Temporary narrators selected by RIA-Novosti include officials, experts, RIA-Novosti correspondents and eyewitnesses. Official sources The temporary narrators to whom RIA-Novosti most frequently and most consistently transfers the function of narrator are local, regional and federal government officials, at least sixty-five various sources in all, with the vast majority of bulletins composed around their statements. Leaders of, and spokespersons for, foreign countries and international and religious organisations, as well as other Russian officials, including Russian president Putin, also act as temporary narrators (see Section 3 below). Frequent temporary narrators include Lev Dzugaev, head of the North Ossetian presidential press service; operation headquarters; the North Ossetian Ministry of Internal Affairs; the North Ossetian Ministry of Health; Valerii Andreev, head of the North Ossetian Federal Security Service; and the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. On 4 September, the number of official sources cited over twenty-four hours roughly doubles to forty-two with the inclusion of an increased number of medical personnel. By consistently employing the full names and official positions of spokespersons, or the full name of the official body even when no individual spokesperson is identified, RIA-Novosti characterises these temporary narrators as official, respected sources of information. At the same time, they are impersonalised: except for Dr Roshal, who is characterised in a very particular way, as discussed in the previous chapter, RIA-Novosti says nothing about these people apart from their name and position. They are included only because of the positions they hold, because they themselves are temporary narrators for the various government departments that employ them and that also narrate as even more depersonalised, abstract narrators. The respect RIA-Novosti accords these temporary narrators is also conferred onto their statements, many of which are repeated, and not only once, indicating the significance RIA-Novosti attributes to them. The information from these authorities, and the official actions they so often describe, are never interrogated but are reported as accurate, authoritative and appropriate. The effect of this array of official sources is to suggest that RIANovosti draws on a wide variety of temporary narrators, yet paradoxically, the view, in terms of both voice – who speaks what for whom – and focalisation (Bal 2009) – who sees what and how – is severely limited. Information is overwhelmingly ‘according to’ someone or something official: according to ‘his words’, to ‘preliminary information’,

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to ‘information from operation headquarters’. The way this information is both controlled and communicated is evident in the relationship that has developed between officials and the press by the morning of 2 September, described here by a RIA-Novosti correspondent: Most of the journalists are located near the Palace of Culture, and every hour and a half, a spokesperson from operation headquarters comes out and speaks to them. Usually these approaches to the press arouse great interest among the local residents, who try to ask a lot of questions of the law enforcement agencies and the authorities of the republic. (II/10:16)6

News, in this narrative, is less about ‘what is happening’ and, typically for the genre of mainstream news reporting, more about ‘what an authoritative source tells a journalist’ (Bell 1991: 191). The result is a narrative constructed according to this view. Thus, although the hostage-takers are reported to make several attempts to communicate with the authorities, including two separate notes, a videotape, a telephone number and various telephone calls, the details of these are unreported. Instead, official narrators repeatedly report the authorities’ efforts to enter into negotiations with the terrorists, who refuse to participate and fail to express any clear demands. Although there is confusion surrounding the events that appear to trigger the violent end of the siege, blame is quickly laid on the hostage-takers, who are reported to have detonated the explosives and caused the sports hall roof to collapse, while security forces open fire in response to save (спасти) those fleeing the school building. Although Russian presidential advisor, Aslambek Aslakhanov, says ‘no one was prepared for what happened’ (III/19:29), and the planned use of force is denied (III/17:27), the end of the siege quickly becomes the ‘operation to release [по освобождению] the hostages’ (III/15:31) even while the aftermath is dubbed a ‘tragedy’ (IV/14:06). In a final example of the dominance of the official narrative and RIANovosti’s endorsement of it, Aslakhanov is quoted indirectly as telling journalists that ‘one and the same Arab organisation could be behind the recent terrorist attacks in Russia’ (I/17:26). Yet, on closer analysis of this post, this is the narrator (RIA-Novosti) re-narrating the words of the temporary narrator (Aslakhanov). In response to a (leading) question from a journalist, ‘How likely is it that an Arab terrorist group is behind the recent terrorist attacks?’, Aslakhanov quotes a proverb, to the effect that whoever pays gets to choose the music and have the girl dance for them [the one who pays the piper calls the tune], and goes on to say that ‘undoubtedly, an organisation is behind [all of these attacks] and is financing these actions’. He says nothing about that organisation being Arab.

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Experts It is not unusual for media outlets to turn to various experts and specialists for their opinion on the events making news, and RIA-Novosti is no exception, although only four such experts act as temporary narrators in the Russian primary narrative text. The first is Duncan March, ‘director of the “Pilgrims” organisation’, who, in an interview with the BBC, discusses the threat journalists may pose to the lives of hostages during a crisis (II/14:53). The second expert is Dr Mustafa Khalaf, general director of the Centre for the Study of Political and Economic Problems of the Near East and ‘Arab expert’, who speaks with RIA-Novosti in Dubai (II/23:31). He discusses the motives of the terrorists, speculating that they want to ‘provoke a wave of anti-Muslim feeling and upset relations between Moscow and the Arab and Muslim world’. The other specialists are ‘Russian military experts’, speaking in Novgorod at RIA-Novosti event: Andrei Kokoshin, head of a Duma Committee, and retired deputy Defence minister and Security Council secretary, and Iurii Kobaladze, retired major general (and spokesperson) of the Foreign Intelligence Service (IV/22:17). Kokoshin hopes ‘the tragedy in Beslan will incite other countries, who share the culture and spirit of Euroatlantic civilisation’, to create a coalition like that of the Allied forces in World War Two, yet at the same time he decries the ‘present-day anti-terrorism coalition’ for its ‘decorative role’ and lack of real unity in its ‘resistance against extremism’. Kobaladze calls for the concentration of power within Russia and the creation of supranational police and intelligence forces to unite leading countries in ‘waging the war which terrorism has unleashed’, while also criticising the lack of trust and coordination found between states. The inclusion of these temporary narrators into the Russian primary text frames the Beslan attack in a very particular way, while also precluding alternative frames which might be suggested by other temporary narrators. Could journalists, for example, be seen as a means for providing the hostage-takers with the international media coverage they crave in order to highlight their cause?7 Why is an ‘Arab expert’ called upon for his opinion rather than experts on national movements, for instance, or on Ossetian, Chechen or North Caucasian history or conflict? The Russian military experts solely reinforce Russian official narratives (see pp. 75–81) without adding any details or insight into either events in Beslan or military operations in Chechnya and the North Caucasus.

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Correspondents and eyewitnesses While it is apparent that, by 10:49 on 1 September, RIA-Novosti has at least one correspondent in Beslan itself, relatively few of the bulletins draw on information from the correspondent’s own observations. The first to do so at any length is posted in the very early hours of 2 September (and repeated at 01:22, 05:45 and 8:46). Here the correspondent describes the situation around the school, where the parents and relatives of the hostages have gathered, as ‘relatively calm’ (спокойной) in spite of the ‘several single shots’ heard coming from the school over the past two hours: Even though it is night, many relatives, especially men, are not leaving the place in front of the Palace of Culture and are hoping to receive at least some sort of news on the fate of their kin. (II/01:13)

A similar post is published on the morning of 2 September, marking the first twenty-four hours of the siege. Now the situation in the square is ‘tense’ (напряженная), although the correspondent does not say how. Instead, s/he describes the facilities set up in the Palace of Culture to help the parents of the hostages: psychological help, places to rest, free food, and the periodic appearance of representatives from the republic’s authorities who speak to the press, request relatives to stay calm and assure them that headquarters’ priority is ‘to save [сохранение] the lives of the hostages’. Apart from the ‘great interest’ that these appearances arouse in the crowd, who ‘try to ask . . . many questions’, the scene is one of almost complete calm: No serious incidents of any kind have been recorded in the square in front of the Palace of Culture, and on the whole, the relatives of the hostages have behaved peacefully without disturbing the public order. (II/10:16)

How is it that these people, many of whom have stood through the night, can remain so calm? The correspondent speaks to none of them, but reports that ‘social order in the square is ensured by soldiers and representatives of the North Ossetian law enforcement agencies’. S/he describes how ‘metal barriers were placed some time ago along the edges of the square’ and that ‘all approaches to the school itself are, as before, blocked by local special police’ (бойцами республиканского ОМОНа). Perhaps this accounts for the tension in the square. Perhaps the calmness described by this temporary narrator is a calmness not felt by the people to whom it is attributed, but a calmness imposed onto the scene by the words of the correspondent. RIA-Novosti’s temporary narrators reporting ‘from the scene of events’ can claim proximity, but even from such a vantage point the narratives they construct may obscure as much as they clarify.

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Other events related by the correspondents in Beslan include the formation of an ‘initiative group’ by relatives of the hostages who intended to offer themselves in exchange for the children (II/23:24); the moving of relatives and journalists to behind the Palace of Culture after two shots were fired from a grenade launcher and injured a policeman (III/01:15); further firing from the school early on the morning of 3 September (III/6:54), and the gathering again of relatives and residents with the cordon now expanded after the firing during the night (III/9:22). This pattern of occasional observation, however, changes as the siege comes to an end. After reporting the evacuation of the bodies from the school (III/12:58), the correspondent (or correspondents) narrates much more frequently than before, relating what they see and hear: two large explosions and intensive shooting (III/13:13), increased shooting and the observation that the journalists, now behind the Palace of Culture, cannot see what is happening near the school (III/13:27), combat near the school and several helicopters circling above (III/13:37), and the wounded driven away in ambulances (III/13:56). The correspondent(s) also act as eyewitnesses, that is, narrating not only what they see but that they themselves see it. A correspondent sees two girls, ten and eleven years old, get into a car near the Palace of Culture, another sees thirteen children led out from the school (III/14:12), a woman carried away on a stretcher (III/14:30), a soldier receiving medical aid (III/14:44), at least two cars with wounded hostages driving off to the hospitals (III/14:49), a wounded man and two young school children carried out on stretchers (III/16:00). The correspondent(s) go on to report renewed firing and the reappearance of the helicopters (III/14:25), another explosion (III/14:44), intensive shooting in the part of the school that looks out onto the railway (III/14:53) and yet another explosion (III/15:18), but gradually the frequency of the correspondents’ narration declines. They describe the transport corridor set up by rescuers, medics, police and soldiers to enable ambulances to reach the school and ferry the wounded away to the hospital (III/16:00), the beginning of the rescue operation (III/16:19) – including sappers de-mining the school and its approaches, still offlimits for journalists and residents (III/16:47) – and a man in camouflage uniform taken to the local police station (III/15:00). They describe the state of the school building: the roof of the sports hall has collapsed and smoke can be seen over the building, almost all of the windows are broken, bullet holes can be seen in the brick walls and the windows on the ground floor have been barricaded with furniture and boxes (III/17:09). Rescuers prepare to clear the rubble from the burnt-out sports hall (III/17:11). Shooting can be heard from time to time as the

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hostage-takers continue to resist (III/17:43), everybody in front of the Palace of Culture is evacuated (III/18:17) and finally there is no more shooting coming from the school, although shooting and the occasional explosion can still be heard in the town (III/23:32). By Saturday, 4 September, the ‘action’ is over and the correspondent returns to the original role of occasional observer. President Putin makes a brief visit (III/4:56, III/5:32, III/6:58), the task of clearing the rubble resumes (III/7:43) and the three wounded rescuers are in a satisfactory condition, ‘smiling and joking with the doctors’ (III/11:31). As on the first two days of the siege, there are also reports in which the correspondent relates his/her own observations. These are again concerned with the relatives of the hostages gathered in the square in front of the Palace of Culture. Now, however, these are people whose children are missing, found neither in hospitals nor on lists, yet the correspondent’s observations remain as understated as before. The expected release at noon of a list of the dead draws around five hundred people to the square, with more continuing to come, but when the list is not ready, this ‘provokes anxiety [беспокойство] in people, who have already for twenty-four hours been able to find out nothing about the fate of their kin’ (IV/12:36). Two and a half hours later, the correspondent relates how residents in the square have begun to compile their own lists of the missing, around one hundred and thirty people (IV/15:05). The process is a long one. Five hours later, the correspondent again describes the relatives, in a scene that is unexpectedly poignant: in spite of the fact that it is already after dark, as before, in the Palace of Culture, members of the Beslan administration are taking statements from citizens who have not been able to find their relatives on either lists of the dead or the hospitalised . . . On the lists are included the name, surname, and any distinguishing marks of the missing. Spread out on tables are photographs of children, whose parents are looking for them. (IV/20:19)

This is the last narration from a RIA-Novosti correspondent in Beslan. It is posted just after what is probably the most transparently descriptive piece from a correspondent, who narrates as an eyewitness: People’s faces have changed. Many women are crying right on the streets, others quietly talk amongst themselves. Everybody is talking about the sudden, tragic outcome of two days of waiting. For some the end turned out to be lucky, others lost their loved ones, and some people lost their whole family . . . Residents approach the half-destroyed building of the oldest school in the town, considered the most prestigious educational institution for many generations of Beslanites. Several even now know nothing of the fate of their loved ones. All through the previous night, parents and relatives of

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the hostages went around to the hospitals of Beslan and Vladikavkaz, travelling on buses provided by the authorities, searching for their kin. (IV/20:14)

These reports are placed late in the primary narrative text, a temporal position that comes well after the siege is over and well after official narratives insisting that all deaths and suffering are due solely to the actions of the terrorists are well established. Thus, although the correspondents’ narratives sometimes differ in tone and content from the official narratives, they are framed by them and hence easily interpreted as conforming to them. In contrast to the many official voices that function as temporary narrators, very few of the bulletins draw on information from eyewitnesses: only eight (6.5 per cent) of those posted on 1 September, none on 2 September and only six (3.6 per cent) of the bulletins posted on 3 September. In all of these cases, the eyewitnesses remain anonymous, their contributions are brief and, with the exception of a short, direct quotation published on 3 September soon after the explosions which triggered the end of the siege, are reported using indirect speech. On 4 September, the day after the siege comes to an end, this pattern of reporting changes. While eyewitnesses continue to contribute only a tiny proportion of the information reported and published that day (2.4 per cent), they are no longer anonymous, their contributions are lengthier and they are reported using direct speech. Like the correspondents’ narratives, their temporal location in the primary narrative text means they are also easily framed by other, official narratives (see pp. 95–100). Embedded non-narrative texts Statements and condemnations from foreign countries and international and religious organisations As news of the hostage-taking spreads, reports are filed from the near and far abroad as politicians, religious leaders and spokespersons of official organisations comment on and condemn the attack. The statements and responses of a total of fifty countries, eight religious (Muslim, Jewish, Orthodox and Catholic) groups and organisations, and eight international organisations, including NATO, the European Union and the United Nations, are reported, indicating the significant international attention the attack attracted. Almost all of these statements include very specific references to the hostage-taking in Beslan, frequently calling for the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages and expressing abhorrence at the

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targeting of innocent children, desire for a peaceful resolution to the crisis, and solidarity with the Russian people and government. There are also offers of help and assistance. Many statements also make specific references to the bomb attack in Moscow on 31 August and the downing of the passenger airplanes the week before, although these references become fewer as the days pass and the bombings are eclipsed by the media attention on the crisis in Beslan. Several countries include within their statements condemnations not only of these particular attacks but of any or all forms of terrorism, wherever and whenever it occurs. ‘We condemn any group that resorts to terrorism to achieve whatever sort of aims,’ says Malaysian prime minister, Abdulla Akhma Badavi (I/20:16). The United Nations Security Council, meeting extraneously in New York on the evening of 1 September, refers to UN resolution 1373, adopted in 2001, and declares that ‘every terrorist act is a crime and has no justification whatsoever, no matter what the motives, when, and by whom it is carried out’ (II/4:50). From associations made within the text of the resolution, terrorist acts are understood to be ‘such acts’ as the taking of hostages in Beslan or those ‘which took place in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001’8 and which are directed at civilians and innocent people, particularly children, but beyond these examples ‘terrorism’, ‘terrorist acts’ and ‘terrorists’ remain abstract and undefined, not only in the Security Council’s resolution but in all of the statements and condemnations. As such, these terms remain open to interpretation and appropriation into other narratives, to which the narrators of these statements, such as the UN Security Council, may or may not subscribe. This is exactly what happens, as seen in the discussion below of Russian official responses. Ukraine is the first country to condemn any display of ‘international terrorism’, again, an undefined term, which is echoed by Britain’s Foreign minister Jack Straw, the CIS, South Ossetia, Germany, Spain and Belarus. Ramzan Kadyrov, first deputy prime minister of (the Moscow-supported government in) Chechnya, says on Russian state television that, ‘[w]e are fighting terrorists and bandits knowing that this is international terrorism, wherever they are, in Ingushetia, Ossetia or Chechnya.’ In the statements from NATO, India, Germany, the United States, Armenia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, China, the Commonwealth of Independent States, South Ossetia, Qatar, Spain, Israel, Italy, Egypt, the European Union, Pakistan, Japan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Malaysia and Bulgaria, references to the specific attacks (local narratives) in Beslan and Russia are coupled with expressions of solidarity with Russia in ‘the fight (борьба) against international terrorism’,9 the phrase used

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by Russian politicians and media to refer to what is known in English as ‘the war on terror(ism)’. Thus, within twelve hours into the siege at Beslan, when the identity of the hostage-takers was still uncertain and their demands were understood to be distinctly concerning specific events in Ingushetia and Chechnya, RIA-Novosti connects the attack to the meta-narrative of ‘the war on terror(ism)’. This effectively restricts any efforts to understand the local narrative, that is, to establish the reasons for this particular attack, the motives and mindsets of these hostage-takers, and possible responses to this event, by subsuming the details of the attack into the more abstract, rhetorically powerful meta-narrative. Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the United States House of Representatives, calls the attack in Beslan a ‘clash of civilisation with barbarians’ and ‘a war between civilisation and barbarity’ (I/19:46), appealing to the even older meta-narrative of civilisation versus barbarism, long invoked to determine international relations and justify policy (Malia 1999; Salter 2002; Bhatia 2005; Ivie 2005) and used by the Bush administration in its elaboration of the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative (Jackson 2005). Reactions to the very particular narrative unfolding in a very precarious and dangerous situation in Beslan’s School No. 1, where, even in the first few hours, people had already been killed and where the lives of over a thousand people were at risk, are expressed not in particular terms, such as enabling the safe passage and swift mobilisation of trained and experienced crisis-negotiators into Beslan (see Dolnik 2007), but as generalised responses to ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative. There are several cases of individuals, including the Costa Rican ambassador in Moscow (III/12:21), offering themselves as hostages in exchange for the children, but this idea is not seriously considered by the Russian authorities. Aleksandr Iakovenko, official spokesperson from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, values it as a ‘gesture of solidarity with the Russian people’ and considers it ‘yet another manifestation of the solidarity of the international community with the Russian people in the fight against terrorism’ (III/17:45). Most of the international statements and condemnations express abstract ideas of support, sympathy and solidarity with the Russian people, government and president. President George Bush claims to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Russia. Jordan’s King Abdullah II assures Putin that ‘[w]e in the Muslim community [сообщество], indeed in the whole world community, are firmly standing by your side’ (II/14:20). ‘Their suffering is our suffering,’ states Jack Straw, British Foreign minister, and ‘the enormous responsibility of the Russian leadership is our responsibility also’ (II/18:34). On 3 September, after the siege’s end, the European Union expresses its ‘understanding of

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“the difficult dilemma”’ (III/17:29) and Italy, ‘the tragic dilemma’ facing the Russian government (III/22:53). ‘We stand together with you in the global war [война] against international terrorism,’ declares General Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan (IV/22:10). Equally abstract calls for unity and the consolidation of forces among the ‘international community’ to fight ‘international terrorism’ are repeated frequently over the four days. Except for calls to states to fulfil their obligations according to the United Nations Security Council’s resolution 1373 (itself couched in abstract terms), these calls for unity are again expressed in the abstract language of the meta-narrative rather than in any concrete language relating to the specifics of the local Beslan narrative, such as calling for an international peacekeeping force to be deployed in Chechnya, or for perpetrators of terrorist attacks and war crimes in the region to be tried in either Russian criminal courts or before the International Criminal Court. Instead, the attacks are a reminder of ‘the necessity to combine efforts at a global level in order to oppose the threat of international terrorism’ (India I/19:40). South Korea claims to be ‘actively involved in international efforts to curb terrorism’ (II/14:41) and Qatar points out ‘the necessity to activate the efforts of the global community in the fight against terrorism and the destruction of its roots’ (III/12:26). ‘There are no differences between the terrorist act in BeerSheva – [sixteen people were killed on 31 August 2004 in two explosions attributed to two suicide-bombers] – and the terrorist act in Beslan,’ states Silvan Shalom, Israel’s minister for Foreign Affairs, ‘and the whole international community must condemn these acts and unite in the fight against terror’ (III/22:23). There are only two instances where governments combine the call for unity with an urge to examine the causes of terrorism (still undefined). German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, says that ‘first and foremost, attention must be paid to the reasons behind the causes of world terrorism’ (I/22:15) and Italy’s president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, states that ‘the vicious circle of violence can be broken by firm opposition to terrorism and a sensible approach to its causes’ (III/22:53). These statements, however, are passing, insignificant elements in the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative elaborated here. Apart from these initial instances, the narrator does not mention them further and they remain neither clarified nor discussed. Persistently framing the events in Beslan with the ‘war on terror(ism)’ narrative effectively renders irrelevant the particular narrative identities of the hostage-takers in Beslan, including their names, ethnicities, nationalities, criminal histories, political and military experiences, and affiliations, as they are characterised into the (stereo) types of the ‘war

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on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative. In the litany of international condemnations, they are repeatedly described as evil and barbaric, ‘thorough criminals completely lacking basic human feelings’ (CIS III/10:29), who have ‘lost their human nature’ (Tajikistan IV/17:32). Their monstrous, evil, unprecedented, inhuman, inconceivable, unimaginable, most cruel (жесточайший) act is ‘a mockery of all values common to humanity’ that has ‘crossed all boundaries of humanity and moral norms’ (Lithuania II/20:50). It is ‘the next encroachment on the moral foundations of the universe’ (Argentina III/2:21), it ‘contradicts all human and religious values’ (Iran IV/13:12, Yemen IV/17:32, League of Arab States IV/20:47), ‘infringes all norms of civilised behaviour’ (India IV/22:10) and ‘places its perpetrators outside of civilised society’ (CIS I/19:46). These are ‘not people’ (не люди) (Chechnya I/18:24), ‘non-people [monsters]’ (нелюди) (Georgia IV/18:47), thoroughly dehumanised by the rhetoric and excluded from membership of the human race. These characterisations are also found in the statements made by religious groups. While only Aleksei II, orthodox patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, closely reiterates the political idioms, stating that ‘terrorism has become international’ and calling for ‘all Russian citizens and the whole world to unite in rejecting terror and fighting against it’ (I/16:50), the efforts of some religious spokespersons to distance themselves from the hostage-takers and their actions are often expressed using the same dehumanising characterisations and good versus evil dichotomy found in the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative. ‘Terrorists are people who are beyond religion, beyond morality,’ state Muslim leaders from Nizhnii Novgorod. ‘[T]hese are criminals against whom all who desire peace and concord on earth must fight’ (I/15:21). ‘Evil and violence are incompatible with the humanitarian ideals of sacred religions,’ says the International Islamic Mission (I/19:29). ‘These monsters have no place on our earth or in our society,’ pronounces the Coordinating Centre of Muslims of the North Caucasus. They are ‘monsters for whom nothing is sacred,’ says Russia’s chief rabbi. ‘Throwing off all masks, terrorism has revealed its satanic face, trampling on all that is sacred, neither fearing God nor shamed before people,’ claims Aleksei II. While these groups may or may not subscribe to the politically circulated ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative, their consistent use of the abstract language, stereotypical characterisations and dichotomous representations found in it allows them and their narratives to be integrated into it, thereby reinforcing the meta-narrative’s claim to authority and its ability to marginalise or overpower alternative narratives. Coupled with the dehumanising of the hostage-takers in the metanarrative is the exaggerated characterisation of the threat and danger

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of both terrorists and terrorism, capable of reaching everybody everywhere. In the international statements and condemnations, the attack in Beslan is frequently described as a ‘terrible reminder that international terrorism is a threat to all of us, wherever we are’ (Great Britain II/18:34). ‘The terrorist-fanatics, who threaten the security of the whole world, have, during these days, essentially attacked the whole of Russia, and tomorrow something similar could happen in any other country,’ says Serbian president, Boris Tadich. ‘They confirm,’ says Nino Burszhanadze of Georgia’s Parliament, ‘that nobody is safe anywhere’ (IV/18:47). Terrorism is deemed ‘one of the most serious threats to peace and security’ (UN Security Council (UNSC) II/4:50), ‘the greatest evil of the twenty-first century’ (CIS III/10:29), a ‘threat to all democracies’ and the fight against it ‘is the absolute priority of the international community’ (Italy III/22:53). This all-encompassing language (all of us in the entire world) serves only to exaggerate the threat of terrorism because, statistically, geographically and effectively, terrorism is a very minimal risk to most people in most states of the world (Zulaika and Douglass 1996; Jackson 2005). Of course, to some people, including the people of Beslan, terrorists can quickly materialise into a very real and present danger, and to say that terrorism is a minimal threat to most people is not to trivialise their plight. Speaking about their suffering, however, in terms of threats to ‘the whole world’, to ‘anybody anywhere’, only engenders a general narrative of fear and unpredictability that does nothing to address and redress their particular situation. It probably even makes their narrative less likely to be heard and investigated, as attention and resources are turned elsewhere. The practice of this meta-narrative,10 that is, one of its consequences and effects, is the exclusion of these ‘non-people’ from the rights afforded the rest of humanity; in Beslan, a man is lynched and shot by local residents who believed him to be one of the hostage-takers, and the aim of the Russian special forces is simply to destroy or annihilate (уничтожать) – a word used in Soviet Russia for enemies ‘of the people’ or in war – the hostage-takers in Beslan rather than capture, charge, try and sentence them in a criminal court. RIA-Novosti reports information from operation headquarters that ‘more than thirty terrorists’ were destroyed in Beslan (IV/13:02) and three were detained (IV/1:58). Other reports give other figures (see Dunlop 2006) but, in any event, only one of the hostage-takers, Nurpashi Kulaev, was eventually tried in court and, in May 2006, sentenced to life imprisonment due to a Russian moratorium on the death penalty. While it may seem inexpedient to speak of the rights of terrorists who have so clearly forfeited their responsibilities to other human beings, characterising them as non-human can only lead

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to an ‘intellectual cul-de-sac’ (Jackson 2005: 185) because, of course, they are human. Dehumanising and destroying people is simply a means of depoliticising them. It is a means of eliminating any efforts to investigate them, their actions and their motives, indeed, their narratives. Thus, we come no closer to ridding the world of political violence because we do not know, understand or recognise it or its perpetrators. Russian official responses and condemnations Given the number of high-level international responses to the siege in Beslan received by the Russian government already on the first day of the hostage-crisis, the response from the Russian side appears at first to be muted and uncoordinated by comparison, with no statement at all from President Putin until the afternoon of 2 September. Nevertheless, elements from the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative expounded in the international statements, such as the evil, international nature of the threat and the need for unity and cooperation between states and between government structures, can also be traced in what Russian officials say. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the State Duma Committee for Foreign Affairs, is the first to comment, calling both the Moscow metro attack and the Beslan hostage-taking ‘acts of international terrorism’ (I/12:17). After speaking by telephone to the general secretary of the Parliamentary Assembly Council of Europe (PACE), Bruno Aller, Kosachev observes that the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly agrees that the terrorists are backed by ‘international organisations’ and that what is needed is ‘even closer collaboration between all interested states in the critical fight against the most ominous phenomenon of the twenty-first century’ (I/13:13). ‘We have collided head on [столкнулись лицом к лицу] with serious and organised enemies, who must not be underestimated,’ stresses Vladimir Pekhtin, deputy speaker of the State Duma, in his budget discussion of funding the development of ‘new technologies and methods in the fight against terrorism’ (I/15:24). Aleksandr Torshin, deputy speaker of the Federation Council, advocates tightening legislation in the ‘war against terrorism’ (I/15:24) and Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s commissioner for human rights, exhorts all Russian citizens not to panic, but ‘to combine the efforts of society, the authorities, and law-enforcement agencies in the war on terrorism’, which, in an exaggeration of the threat, he calls ‘the Black Death [чума] of the new century’ (I/15:38). Finally, Russian Foreign Affairs minister, Sergei Lavrov, makes a statement, calling for ‘daily cooperation between states and special forces’ and recalling the developments made through Russian initiatives in the UN on the issue of ‘the fight against terrorism’ (I/19:43).

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As the siege continues, three aspects of the Russian responses can be noted. First, the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative begins to emerge more clearly. Secondly, particularly (but not solely) in the televised address of President Putin on the evening of 4 September, references to Soviet and Stalinist societal narratives mark the meta-narrative as a specifically Russian version of the ‘war on terror(ism)’. Thirdly, Russian officials claim the respectfully and gratefully acknowledged international responses as evidence of overwhelming international support for the Russian government and its ‘war on terror(ism)’ practices. Thus, the terrorists are again characterised stereotypically as inherently evil and exaggeratedly powerful. The ‘monstrous terrorist acts’ in Moscow and in Beslan (Valentina Matvienko, governor of St Petersburg, II/10:26) are ‘not uncoordinated’, says Sergei Goncharov, president of the Alpha Special Forces Veterans’ Association. They are ‘not the bacchanalia of furious people, but well-planned acts’, he continues, and ‘there is no hundred percent guarantee that this chain of terror will not continue further . . . Russia’s Number 1 enemy is terrorism’ (II/13:44). ‘We have become witnesses to . . . a new, unprecedented form of “terrorist lawlessness” [беспредел]’ states the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, using a word popular in post-Soviet Russia to invoke a complete breakdown of social order. The ‘monstrous crime .  .  . confirms once again that terrorists are beasts, for whom nothing is sacred. For the sake of their own criminal aims they defy the very basis of civilisation’ (IV/14:08). President Putin, in his first public statements on the siege, immediately conflates the local narrative with the larger narrative, stating that the series of terrorist attacks over the last ten days are ‘directed not only against specific Russian citizens, but against Russia as a whole’ (II/14:26). The calls for unity among the ‘international community’ in the face of this threat are also endorsed here in the Russian responses, along with calls to Russian citizens to unify as a society by cooperating with police and law-enforcement agencies. This is, arguably, an example of the ‘politics of fear’ or ‘decision makers’ promotion and use of audience beliefs and assumptions about danger, risk, and fear, to achieve certain goals’ (Altheide 2006: 416), including reinforcing the necessity and legitimacy of government policy and action. Governor Valentina Matvienko, for example, exhorts St Petersburgers to vigilance (бдительность), ‘an attitude of watchful suspicion’ against all manner of socially constructed enemies that was a crucial element in legitimising the Soviet regime and a requirement of Communist Party members, especially during the Stalinist terror and purges of the 1930s (Fitzpatrick 1999). Matvienko says,

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I once again want to stress that there must be no panic or confusion among us. The city should live in a normal working routine. Only together, only in unity, only trusting and assisting the law-enforcement agencies can we withstand danger. We must be vigilant, allowing nothing suspicious to pass by our attention. Help our police force. Any information may become important and timely for the law-enforcement agencies. (II/10:26)

Moscow mayor, Iurii Luzhkov, explains the eventual decision to cancel Moscow’s City Day celebrations scheduled for that weekend by appealing to this same unified resistance in the face of danger, and reinforces it by linking the present situation to a narrative of Russia’s experience in the Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland (World War Two): This decision does not mean that Muscovites are afraid of terrorists. We were not afraid of the fascists back in the grim year of 1941, we stood up to them and we were victorious, and we will not be afraid of terrorists now. (II/17:41)

This public narrative of victory enjoyed extremely strong currency in Soviet times, particularly since the development in the 1960s of a war cult focused around the annual anniversary Victory Day parades (Tumarkin 1994). After declining somewhat during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years, the parades and the accompanying public narratives of courage and triumph have been restored under President Putin, and are again finding resonance in sections of Russian society (Hutchings and Rulyova 2008). The Russian State Duma, in a statement adopted on 3 September in an extraneous session, appeals to an even older narrative to invoke this sense of unity and victory. ‘In these difficult days,’ states the document, ‘we must remember that throughout the centuries-old history of Russia, not a single enemy has succeeded in breaking the will of our multiethnic people [многонационального народа] and forced it to its knees. Nor will they succeed this time’ (III/19:07). These narratives of invincibility are also embedded in Soviet narratives of success and accomplishment. In his first address to the Soviet people after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin recalls the defeats of Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm, and a few months later, on the occasion of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, invokes the defeat of ‘foreign interventionists’ in 1918 and the inspiration of a roll-call of Russia’s most famous military heroes, from Aleksandr Nevskii in the thirteenth century to Mikhail Kutuzov, the great general of the wars against Napoleon.11 An example of a narrator who can choose not to narrate, President Putin says little about the hostage-taking and the events in Beslan. After

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his first public statements on 2 September, he is absent from the RIANovosti narrative until the very early hours of Saturday, 4 September, when he arrives suddenly at Beslan airport, visits a local hospital for half an hour and then holds a meeting in the city administration building, before returning to the airport and departing just two hours after his arrival. His only reported statements are those made at the beginning of the meeting, which is apparently open to the press before it continues behind closed doors. ‘Today all Russia is concerned for you [переживает за вас], grieves together with you, is grateful to you and is praying for you’ (IV/6:46) he says to North Ossetian president, Aleksandr Dzasokhov. As in his first public statement two days before, Putin again relates the attack to the multiethnic nature of the region, even though this was never a feature of any of the hostage-takers’ communications or demands. ‘One of the aims of the terrorists,’ Putin says, ‘was to sow interethnic hostility, to blow up the whole of our North Caucasus.’ Yet rather than considering the nature and/or the causes of those hostilities and the strategies needed to resolve them, Putin simply instructs those present at the meeting12 ‘to proceed from the assumption that anybody who is tempted [to carry out] similar provocations will be considered by us to be participants in a terrorist act and accomplices of terrorists’ (IV/6:46, emphasis added).13 Putin saves his major public appearance for a broadcast on state television that evening, in an address said to have inaugurated ‘the reassertion of Great Russian patriotism in the context of the rehabilitation of selected aspects of the Soviet imperial past’ (Hutchings and Rulyova 2008: 137). Much attention is paid to this event by RIA-Novosti, which publishes numerous excerpts of the address more than once and posts the full text twice. In the address, Putin clearly uses the language of the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative, namely abstract nouns, binaries and a threat characterised as inhuman, unprecedented and enormous: We are dealing not with individual acts of intimidation, not with the isolated sorties of terrorists. We are dealing with the direct intervention of international terror against Russia. With a total, brutal full-scale war, which again and again takes away the lives of our compatriots. All world experiences indicate that such wars, unfortunately, are not quickly ended. (IV/18:12)

Yet the narrative to which Putin links this war is none of those used so extensively by the Bush administration when explaining the attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001 (see Jackson 2005). Rather, from the ‘several tragic pages and difficult events in Russia’s history’, Putin refers to the ‘collapse of a vast, great state, which turned out to be unvi-

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able [нежизнеспособным] in a quickly changing world’. Although ‘we managed to preserve the core [ядро] of this giant, the Soviet Union and .  .  . called the new country the Russian Federation’, Putin describes how the changes this brought about turned out to be completely different from those which had been hoped for. Transitional economic policies, the loss of a dominant ideology to neutralise internal and interethnic conflicts, the loss of attention paid to defence and security, a lack of understanding of the processes taking place in Russia and in the world left the country defenceless against West and East; in short, ‘we displayed weakness. And the weak are beaten’ (Проявили слабость. А слабых – бьют). This is arguably a direct allusion to Stalin’s famous speech in 1931, in which he argued that collectivisation and rapid industrialisation were essential for the survival of the Soviet Union, particularly in the face of internal and external enemies who strived to destroy it. ‘To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind’ (Задержать темпы – это значит отстать), Stalin said. ‘And those who fall behind get beaten’ (А отсталых бьют).14 In his address, Putin uses not the binary terms of civilisation versus barbarism, but of strong versus weak, unity versus separation and human versus inhuman, all of which work closely together so that, for Putin, strength is equated with unity – his ruling party is United Russia – and humanity, and weakness with separation and inhumanity. It was the collapse of the Soviet Union that made Russia weak, and the aim of terrorists is ‘to destroy and “pull apart” [растащить] Russia’ and ‘tear away from it its piece of the “pie”’. Strength, however, lies ‘in our morals, our courage, and our human solidarity’. But what does it mean for Putin to be strong and unified? Although he speaks of how people in Beslan humanely cared for and supported each other and were not afraid to put themselves at risk for the sake of the lives and security of others, in Putin’s narrative, strength comes from a strong state and an organised, unified society. Thus, Putin promises ‘to create an even more effective system of security’ and ‘to demand from our law-enforcement agencies actions which will be adequate to the level and scope of the new threats’. Putin’s apparent faith in (and desire for) these responses is such that his direct reply to the hostage-takers is a series of abstract, bureaucratic, legislative measures. He vows to ‘strengthen the unity of the country’, ‘create a new system of coordinated forces and resources to exercise control over the situation in the North Caucasus’ and ‘create an effective anti-crisis system of management, including principally new approaches to law enforcement’. This reappraisal will bring unity, Putin concludes. ‘Only then we will defeat the enemy.’

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This, then, is President Putin’s version of the ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative. The binaries and narrative connections found in it differ from those in the Bush administration’s version, yet the abstract language of the meta-narrative and its inherent dichotomies of good versus evil mean that the two versions (and others espoused by other states) easily dovetail. They appear to mean the same thing but, like the abstract language that constitutes it, the meta-narrative itself is abstract, and so comes to mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean. The metanarrative is used to garner wide appeal and support, yet is particularised to serve the Russian government’s own agenda. Not all of the international statements and condemnations (discussed in the previous section) conflate the Beslan hostage-taking with the/a ‘war on terror(ism)’. Yet they still use abstract language and are thus easily and seamlessly incorporated into the Russian version of the meta-narrative. All those states and organisations that condemned ‘all forms of terrorism’, ‘any manifestation of terrorism’, ‘wherever and for whatever reason it happens’ failed to define terrorism. All those condemnations of ‘such acts’, of ‘this and other acts of terrorism’, of ‘all terrorist acts’ failed to specify what they meant by ‘terrorist acts’. The Russian government is free to define the terms as it will, and can point to the international condemnations and responses as unanimous international support for whichever definitions it chooses. The abstract unity of the global community can be defined by the Russian government as ‘the force for good of which we are a part’, and the sympathy, solidarity and support expressed repeatedly towards the Russian government and people can be defined by the Russian state as approval and endorsement for its policies, practices, and the specific actions of the Russian authorities and special forces in Beslan, Chechnya and the North Caucasus. The Kremlin’s press-service sums it up thus: Without exception, the leitmotiv of all the statements from foreign leaders is the same: the firmest condemnation of the inhuman acts of international terrorism in Russia, certainty that all who are responsible for these barbaric actions will be punished as they deserve, support and solidarity for the leadership and people of Russia, and the readiness to develop joint efforts in the fight against international terrorism. (III/19:54)

Yet, there is an exception, an awkward element that does not fit easily into the Russian government’s narrative of events in Beslan, that ‘sounds “discordant” [диссонансом] against the background of condolences’, as Konstantin Kosachev expresses it, ‘inappropriate’ (неуместно по тону), ‘illogical’ (нелогично по содержанию) (IV/15:57)

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and ‘strange’ in the context of such ‘broad international solidarity and support’ (IV/15:53). Bernard Bot, Foreign minister of The Netherlands, allegedly states that the Russian leadership should explain how the tragedy in Beslan happened (IV/14:22). As discussed in Chapter 1, importing an element into a narrative which is essentially incompatible with the overall narrative can lead to three outcomes: a) the construction of a narrative that is essentially incoherent and unworkable (and so would need to be discarded), b) changing the original or receiving narrative, or c) modifying or rejecting the awkward element. In the case of Bernard Bot, the Russian government chooses option c). Bot’s statement is met with bewilderment and indignation. It is ‘blasphemous’ (IV/14:22, IV/15:08, IV/15:49), ‘an insult to those who suffered’ (IV/15:57). The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs complains to The Netherlands’ embassy in Moscow, and the ambassador is summoned to the Ministry to be told that an explanation from The Netherlands’ government is demanded and expected (IV/15:53). The suggestion that the Russian government re-examine the events in Beslan undermines the state’s narrative, which is so dependent on the dichotomy of inherently evil and inherently good. If evil is only capable of evil, and good only capable of good, then all blame can only be placed on the terrorists. By its very nature, says the narrative, the Russian government is capable only of good.15 This is considered a self-evident assumption with no need of reflection or interrogation. The live broadcasts on numerous television stations ‘leave no doubt that the bloody drama was caused by the terrorists’, insists Russian Foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov (IV/14:22, 15:08), a conclusion reiterated by others, further endorsing the narrative. President Bush’s press secretary declares that ‘the responsibility for the tragic deaths of people lies on the terrorists’ (III/19:30) and Richard Baucher from the US State Department states that ‘the blame for the tragedy lies completely on the terrorists’ (IV/00:24). Romano Prodi, chair of the European Union, is reported to state that ‘all blame for what happened lies exclusively on the terrorists’ (IV/15:49). In its objection to Bernard Bot’s statement, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declares that ‘the facts and cause and effects [причинно–следственная связь] with regard to what happened in Beslan are obvious to all. Clear to all, with the exception perhaps of the Dutch representative’ (IV/15:39). Bot’s lone voice is a ‘complete contradiction of the wide international support and manifestations of solidarity with Russia’, says Valerii Loshchinin, first deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry (IV/15:39), and it is rejected outright.

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Embedded anachronic narrative texts: narratives from ‘before’ In the primary narrative text there are five external retroversions with a reach of between about twelve hours and ninety-nine years, all of which function as a means of framing the hostage-taking in Beslan in a very particular way. The first is the inclusion, less than an hour and a half after the attack was first reported, of a summary of events from Russia’s three largest previous hostage-takings. In June 1995, a unit of about a hundred fighters (boeviki) led by Shamil Basaev seized several buildings including a hospital in Budennovsk (Southern Russia), capturing around two thousand people. In January 1996, around three hundred boeviki under the leadership of Salman Raduev seized around two thousand hostages in a hospital in Kizliar, Dagestan, before moving them on to the village of Pervomaiskoe. In October 2002, fifty terrorists led by Movsar Baraev took more than eight hundred people hostage in the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow. In each case, large numbers of civilians were killed and wounded. While Basaev and Raduev both managed to escape, all the terrorists in Moscow ‘were destroyed’ (I/11:30). The second external retroversion, an article filed from Moscow just after midday on 1 September, describes the burning candles and flowers brought the evening before to the Rizhskaia metro station in Moscow, and recalls the explosion near the Krestovskii supermarket as ‘the next link in the series of tragic events’ that includes the destruction of the two passenger airlines (I/12:05). The third external retroversion occurs in an embedded (synchronal) narrative (III/12:49) that describes a prayer service held in Krasnoiarsk (Siberia) before the ‘relics of the holy martyrs, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna and the nun Varvara’, which had recently arrived in Krasnoiarsk from Jerusalem via Irkutsk and were brought to the cathedral in a procession attended by around five thousand ‘believers’. During the prayer service, the archbishop of Krasnoiarsk and Yenisei remarks that ‘the first terrorist acts began in Russia during the time of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fedorovna’ and describes how her husband, the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, brother of Emperor Aleksandr III, was killed by terrorists in 1905. The fourth external retroversion, placed at the end of a report describing an ‘anti-terrorist’ demonstration held in Makhachkhala, Dagestan (III/16:18), briefly recalls that ‘Dagestan has suffered many acts of terrorism – in Kizliar and Pervomaiskoe during the summer, and in the autumn of 1999 when groups of fighters [бандформирования] invaded the territory of the republic.’

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Finally, in a post reporting that Spanish television and leading radio stations have interrupted all scheduling to broadcast live from Beslan (III/16:51), RIA-Novosti notes how the Spanish commentaries, previously sympathetic to ‘Chechen terrorists’, are now changing tune. What follows is an alleged summary of the views of Spanish journalists and specialists on Russia, which is, effectively, Russia’s condensed history of the region: Even though the Chechen problem has existed since the age of the tsars, after the first war in Chechnya, Moscow in practice granted this republic complete sovereignty and withdrew all its security forces. However . . . this led to the complete collapse of all state structures, an orgy of banditry, the practice of mass kidnappings, and finally, the invasion into Dagestan of Shamil Basaev’s Chechen fighters and Arab mercenaries. (III/16:51)

Through all of these external retroversions, RIA-Novosti frames the events in Beslan as yet another terrorist attack on the Russian Federation. Russia knows about terrorism, suggests the narrator through these connections; we are not new to the experience; in fact, we were the first: the wave of terrorist attacks carried out in Russia by the terrorists, or boeviki, of the Social Revolutionary Party in the early twentieth century, of which Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich was a victim, is now widely acknowledged to be the first example of sustained, organised terrorism in the modern period (Geifman 1993). Russia is an experienced veteran in the ‘war on terror(ism)’ and still at the frontline. Embedded synchronal narrative texts located beyond Beslan School No. 1 Of the one hundred and twenty-four posts from Wednesday, 1 September, more than half (71) report not on the actions of the hostage-takers and the hostages, but on the actions of government officials and personnel. These include the adoption of additional security measures in the region and at borders; the preparation and transportation of medical supplies, rescue workers and psychological help; President Putin’s return from holiday in Sochi to Moscow; his high-level meeting with interior minister Rashid Nurgaliev, general prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev and FSB first deputy director Vladimir Pronichev, his telephone call with North Ossetian president, Aleksandr Dzasokhov; the appointment of Vladimir Iakovlev, presidential plenipotentiary in the Southern Federal Region, to head of operation headquarters in Beslan; the cancellation of passenger flights; and the setting up of a telephone ‘hotline’. As with the official statements that form the bulk of RIA-

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Novosti’s narrative text, these actions are never queried. Together they build up a picture of a resourceful and effective state moving quickly and efficiently to respond appropriately to the crisis. Meanwhile, life goes on. The tragic events bear no influence on the rouble’s rate of exchange with the US dollar, Moscow’s streets and metro stations appear as normal, and its school children, bearing the customary bouquets of flowers, fill its schools. This pattern continues on Thursday, 2 September, where almost three-quarters (72) of the dispatches posted that day focus on the actions of government officials and personnel. In the early hours of the morning, there is particular emphasis on the emergency session of the United Nations Security Council being held in New York to discuss the ‘series of recent terrorist acts in Russia’ (II/00:07, II/1:25, II/4:40, II/4:50, II/5:45, II/8:46). The actions of President Putin, who meets that day with King Abdullah II of Jordan and cancels his impending official visit to Turkey, are included, as are government responses to the crisis. These include increased security in Moscow’s schools, in St Petersburg and on the railways; the maintenance of, and many responses to, the twentyfour hour telephone ‘hotline’; the closure of all Beslan schools; the decision to go ahead with plans for the Moscow City Day celebrations on 4–5 September, which were then shortened and eventually cancelled; the preparation of the delivery of medical supplies and International Red Cross aid; and changes to the train services in and out of Vladikavkaz and Nazran. On Friday, 3 September, this pattern changes and, for the first time, just over half (87) of the day’s posts report directly on events taking place in or near School No. 1. This is probably to be expected, since this is the day of the denouement of the hostage-taking with its dramatic, visible ‘action’. Nevertheless, journalists’ access to the school is limited. The cordon around the school is extended to beyond the Palace of Culture after two shots are fired from a grenade launcher during the night, and when shooting breaks out in the middle of the day after the explosions, people are pushed back from the cordon, making it difficult for journalists to see what is going on near the school itself. Hence, a number of reports filed from Beslan that day concern not the crisis itself but the responses of the authorities to it: all North Ossetian Interior Ministry subdivisions are placed on alert to prevent the terrorists from leaving Beslan, field hospitals are set up, the International Red Cross Committee is delivering medicines, equipment and personnel to the hospital in Beslan, donors are giving blood, and Dr Roshal and the North Ossetian minister of Health visit the wounded in hospitals in Vladikavkaz and Beslan. Several posts report the growing number of

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people admitted to various hospitals, from over one hundred and fifty to five hundred and fifty-six, including three hundred and thirty-two children. Three times it is reported that the wounded and the hospitals lack for nothing. ‘The wounded have all they need. We have blood, all medicines and dressings,’ says the North Ossetian Ministry of Health (III/17:09), a claim repeated in a later report even though the number of wounded has risen from ‘around three hundred’ in the first report to four hundred and twenty-nine in the second. The International Red Cross Committee also says there is enough medicine, medical materials and blood supplies in Beslan and media reports that the electricity supply to the town was interrupted are refuted, with a report that ‘the energy supply to the Beslan City Hospital was working without interruption [and] the victims were receiving the necessary medical assistance’ (III/18:02).16 Further afield, the Federal Fund of Obligatory Medical Insurance holds a special meeting and decides to direct sixteen million roubles to North Ossetia for the treatment of the wounded; the Russian State Duma holds an extraneous session and unanimously adopts a statement in connection with the situation in North Ossetia; a flying rescue hospital is deployed, complete with specialised doctors, highly qualified personnel and ‘all necessary medicines and equipment’; (III/16:45); two Il-76 airplanes from the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, equipped with intensive care units and teams of medical specialists, leave Moscow to pick up injured former hostages; and another airplane departs for Beslan from Rostov-on-Don with six surgeons and essential medicines on board. In an army firing range near Vladikavkaz, explosives discovered in, and removed from, the school in Beslan are destroyed. Promises for the future are already being made. Russian prime minister, Mikhail Fradkov, commissions the Ministries of Health, Finance, Economic Development, Emergency Situations, and Education and Science, together with the North Ossetian government, to ‘introduce into government projects resolutions regarding assistance for the victims of Beslan’ (III/17:55), including the victims’ recuperation, the rendering of assistance to the families of the dead and wounded, and also the rebuilding of the school in Beslan. Moscow District earmarks two million roubles for materially assisting the victims of the terrorist attack, is prepared to bear the cost of the rest and recuperation of the children of Beslan, and will support regional medical institutions treating wounded and suffering adults. On Saturday, 4 September, the focus of the narrator again moves away from School No. 1 and its immediate vicinity, with less than a quarter (39) of the day’s posts describing events occurring there.

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Attention turns instead to the treatment of the wounded, with many posts reporting the numbers of wounded in various hospitals in Beslan and Vladikavkaz, patients’ discharge, admittance or movement from one hospital to another, the nature and condition of their injuries, and the number of people who died in hospital. One report describes the work of the Ministry for Emergency Situations airmobile hospital set up in the grounds of a Beslan hospital and the treatment there of two Ministry for Emergency Situations personnel, who ‘are able to walk unaided, and were smiling and joking with the doctors in spite of their situation’ (IV/11:31). Dr Roshal, who has been visiting the hospitals, praises the qualified staff and says they have everything they need for the treatment of the children (IV/11:38). The narrator follows particularly closely the two Il-76 Ministry for Emergency Situations airplanes that fly from Moscow to Beslan to collect severely wounded children.17 The planes leave Beslan each with reportedly three severely wounded children and their parents on board, and arrive at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport at 9:18 and 9:22. From there, four children are admitted to the 9th Hospital, one to the Morozovskaia Hospital and one to the 7th Hospital. While two hundred beds in various Moscow hospitals have been prepared to receive more wounded children, and a third airplane is reported to have left Moscow for Beslan, the narrator continues to relate the plight of these first six children. RIA-Novosti publishes each child’s initial and surname, age, the nature of their injuries and the medical departments in which they are receiving treatment. The successful emergency operations on three of the children are reported, along with the conditions of all six children, the arrangements made for their parents and the responses of the staff, who are ‘very concerned for them, as if for our own children’ (IV/16:09). Later that evening, there is an update on the very youngest patient from Beslan, ‘not yet two years old’, whose condition is said to be the most critical (IV/19:10). Later again is an even more explicit account of his injuries and condition, and an update on all four children being treated at the 9th Hospital from the head doctor there, Petr Prodeus. Finally there is an account of seven-year-old Amina Kochmazova, recovering in the cardiology and respiratory department of the Morozovskaia Children’s City Clinical Hospital. Now ‘transferred to a general ward, she is weak after the anaesthesia, but she will improve’, says the manager of the department, Iulia Zakharova (IV/22:30), who also describes how visitors brought toys and presents for the girl. ‘Visitors just came. They were people I treated last year and now they came to see me. They know about the girl and brought her lots of toys. Very beautiful toys,’

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says Zakharova. ‘Now the girl is in a stable condition,’ she concludes (IV/23:06). This embedded, detailed narrative, so unlike the repeated reporting of numbers that characterises the information available from hospitals in North Ossetia, exemplifies the care and provision of the state for these unfortunate young children. In contrast to the violence and disregard of the terrorists who inflicted the burns, gunshot wounds and eye damage on them, the government provides them with transport to the best specialist medical care in the capital, where they are saved by skilled, concerned professionals and the kindness of strangers. Hutchings and Rulyova (2009) note that Vremia, the main news programme on Russian state television, also ‘made much of the transportation of injured children to Moscow hospitals’ to the extent that the children’s arrival in Moscow was portrayed ‘as a homecoming from the traumas of the front line’ (2009: 78). Putin reinforces this image when, in Beslan, he calls North Ossetia ‘an outpost [форпост] of Russia in the south’, while, in his televised address to the nation, he embraces Beslan as ‘a Russian city’. The concern and kindness of strangers are found also in the streets of Moscow, where Muscovites lay flowers at the North Ossetian ‘embassy’, and abroad, where flowers and candles are laid at the Russian embassies in Tallinn and Narva in Estonia, Warsaw and Washington DC, where donations are also collected. The Dagestan Centre for Medical Disasters sends a team of doctors, surgeons and intensive care specialists to North Ossetia, along with dressings, antibiotics, anaesthetics and other preparations at a cost of thirty thousand roubles. The Russian branch of the International Red Cross Committee organises an appeal for the donation of toys, games, books and school materials for ‘the suffering children of Beslan’ (IV/12:46), and in Rostov-on-Don, Moscow and Makhachkala, people flock to clinics to donate blood. The football match held in Moscow between Russia and Slovakia that evening begins with a minute’s silence. Plans for the future continue. ‘Suffering children from Beslan will be offered the best health resorts on the Black Sea coast and near Moscow, where they will be able to undergo treatment and study at the same time,’ the Russian minister for Education and Science tells journalists in Beslan, stressing that the children will be offered places together with their parents (IV/15:26). The Russian Ministry of Transport is sending four buses to Beslan; Aeroflot is offering to provide free transport for children to hospitals and sanatoriums in Russia and abroad for treatment and convalescence; Russian Railways offers its hospitals and holiday hotels for the free treatment and convalescence of two hundred and fifty

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people, and there is talk of a new school, to be ready for 1 September next year. All of these continue the characterisation of government authorities as well resourced, generous and competent, responding appropriately and effectively to the crisis: evidence of ‘Russia’s refusal to be bowed by Beslan’ (Hutchings and Rulyova 2009: 79). President Putin himself visits Beslan, very early on the Saturday morning, an event considered to be of some significance by RIANovosti, who closely tracks his every move and public statement. From the airport, Putin travels to the Beslan District Clinical Hospital where fifty former hostages have been admitted. Met by the chief doctor, and accompanied by North Ossetian president Dzasokhov, Putin visits ‘all the wards, beginning with those for the seriously wounded’, including the bedside of Lidiia Tsalieva, the director of Beslan’s School No. 1. After half an hour, Putin makes his way to operation headquarters, where he recalls the various directives he has already given in Moscow (closing borders, conducting checks), instructs lists to be compiled of those who need support, expresses condolences, offers to send victims for treatment and rehabilitation, and stresses that the use of force was not planned. ‘Events developed very quickly and unexpectedly,’ he says, ‘but the members of the special forces displayed particular courage’ and ‘also suffered great losses’. The meeting continues behind closed doors, and less than fifteen minutes later Putin departs for the airport. He does not visit School No. 1, less than a few hundred metres away, and neither does the narrator. The cordon remains in place, keeping relatives and journalists away. Embedded synchronal narrative texts located in or near Beslan School No. 1 From actors to characters: who are the hostage-takers? By far the most frequent word used on 1 September by RIA-Novosti to describe the group of hostage-takers is boeviki. Used before 1917 to describe armed revolutionaries, by the 1980s the term was used in the Soviet press to refer to those involved in a range of conflicts, including Kashmiri and Punjabi separatists, Ulster Unionists and the IRA in Northern Ireland, Red Brigade terrorists in Italy and even Solidarity members in Poland. During the First Chechen War (1994–96), it was the word most commonly used, even by a relatively sympathetic Russian press, to refer to Chechen fighters. Today, boeviki is used frequently in the North Caucasus and in the Russian press, yet the nuances and connotations of the term and the English words used to translate it have become problematic in both

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Russian and English reportage. Valery Tishkov discusses it briefly in an attempt to define it and its usage: It is hard to pinpoint the moment when the word boevik entered the post-Soviet lexicon, but in time it became inseparable from the ethnic conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and Tajikistan. It corresponds more or less to the English words ‘insurgent,’ ‘combatant,’ ‘militant,’ or ‘freedom fig hter,’ but it eventually lost any political neutrality it might once have had. In Russian, it literally means ‘fighter,’ but in its new form it has a connotation close to ‘commando,’ ‘mercenary,’ or ‘paramilitary.’ (2004:90–91)18

Arguably, ‘any political neutrality it might once have had’ had already been lost in the early days of the Soviet Union when boeviki was used to describe members of the military organisations of the revolutionary parties, particularly of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and Lenin’s opposition to their terrorist activities ensured their negative representation in the Soviet press (Ushakov 1935:163). Moreover, the political connotations of the word (and thus the various possible translations of it into English) depend very much on who is using it, including those who appropriate it for themselves as a means of resistance, a point perhaps missed by Tishkov, who, when meeting Beslan Gantemirov – leader of an armed faction in Chechnya in the run-up to the First Chechen War – for the first time, was evidently ‘struck’ by his ‘ironic defiance’ when introducing himself as a boevik. It is the word used consistently by locals in their eyewitness accounts of the Beslan attack, yet any of the translations Tishkov suggests would sound awkward if used in those personal narratives. Nick Paton Walsh, a journalist for The Guardian, calls it ‘a catchall word that epitomises the gulf in perceptions in the [Chechen] conflict. It translates directly as “fighter”, but means to some locals “separatist fighter” and to Russian officials “terrorist militant”’ (2004) and is thus emblematic of the contestation between circulating narratives. Other high-frequency appellations used by RIA-Novosti on 1 September are ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandits’, a derogatory term associated with criminals and mafia but also used, since the First Chechen War, for Chechen separatists.19 Other terms include нападавшие (attackers), захватившие or захватчики (hostage-takers, aggressors, invaders) and преступники (criminals). The group of hostage-takers is reported to include two террористки-смертницы (female terrorist ‘suicidebombers’- the root of the word means ‘death’ and it is also used for males) or shakhidki, a Russianised feminine form of the Arabic word shahid (or shaheed) coined by Russian newspapers after the 2002 Dubrovka hostage siege. In contrast to very broad Arabic uses of the word, in Russian shakhidka means a female suicide-bomber.20

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On 2 September, terroristy becomes the most frequent word used by RIA-Novosti to describe the hostage-takers, with boeviki now used only about half as many times, a pattern that continues into 3 and 4 September. These two terms are used virtually interchangeably, along with the occasional use of bandity, with others such as ‘hostage-takers’, ‘criminals’, band (gang) and ‘attackers’ gradually all but disappearing from the text. The word terrorist is not easily defined and in contemporary usage has become emotionally and politically highly charged. The overwhelming use of the word to refer to the hostage-takers in Beslan immediately and reiteratively connects the local Beslan narrative, with its very particular horrors and dangers, to the larger narrative of ‘the war on terror(ism)’. If terrorists are characters in both narratives, then it is easy to conflate the two, as the Russian authorities do so readily and insistently. Jackson argues that the current fear of terrorism . . . began in the early 1980s when officials started to apply the term ‘terrorism’ to acts of violence that they had previously called hijackings, bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and sabotage. As a result of this reclassification, it appeared there was a new plague of terrorist violence. (2005: 95)

In the same way, the hostage-takers in Beslan are effectively ‘reclassified’ by RIA-Novosti’s persistent, prevailing use of the word ‘terrorist’ in preference to other available, more specific words. Thus, the practices of ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative come to bear on the local Beslan narrative. While attackers, hostage-takers and criminals may be open to negotiation and the full force of the law, terrorists are not to be negotiated with and must be destroyed. By extension and association, boeviki are also terrorists in the RIANovosti narrative, with any variances of local meaning and usage lost, as one word is regularly interchanged for the other. Akhmed Zakaev, the Chechen-Ichkerian Foreign minister granted political asylum in Britain in 2003, is characterised as the ‘emissary of the Chechen boeviki’, and RIA-Novosti’s London correspondent bluntly refuses to appear on British television with him, on the grounds that ‘as a Russian journalist I cannot discuss any issues in connection with the situation in Chechnya and the hostage taking in Beslan . . . together with Akhmed Zakaev, a terrorist’ (III/20:44). Russian Foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, is equally scathing of Zakaev, who ‘having “buried himself” in London, said today that the Russian leadership alone is guilty for everything that happened in Beslan’, and attempts to stretch the terrorist characterisation to Bernard Bot, the Dutch Foreign minister who asked the Russian

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government for an explanation regarding the events in Beslan. ‘I do not want to suspect that he [Bot] helps people such as Akhmed Zakaev [who are] directly connected with terrorists’ (IV/15:08), says Lavrov. This chain of characterisations, whereby the hostage-takers are terrorists, terrorists are Chechens, and both Chechens and hostage-takers are international terrorists, permeates the RIA-Novosti narrative, even though the identity of the hostage-takers (indeed the very number of hostage-takers, including how many were killed or arrested or escaped) remains vague throughout. There are conjectures that the group is led by an Ingush known as ‘Magas’, the same person who led the attack on Nazran, Ingushetia on the night of 21 June 2004, and that the hostagetakers are from ‘The Islamic Battalion of Martyrs’ terrorist organisation, ‘Riyad as-Salikhiin’, described by RIA-Novosti as ‘an international terrorist organisation banned by the UN and the USA, which was created, and is controlled by, the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basaev, who organised terrorist attacks in Budennovsk in 1995 and in Moscow in 2002’ (I/21:18). On the morning of 2 September, four different officials state variously that ‘[w]e cannot yet say who these people are and who is behind them’ (II/7:19), that the group is made up of ‘Ossetians, Ingush, Chechens and Russians’ (II/8:46), or ‘natives of Chechnya and Ingushetia and several other nationalities’ (II/9:14). The FSB are sure they know who the hostage-takers are – ‘We have succeeded in establishing [their] identities,’ says Andreev (II/9:14) – but what they are, he does not say, and nothing more is said for the rest of the day or, in fact, until the afternoon of the next day. Just over an hour after the first explosions on 3 September, RIANovosti reports from the Beslan law-enforcement agencies that ‘two women-terrorists [женщины-террористки]’ and ‘several terrorists’ were trying to merge into the crowd’ (III/14:17). Later, Beslan residents lynch one of the men detained by military servicemen, ‘because they decided that this was a boevik’ (III/17:00). Another man, delivered under escort to a nearby police station, was also thought to be a boevik. By evening, official statements were citing more concrete figures: ten boeviki have been destroyed (III/18:57), nine of them were Arabs and there were representatives from a number of Caucasus republics. ‘The terrorists were “international” [“интернационал”],’ says Russian presidential advisor, Aslambek Aslakhanov, using a neologism from the English rather than the Russian международный (III/19:17). Valerii Andreev from the North Ossetian FSB claims ‘twenty terrorists, including ten from countries of the Arab world’ had been destroyed (III/19:23), and North Ossetian law-enforcement agencies claim the gang was made

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up of Chechens, Ingush, Arabs and Turkish mercenaries (III/19:34). Here again is the claim that the operation was led by Magomed Evloev, known as ‘Magas’, but now it is reported that whether he was in fact one of the hostage-takers had not been established. ‘As a rule, the heads of the band formations do not go to their deaths, but send their assistants,’ says a source from the North Ossetian law-enforcement agencies (III/19:34). The link to Chechnya-Ichkeria is also repeated here, with the suggestion from the law-enforcement agencies that Doku Umarov, ‘one of the heads of the band formations operating in Chechnya’ could have coordinated and directed the capture of the school, as North Ossetia is his ‘zone of “responsibility” among the boeviki’ (III/19:34). RIANovosti reinforces the link to Ichkeria with the headline for this bulletin, claiming the ‘Seizure of the School in Beslan was Planned by [Shamil] Basaev and [Aslan] Maskhadov’. Live on state television, Valerii Andreev continues to characterise the terrorists as ‘international’. Among the twenty terrorists destroyed are now not only ten Arabs but ‘a black person’ (негр), a ‘fact that indicates that the seizure of the school was planned by international terrorists’ (II/20:13), although Andreev cannot say precisely how many boeviki had taken part in the hostage-taking and does not answer questions on whether any of the terrorists have been captured (III/21:29). General Lieutenant Viktor Sobolev, commander of the 58th Army, however, tells Russian television station NTV that, while almost all of the bandits were destroyed, some were detained. In the same bulletin, Lev Dzugaev reports that three terrorists have been detained in Beslan and members of the law-enforcement agencies are ‘working with them’ (III/23:45). By the early hours of the next day, the arrest of three boeviki becomes ‘unofficial information’ (IV/1:58) but, along with ‘the search for the boeviki who were able to break out of the cordon’ (IV/00:47), is not mentioned again in the RIA-Novosti narrative. The number of hostagetakers destroyed, however, rises to twenty-seven (IV/1:58) and then finally to ‘more than thirty of various nationalities’ (IV/13:02, 13:05). Who were the hostage-takers? How many were there? How many were killed? How many were in custody? How many escaped? After four days of reporting, RIA-Novosti can say little about the hostagetakers, except that they are entirely to blame for the deaths of the hostages. ‘These tragic events in Beslan were broadcast live on many television channels, and the footage leaves no doubt that the bloody drama was caused by the terrorists, who lost their nerve,’ says Russian Foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov (IV/14:22). This nebulous characterisation of unquestionable evil can be understood as both stemming from, and easily assumed into (or framed by),

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the larger narrative and practices of ‘the war on terror(ism)’, which characterise the terrorist enemy as international, everywhere and solely to blame, yet at the same time nowhere, uncountable, unknowable and unnameable. It seems as if they are like so many cockroaches that appear from nowhere and then scatter in all directions as you swipe at them. The number of corpses that are swept up afterwards may prompt one to say, as Andreev does, that the operation to destroy them was successful, but where they came from, how they did what they did and where they went afterwards are questions nobody really expects to be able to answer. Living with the threat of cockroaches, it seems, is just part of living in cockroach-infested territory.21 Narratives from inside the school On 4 September, narratives from inside the school appear in the primary narrative text for the first time. They are posted in the evening, a day after the siege has come to an end, after the fighting has ceased, and after bodies and debris have been removed from the school. The first of these is told by Sergei Fridinskii, deputy procurator of the Russian Federation for the Southern Federal District (IV/17:15). Fridinskii’s arrival in Beslan is reported just before five pm on 3 September, almost four hours after the initial explosions. He is also among those who attended the early morning meeting with President Putin on 4 September and, on Saturday afternoon, he speaks to journalists about the number of dead. In a live appearance on Russian television, Fridinskii speaks about ‘the atrocities of the boeviki’, how ‘they were leading the hostages out and shooting them from time to time . . . putting people against the wall and shooting them for the smallest show of insubordination . . .’. The second narrative relating events occurring inside the school is told by Alina Tsomartova-Levitskaia, the North Ossetian minister for Education (IV/19:42, IV/20:19), who appears here in the narrative for the first and only time. In an interview with RIA-Novosti, the minister describes how, even when taunted and threatened by the hostage-takers, ‘the children behaved heroically and with dignity. They understood, just by watching, what their teachers wanted to say to them. Even the small children, sinking into unconsciousness, were morally supported by the older children.’ She relates how ‘a fourteen-year-old girl shielded her nine-year-old brother, and received shrapnel wounds to her head’ and how the PE teacher was shot for comforting a small child. This narrative is endorsed in the same bulletin by the Russian minister for Education, Andrei Fursenko, who says the teachers had conducted themselves ‘with great dignity’ and tells how he and Tsomartova-

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Levitskaia had met with the director of the school, ‘who also behaved heroically (she was wounded and is in hospital) [and who] spoke of the teachers, how they behaved with dignity’ (IV/20:19). The graphic detail of both of these narratives strongly suggests a narrative perspective, or focalisation, that could only have come from an eyewitness or eyewitnesses of the events described. Yet neither Fridinskii nor Tsomartova-Levitskaia was inside the school when these events took place. They themselves are not the eyewitnesses, who remain anonymous. Fursenko suggests that ‘the director of the school’ was a source of information for Tsomartova-Levitskaia’s story but neither the director’s personal narrative nor any of her accompanying nonverbal communications are included. The personal narratives of the anonymous eyewitnesses are completely effaced by the interpretive voices of these two temporary narrators, who linguistically pose, as it were, as eyewitnesses. Common to both these narratives is the characterisation of the terrorists as evil, cruel and brutal. They shoot, and threaten to shoot, at random, creating an almost unimaginably dangerous and horrific situation for the hostages, who, in contrast, are ‘heroic and dignified’, protecting and supporting each other. These characterisations are completely congruent with those found in ‘the war on terror(ism)’ metanarrative used so emphatically by Russian officials when speaking about the events in Beslan. There is nothing here that contradicts that official narrative. Both these narratives from inside the school (and the two told by former hostages, see below) are internal retroversions, interrupting the narrative to relate events that took place earlier. In the discussion of internal retroversions in Chapter 1, I suggested that their function is either to ‘fill in the gaps’ with information that was not previously available, or to indicate that the events related are not deemed by the narrator to be of great significance. In this case, it is unlikely that the information was not previously available. Caucasian Knot, for example, includes eyewitnesses’ stories from inside the school already on the second day of the siege. While the school itself, and sections of its immediate vicinity, were inaccessible to journalists,22 the borders between these restricted areas and the location of the press were porous, with people and information crossing them at numerous times throughout the siege. Why the gap, then? Are these narratives insignificant? These stories contradict official assurances that ‘none of the children are suffering’ (I/21:28), that although some people had been killed, none of them were children and ‘the condition of the children was satisfactory’ (II/7:19). The twenty-six hostages released on the afternoon of 2 September

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through the mediation of Ruslan Aushev (whose story from inside the school is not included) were interviewed by the law-enforcement agencies or sent to hospital before going home that evening, where they were, presumably, free to speak to anybody they liked, yet their stories from inside the school are incorporated into the RIA-Novosti narrative only through an official source. Lev Dzugaev, press-secretary for the North Ossetian president, claims they ‘feel more or less satisfactory’ although, understandably, they are ‘experiencing psychological stress’ (II/19:56). In addition, conditions inside the school were apparently ‘satisfactory, although the situation is very difficult’ (II/20:18). Even on the morning of the third day of the siege, Dr Roshal was assuring relatives of the hostages that there was ‘no threat to the lives of the children’, that even without water they could survive for ‘eight to nine days’ (III/8:10). There is no place here, among all these reassurances, for stories of terrorist atrocities. The temporal location in the narrative text for these atrocities is after it has been firmly established that all blame for the deaths of hostages is to be placed solely on the terrorists. Only after the official narrative of a ‘successful operation to release the hostages’ undertaken by heroic members of the special forces is elaborated in the aftermath of the siege are these graphic narratives included in the narrative text, where they serve to endorse, rather than undermine, the overall narrative of an effective, benevolent state working diligently to protect its brave and heroic citizens from the inhuman evil of international terrorism. Personal narratives: eyewitness accounts On 1 September, ‘according to eyewitnesses’, fifteen boeviki seized the school, two local residents were wounded and the bandity drove the children into the school sports hall, although supposedly one child managed to escape. The boeviki were dressed in black clothing and bullet-proof vests, their faces covered by masks, and they were armed with grenade throwers and guns. They attacked during the school assembly, shooting into the air. Around fifty children ran off when the school was seized. Two school girls who managed to escape said the boeviki were behaving aggressively and frightening the children, and that one of the boeviki was wounded.23 Eyewitnesses also report thick smoke belching from a nearby building apparently on fire, and the arrival of several fire crews. Relatives of the children taken hostage say that Lidiia Tsalieva, the director of the school, and several other teachers need medicine for their diabetes. They also estimate that there could have been between four and five hundred people, children and their families, at the morning assembly. All of these eyewitnesses, including

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the two girls who managed to escape, are anonymous and all of their words are reported as indirect rather than direct speech. On 2 September, although journalists, local residents and relatives of the hostages share the same space near the Palace of Culture, just several hundred metres from the school, there are no bulletins at all drawing on information from eyewitnesses. When twenty-six women and children are released from the school late that afternoon, nothing is reported from them. On 3 September, five bulletins drawing on eyewitnesses are posted within about ninety minutes after the explosions that triggered the end of the siege, including the first and only direct quote from an eyewitness, again anonymous, who says, ‘People began running out from the hall of the school. The terrorists began shooting. The security forces [силовые ведомства] opened fire in reply, in order to save those who had run out.’ Eyewitnesses also say the boeviki tried to break out of the school and [run] into the town,24 and that around forty children were led out of the school. Five minutes later, another forty children were led out of the school, most of them naked or half-dressed. A significant number of hostages walked or ran out of the school towards operation headquarters, where they were put into cars and driven off to hospitals. The final eyewitness source is posted at 17:00 as part of a bulletin describing the lynching by a crowd of local residents. One of the eyewitnesses says the man thought to be a boevik was shot by one of the local residents. On 4 September, this pattern of reporting changes, with four evening posts that include the personal narratives of four eyewitnesses, two of whom are surviving hostages. The first post (IV/20:14) describes the situation in Beslan and the mood of the people on the streets, and includes forty-five-year-old Madina, the owner of a café near operation headquarters, who says, in conversation with the RIA-Novosti correspondent, that there was no hot food today because the cook and others from her staff were looking for their relatives. Another Beslan resident, thirty-year-old policeman Alan, says in the same post that after the fighting (бой), he tried to get into the grounds of the school and find his niece. ‘During the fighting I was really close and it seemed to me that I saw her face in the window of the building. However now there’s investigative work going on there and none of us are allowed in,’ he says. The first personal narrative of a surviving hostage is that of fifthgrader Arsen Khasigov, taken hostage with his younger brother, Soslan, and their mother: ‘They didn’t give us anything to eat or drink. We were in the sports hall. There were men, women and children there. Home-made bombs were fas-

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tened with Scotch tape to ropes strung along the hall. One time the Scotch tape broke and a bomb fell on a woman but it didn’t go off,’ said Arsen. In the sports hall a rope with home-made bombs was also strung between the basketball hoops. ‘They fired blanks at us to scare us. At first they told us to stand, and everyone stood up, and then another terrorist made everyone sit down, and that happened a few times,’ added the school boy. He said that ‘the terrorists took their clothes off them, urinated on the clothes and threw them around, saying “drink!”’ Arsen Khasigov told how the three home-made bombs which were stuck to the rope went off in the sports hall. The doors and windows of the sports hall were blown out by the explosion and people began to run. ‘Then they began shooting at us. There were two exits, we knew one of them was mined and my brother and I ran to the other one. When we ran outside onto the street, our special forces guys were there with automatics,’ said the school boy. The Khasigov brothers were not wounded and their mother is in hospital. A neighbour has taken in the boys. (IV/20:19)

The second personal narrative of a surviving hostage is found in the last post of the day, published just before midnight, and the only post from Beslan to have the correspondent’s name, Aleksei Berezin, in the by-line. It appears to be an interview with Alina, who was taken hostage with her eight-year-old daughter, Ilona. Alina says that, as soon as the terrorists had locked themselves into the school, they shot a forty-year-old man in front of everyone. ‘They wanted to show us that they weren’t joking,’ Alina said. ‘On the first day it started raining, and there was a heavy thunderstorm. After the first clap of thunder the boeviki jumped up from their places and seized their weapons, grenades and explosive devices. They yelled out that if this was an assault [штурм], then they would blow everybody up.’ She said that the terrorists were extremely nervous, but after a while they calmed down, realising that it was thunder. ‘Later the boeviki took out about twenty men and shot them, either in the corridor or in one of the classrooms. The men didn’t know they were being taken out to be shot, they just told them that they needed to go to another building, and after a while we heard shots and cries and everything became clear’. ‘The boeviki said that if their demands were met, then everyone would stay alive, but if not then they would blow everyone up,’ said the former hostage. She said that there was nothing more for her to do and she began to pray. Towards evening on the second day all the terrorists began to get very nervous. During the night they took all the middle-aged women to the old sports hall and surrounded them with explosives, recalled Alina. The

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children began to get hysterical. ‘I comforted my child by saying that everything would be alright.’ ‘Everyone was in a really bad way. Already on the second day women were only half-conscious,’ Alina recalls. On the morning of 3 September, the boeviki were already ignoring any requests for food and water. ‘You’ll die where you are sitting,’ they said. ‘On the morning of the third day, I asked for water for a child who was unconscious and they refused. Even though our government was prepared to give us food and water the boeviki didn’t let them.’ ‘We were sitting down the whole time, they didn’t let us stand up, only – and this was rarely allowed – to take a child to the toilet. During the whole time we practically didn’t sleep. They took our mobile phones away from us and said that ‘if anybody’s rang, they would kill them. If anybody kept their mobile phone and was discovered, then the boeviki promised they would immediately kill twenty people,’ said Alina. The hostages, she said, were forbidden to stand or speak. If they did, they’d be dead. Periodically, said Alina, for breaking a rule, the boeviki would take out an older student, put a gun to his head and promise to shoot him. It was very difficult to calm the children. The boeviki hung bombs all over the sports hall building and joined them up with wires. However, they did this really carelessly – the wires were stuck on with Scotch tape and they themselves, walking past were always catching on them. ‘The bombs could have gone off accidentally,’ said Alina. She said that all the wires came together at an armchair in the centre of the hall. A pedal, activating all the bombs, was under the foot of a terrorist sitting in this armchair. The boeviki made it clear that if there was an assault, then whoever was sitting on the chair would press the pedal and everything would get blown up. ‘On the first day, after some of the bombs were already set up, one of them exploded and killed a man,’ said the former hostage. ‘On 3 September, the boeviki had calmed down. The situation, evidently, had stabilized. People were calming each other and the children, but the situation none the less, was terrible. I was calming my daughter and telling her that we would be home by lunch and soon I would buy her plenty of cold water,’ said Alina. Towards noon on 3 September, the boeviki were quarrelling and even began shooting into the walls. Alina said that the bandits were arguing in Chechen, and even though [she] knows a little of this language, she couldn’t understand what had caused the quarrel. And suddenly, she said, somewhere several metres away a bomb went off. It was strong, but nobody was hurt. After a while a second bomb went off, stronger than the first one. Everything was on fire and in smoke, remembers Alina. ‘My whole back was on fire, I was burned. My child, who I was shielding with my body,

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was burnt on the leg. As a result of the explosion the glass broke. I seized my child, dashed forward and literally threw her out the window, and bracing myself, jumped out of the window’. Alina said that the windowsill was a little higher than she was. Shooting began. Everything was on fire and covered in smoke. ‘I threw myself towards the window, barefoot on the glass,’ she remembers. She said that making her way to the window, she saw bodies torn apart by the explosion. The roof began to collapse after the first explosion and when the second explosion went off there were already no boeviki in the hall, only one remained, the one sitting on the armchair. ‘We ran through the back courtyard of the school, and the special forces guys covered us with return fire. I ran to a five-storey block of flats and jumped into the doorway. There were soldiers there. They led us to an apartment, where I ran into the bathroom. I put my child in the bath, lay down in it myself and turned on the water. We drank for about forty minutes. Then they led us out to the fifth floor and, through the attic and the roof, took us next door. We went down to the street and they came and helped us,’ said Alina (IV/23:43).

Just like the two other narratives from inside the school (related by Fridinskii and Tsomartova-Levitskaia), these two personal narratives are congruent with the official narratives elaborated in the RIA-Novosti primary text. Both highlight the random, mocking cruelty and brutality of the hostage-takers, who are described as nervous, amateurish and quarrelsome. It is they alone who cause the deaths and terrible sufferings of the hostages. It is their home-made bombs that explode in the sports hall. In contrast, these narratives characterise the Russian government as the force for good. Khasigov describes how, when he and his brother ran outside, ‘our special forces guys [наши спецназовцы] were there with automatics’, at which point his personal narrative ends; the boys are saved. Alina highlights the difference between ‘our’ benevolent government, which ‘was prepared to give us food and water’ and the cruel terrorists, who ‘didn’t let them’ (не дали это сделать). She also describes her escape with her daughter: they are aided by special forces, led to safety by soldiers and assisted when they emerge onto the street, at which point the narrative ends; they are saved. Furthermore, both personal narratives (again like the others from inside the school) are placed very late in the primary narrative text, well over twenty-four hours after the siege’s end. They are appropriated only after other temporary narrators have established that the terrorists are solely to blame for the atrocities suffered by the hostages, and that the state did all it could to save them. With regard to the representation of experience, Riessman (1993) asks who determines what the narrative means and whether alternative

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readings are possible. In the case of these personal narratives, it is undoubtedly RIA-Novosti as narrator, rather than the hostages, who determines their meanings. By selecting just two personal narratives (out of potentially hundreds) that fit congruently with the official narrative of events, and including them only after that official narrative has been elaborated, RIA-Novosti ensures that these narratives become graphic endorsements for the official narrative, or ‘particular excerpts to display [the narrator’s] interpretive framework’ (Riessman 1993: 25). Although there are severe constraints on alternative readings of these narratives because readers have access neither to the original communications – gestures, tone of voice and other nonverbal aspects, for example, are not described by the narrator – nor to any of the hundreds of other personal narratives from inside the school, alternatives are possible. Twice Alina mentions threats from the hostage-takers to blow up the school if there is an assault on the building, which might suggest that the use of force by Russian troops contributed directly to the carnage that followed. She also says the boeviki said everyone would stay alive if their demands were met, which could indicate that contact and negotiations with the hostage-takers were very real means of ensuring the safety of the hostages, means that were not genuinely pursued by the authorities. The very amateurishness of the hostage-takers and their home-made bombs stuck with Scotch tape could indicate an element of bluffing on their part. Khasigov describes how a bomb fell from its rope but didn’t explode; Alina describes how carelessly the hostage-takers strung up the bombs and brushed against them as they walked past. One might wonder how such bombs could have blown out the doors and windows of the sports hall. One might wonder whether the bombs Alina describes, a strong bomb several metres away and then a second, stronger than the first, might have come from elsewhere. We might, but RIA-Novosti wonders not at all. These possible discrepancies are mentioned nowhere else in the narrative that, instead, asserts again and again the official version of events. Conclusions RIA-Novosti’s Russian-language primary narrative text is the longest of all six texts analysed in this study, reflecting the substantial resources the agency commands and that allow it to systematically produce a large amount of material, with correspondents in Russia and abroad, and with considerable contacts in the Russian government. This close association with the state is clearly manifested in the text. Official sources from local, regional, federal and international authorities make up the over-

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whelming majority of temporary narrators enlisted by RIA-Novosti, and through their sheer numbers and the frequent repetitions of their statements, they are instrumental in the construction of the narrative. Yet, what appears to be a wide range of sources is, in fact, limited, both in terms of voice and focalisation, so that, paradoxically, these numerous temporary narrators combine to create what is effectively a simplified, reductionist narrative of events. Four ‘experts’, drawn from journalism, Middle Eastern Studies and the Russian military, also act to frame the Beslan events in a way that remains in accord with official narratives. While the agency has at least one correspondent reporting from Beslan during, and immediately after, the hostage-taking and others reporting from North Ossetia and the North Caucasus, there are few occasions, most of which are temporarily located around the ending of the siege on 3 September, when these temporary narrators function as eyewitnesses. Usually, the correspondent in Beslan contributes only intermittent observations, some of which are poignant and descriptive, evoking a dramatic sense of time and place. Yet these passages are both somewhat obscure, raising more questions than answers, and easily coopted into official narrative frames because, like the personal narratives of eyewitnesses, they are placed temporally late in the primary narrative text and lack the endorsement of repetition favoured by official sources. Local residents, the relatives of the hostages and the hostage survivors themselves function even more rarely as temporary narrators. When they do, they are generally anonymous, quoted indirectly and temporally located towards the end of the primary narrative text, where their personal narratives are readily incorporated into official narratives of the hostage-taking, which by this time have been clearly elaborated and firmly reiterated. Only two hostage survivors narrate their stories at length, providing details of events that occurred inside the school during the siege, the core site of the Beslan events that was largely inaccessible to other temporary narrators. Their narratives are also congruent with official narratives, and although they include elements which could be used to construct alternative narratives, these elements are not marked in any way and alternative narratives are not considered. A significant proportion of the primary narrative text includes statements and condemnations of the attack made from an array of international leaders, government representatives, international organisations and Russian officials. Classified for the purposes of analysis as ‘nonnarrative texts’ because they comment on, rather than relate, events, this material is where the local narrative of the Beslan attack is consistently linked to, and thereby framed by, the meta-narrative of ‘the war on terror(ism)’. Even those statements that do not refer specifically to this

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meta-narrative are co-opted into it because of the binarisms and abstract language they use in their calls for international unity and support for Russia, and their stereotypical characterisations of the hostage-takers. Thus, little effort is made to establish the narrative identities and political motives of the hostage-takers in Beslan. Instead, they are effectively depersonalised, depoliticised and dehumanised, characterised as inherently evil beings whose monstrous acts have placed them beyond the boundaries of humanity. At the same time, conflicting yet associated assumptions are made about their identity; as North Caucasians, Chechens, terrorists, boeviki, they are all conflated with ‘international terrorists’, part of an exaggeratedly all-powerful, ever-present danger. This narrative is then played out in the way the Russian special forces aim only to ‘destroy’ the terrorists. No serious attempts are made to identify, investigate, capture, charge and try these people. By the end of the narrative, RIA-Novosti can say little about who they are, and how and why they were able to do what they did. In contrast, the Russian state is cast by default as the force for good in the meta-narrative, an experienced veteran in this ‘war’. Much of the primary narrative text focuses on the actions of the authorities, who, through the intensification of security measures, the mobilisation of personnel, troops and medical equipment, are cast as a capable, resourceful, benevolent government working effectively and efficiently to protect its innocent citizens from this barbaric attack. The fates of a number of young, critically injured children, flown from the Beslan ‘outpost’ to Moscow, are attentively narrated as they and their parents are welcomed and cared for by medical experts in the capital. Yet closer analysis of ‘the war on terrori(ism)’ narrative espoused by Russian officials, including President Putin in his televised address to the nation, suggests that not all versions of this meta-narrative are the same. Parallel to the way plurality in the RIA-Novosti narrative text is effectively homogenised into conforming to official narratives of the events in Beslan, the Russian government’s use of ‘the war on terror(ism)’ to frame Beslan is a political means of legitimising its power, achieving specific political goals, and consolidating its own narrative position and practices, for which it claims (and expects) unanimous support. Notes 1 The Russian News and Information Agency RIA-Novosti, http://en.rian.ru/ docs/about/novosti.html [accessed 20 July 2011]. 2 http://en.rian.ru/about [accessed 27 July 2008]. 3 http://rian.ru/docs/about/index.html [accessed 20 July 2011].

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4 ‘Putin Opens Russian Information Center in Beijing’, RIA-Novosti, 21 March 2006, http://en.rian.ru/russia/20060321/44591300.html [accessed 20 July 2011]. 5 Oddly, the posting time of this is given as 15:31, even though it chronicles events up until 23:32 that night. It can only have been written, or updated, after that time and inserted retrospectively into the text. 6 The reference indicates the date (in Roman numerals) and time of publication and is used for all RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter data. ‘E’ denotes the English narrative text. Caucasian Knot is referenced using a slightly different system, explained in Chapter 4. 7 See, for example, Duncan March, ‘Siege Negotiation Tactics: an expert’s view’, BBC News World Edition, 26 October 2002, where March discusses this as a tactic in relation to the Dubrovka Theatre siege, http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/europe/2362959.stm [accessed 20 July 2011]. 8 Resolution 1373 (2001) ‘Threats to International Peace and Security Caused by Terrorist Acts’, http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/ N01/557/43/PDF/N0155743.pdf?OpenElement [accessed 21 July 2011]. 9 Борьба can also be translated as ‘struggle’. It was very much a part of Soviet rhetoric that couched most of public and political life as the ‘struggle’ against various external and internal enemies, and the ‘struggle’ to build socialism, fulfil the Five-Year Plan or bring in the harvest, for example. As such, it can sound very banal and lacks the dramatic rhetoric of ‘war on terror’, although arguably this too, comparable with ‘wars on’ drugs or poverty, for example, has the touch of the banal about it. 10 Jackson argues that ‘the war on terror(ism)’ is not just a ‘series of assumptions, beliefs, justifications and narratives . . . an entire language or discourse’ but ‘is simultaneously a set of actual practices – wars, covert operations, agencies and institutions’ (2005: 8). He lists global military campaigns, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, covert military and intelligence operations, the use of torture against suspected terrorists, diplomatic and financial coercions, the introduction of new legislation in many countries, and the creation of new departments, agencies and national strategies, all of which involve the corresponding distribution of funds and resources. 11 Stalin (1967:1–10). This historically referenced ‘sedimentation’ of narratives is an example of ‘narrative accrual’, defined by Baker as ‘the outcome of repeated exposure to a set of related narratives, ultimately leading to the shaping of a culture, tradition, or history’ (2006:101). 12 These were president of North Ossetia, Aleksandr Dzasokhov; first deputy director of the FSB, Vladimir Pronichev; minister for Emergency Situations, Sergei Shoigu; deputy general procurator of the Russian Federation, Sergei Fridinskii; commander of the 58th Army, General Sobolev; head of the FSB directorate in North Ossetia, Valerii Andreev; and the North Ossetian minister for Internal Affairs, Kazbek Dzantiev. 13 During World War Two in the Soviet Union, sympathy for the enemy (сочувствие врагy) was a criminal offence.

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14 ‘The Tasks of Business Executives. Speech Delivered at the First All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry, February 4, 1931’, in Stalin (1955: 40). For further comparisons between Putin’s speech and Stalin’s language, see Oleg Ken, ‘Путин и Сталин: сходство языка и мышления’, Delo (13 September 2004), www.idelo.ru/340/9.html [accessed 21 July 2011]. 15 In contrast to the anonymous evil of the terrorists, RIA-Novosti consistently characterises rescue workers and members of the security forces as heroes. It names those who were killed, follows the fate of those injured and singles out an FSB officer who ‘saved the lives of two small girls at the cost of his own’ (III/20:07, III/20:11). See also Hutchings and Rulyova (2009: 78). 16 For an alternative narrative, see Francesca Mereu, ‘Beslan’s Hospital Shocked Doctors and Putin’, Moscow Times (20 December 2007), www. francescamereu.eu/index.html [accessed 21 July 2011]. 17 While no mention of President Putin is made in connection with these airplanes, it is probable that he travelled on one of them. The post reporting the arrival of the two airplanes in Beslan (IV/2:58) is immediately followed by a post reporting Putin’s arrival at Beslan airport, where he was not met in any official capacity, and immediately headed for the district hospital in a minibus (IV/4:56). Similarly, the post reporting Putin’s completion of the meeting in operation headquarters and his departure for Beslan airport (IV/6:59) is immediately followed by a post reporting the departure of the first Ministry for Emergency Situations airplane (IV/7:34). 18 Another possible translation offered by Ryazanova-Clarke and Wade is ‘guerrilla’ (1999: 72). 19 Article 209 of the Russian Criminal Code establishes ‘banditry’ (бандитизм), involvement in a ‘stable armed group’ (банд), as a criminal offence. 20 The use and translation of the words shahid and ‘martyr’ are extremely problematic, partly due to their ambiguous definitions. While both Arabic and English are etymologically derived from the Greek word meaning ‘witness’, suggesting conditions of principled innocence and non-violence on the part of the martyr, the word also refers to those who use violence, such as those who die for the sake of their country during wartime, and in some Arabic narratives those who undertake ‘martyrdom operations’. 21 For an alternative narrative that investigates the answers to these questions, see Ella Kesaeva, ‘Террористы-агенты: Неизвестные подробности бесланской трагедии’, Novaya Gazeta (20 November 2008), www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/86/00.html, trans. by David Essel, ‘Terrorists or Agents? Strange facts about the Beslan tragedy’, http://larussophobe.wordpress.com/2008/11/29/another-original-lr-translation-beslan-and-the-kgb [both accessed 21 July 2011]. 22 Fatima Alikova, a local newspaper journalist, was herself a hostage (I/13:51) but apart from this initial information remains absent from the RIA-Novosti narrative text.

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23 The first time this information is included (I/12:55) it comes from operation headquarters, who report what the girls are saying. When it is repeated in the ‘summary’, it is reported as coming from the girls themselves (I/14:31). 24 The exact same wording is reported earlier (III/13:56) where it is not attributed to eyewitnesses but, indirectly, to the RIA-Novosti correspondent at the scene of events.

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3

Kavkazcenter: ‘Mister Putin, you are a butcher’

The Kavkazcenter News Agency describes itself as a ‘Chechen, independent, international and Islamic internet agency’.1 It was founded in March 1999 ‘in Dzhokhar (Grozny)’ by ‘the ChRI [Chechen Republic Ichkeria] National Centre for Strategic Research and Political Technology, which was registered with the ChRI Ministry of Justice in October 1998’. While the site calls itself a ‘private, independent agency’ that does not ‘represent the viewpoint of any state structures or the ChRI government’, it openly claims to present the position of ‘the Chechen mujahedeen’, and, up until the unilateral declaration of the Caucasus Emirate in the autumn of 2007 that effectively split the Chechen resistance into two camps, had strong links to, and was a key communication channel for, the Chechen-Ichkerian government (in exile). Publishing in Russian, English, Turkish, Ukrainian and Arabic, the agency’s main focus is the reporting of ‘events .  .  . connected to the Russian military aggression against the ChRI’, with a particular mission to report the actual events in Ichkeria under the conditions of a total information embargo, and to disseminate to the global community true information about the war, war crimes, and the facts of genocide by the state aggressor against the entire people and those defending themselves from this aggression . . .

As well as posting news (focusing on events in the ‘Islamic world, the Caucasus, and Russia’), analyses, interviews, photographs, video clips, radio podcasts and lengthy documents on various aspects of Islam, the agency also aims to ‘widen its activity by creating a valuable [полноценный] international and alternative information corporation’. Hosted at various times in Estonia, Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, the site has survived several attempts by the Russian FSB to shut it down, and has long been considered the major site of the Chechen armed resistance.2 It is used here as an example of a non-state movement vying for legitimacy, players that are frequently overlooked in Western

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academic criticism of government and dominant discourses (Bhatia 2005). Russian primary narrative text On Wednesday, 1 September 2004, Kavkazcenter published twentyseven posts (almost 2500 words) that refer to the hostage-taking in Beslan. Similar to the RIA-Novosti posts, most of these are brief bulletins made up of only one or two short paragraphs, but in contrast these are not repeated and there are no summaries. On Thursday, 2 September 2004, thirty articles (about 4000 words), including two longer commentaries, were published, while on Friday, 3 September, only seven (just over 1000 words), including an opinion piece, reported on events related to the hostage-taking. On Saturday, 4 September 2004, Kavkazcenter published thirty articles that mentioned the events in Beslan (about 9600 words). Just over half of these (18) are relatively brief, typical of the news bulletins of the previous days and three of the posts are longer commentaries written for, or attributed to, the agency. The remainder come from the website’s ‘Press’ section and are full-length articles and commentaries taken from the Russian and foreign press. These account for a large part of the primary narrative text, and make up almost two thirds of the text’s total word count of just over seventeen thousand words, the shortest of all three Russian narrative texts investigated in this book (see Figure 4). Narrators Although Kavkazcenter does not present itself as a prominent, active narrator in the same way RIA-Novosti does, anonymous editorial comments and wry headlines are found throughout the Kavkazcenter bulletins, and provide a strong sense of the narrator’s linguistic presence. The United Nation’s call for the release of the hostages, for example, is 10000 8000

Kavkazcenter Russian Primary Narrative Text

6000 4000 2000 0 Wed 1 Sep Thur 2 Sep

Fri 3 Sep

Sat 4 Sep

Figure 4 Kavkazcenter Russian primary narrative text (number of words)

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viewed as such an uncharacteristic breach of that organisation’s usual reluctance to call Russia to account that it is headlined by the droll, ‘UN Interferes in Russia’s Internal Affairs’ (II/8:34). Many of the agency’s editorial comments are preceded by the word напомним (‘we remind you’) and commonly include elements that are either missing from official versions of events or are referred to only briefly (and hence characterised as insignificant) in the RIA-Novosti Russian narrative text. ‘We remind you,’ writes Kavkazcenter, ‘that the demands of the group became known earlier: the cessation of military action and the withdrawal of occupation forces from Chechnya’ (I/19:17). ‘We remind you,’ the agency writes with reference to the Dubrovka theatre siege in Moscow, ‘that after Putin’s assertions to save the lives and health of the hostages . . . a storm followed which ended with hundreds of casualties’ (II/18:54). ‘We remind you that literally five minutes before the beginning of the storm [in Beslan], President Dzasokhov of North Ossetia promised that there would be no storm’ (III/15:27). When Russian Foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov claims ‘the most important goal was to save the lives of the hostages’, Kavakzcenter reminds readers that ‘as a result of the action “to save the hostages” .  .  . around a thousand hostages were killed or wounded’ (IV/15:28). ‘We remind you,’ the site continues, ‘that the Russian authorities arrested [Russian journalist] Babitskii, who was intending to travel out to Beslan, and poisoned his colleague, Politkovskaya’ (IV/15:46). By specifically including and drawing readers’ attention to these elements, Kavkazcenter sets out to deliberately challenge and construct an alternative to official narratives articulated by the authorities. This is also achieved by Kavkazcenter’s use of headlines that, in contrast to RIA-Novosti’s focus on the statements and actions of officials, often highlight what officials are not saying and not doing. Putin’s return to Moscow and orders for the head of the FSB and other high-ranking officials to fly to Beslan is titled, ‘Putin Says Nothing. Putin is Broken [сломлен]’ (II/12:56). Similarly, ‘Negotiator Aushev Frees Hostages but Ziazikov Hides Himself’ (II/19:27); ‘Russian Forces [силовики] Conceal Information about the Group’s Demands’ (II/21:37); and ‘Russian Authorities are not Reporting the Casualties of the Storm’ (III/15:27). Kavkazcenter also interprets, or re-narrates, the actions of officials. The responses of the FSB and Ministry of Internal Affairs, who persistently appear to avoid any real political negotiations with the hostage-takers and concentrate instead on negotiating the provision of food to the hostages and a safe passage to Chechnya for the hostage-takers, are headlined ‘FSB Busy Saving Putin from Negotiations with [ChechenIchkerian president] Maskhadov’ (II/21:29). The blocking of telephone

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communications in Beslan, the sealing off of the town by Russian security forces, the arrival of special units that took part in the storming of the Dubrovka theatre, and the official claims that the school will not be stormed are viewed not as the actions of a reliable and responsive government, but as evidence that ‘[t]he storming of the school in Beslan is being prepared’ (III/00:43). Official sources The statements of politicians and officials that so characterise the RIANovosti narrative are all but absent from the Kavkazcenter narrative. Officials are quoted, but there is a critical tone of scrutiny and scepticism here that is entirely missing from RIA-Novosti, which reports without comment. Kavkazcenter frequently points out the lack of evidence to support the statements from Russian authorities, and it accuses Russian sources of concealing information and editing television footage. Unlike RIA-Novosti, news for Kavkazcenter is not what an authoritative source tells a journalist but what the journalist (or editor) says about official statements and their sources. Rather than giving the names and positions of official spokespersons as RIA-Novosti does so consistently, Kavkazcenter often only attributes official statements generally, as ‘Russian authorities’, ‘Russian sources’ or the ‘Russian command’, for example, and makes no distinction between the different departments and spokespersons in the way that RIA-Novosti so carefully does. This not only depersonalises these temporary narrators but homogenises them into an indistinct whole, similar to the way official narratives blur the distinctions between Chechens, terrorists and international terrorists. The site is also often curtly disparaging of these public figures: presidential aide, Aslambek Aslakhanov, for example, becomes a ‘Chechen collaborator’, operation headquarters in Beslan is only ‘so-called’, a play on words turns Moscow mayor, Iurii Luzhkov, into a ‘little meadow’ (лужок) and, in spite of the armed group demanding to negotiate with Murat Ziazikov, the ‘so-called president of Ingushetia’ is nowhere to be seen. Temporary narrators also include official spokespersons absent from the RIA-Novosti narrative. Russian State Duma deputy, Mikhail Markelov, for example, who is present at the scene, tells Interfax that the terrorists are following the news, that they are ‘literally standing in front of the televisions’ (I/11:45), an observation never mentioned by RIA-Novosti. Stanislav Kesaev, deputy chair of the North Ossetian Parliament, and Soslan Sikoev, the republic’s deputy minister of Internal Affairs, tell the relatives of the hostages that no contact with the terrorists has been made (I/21:24), a statement unreported by RIA-Novosti,

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possibly because, by this time, command had been handed over to the FSB, who had already claimed that contact had been made and negotiations were continuing. Since the Russian government considers them both terrorists, RIA-Novosti reports nothing from either Akhmed Zakaev or Aslan Maskhadov. In contrast, Kavkazcenter refers to Maskhadov as president of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria, and to Zakaev as his spokesperson and the republic’s minister for Culture, Press and Information. Maskhadov, wanted by the Russian authorities and in hiding, does not speak directly, but Zakaev narrates five times in the Kavkazcenter narrative text, declaring that President Maskhadov and the Chechen official structures have nothing to do with the Beslan attack (I/17:29). Speaking from London in an interview with Chechenpress (the Chechen-Ichkerian State News Agency website), Zakaev recounts his telephone conversation with North Ossetian president Aleksandr Dzasokhov and Ruslan Aushev, who was instrumental in securing the release of several hostages, in which they discussed the participation of the Chechen-Ichkerian side in resolving the crisis in Beslan. Both Zakaev and Maskhadov are prepared to travel to Beslan under guarantee of ‘the appropriate conditions’ from the Russian authorities (III/9:48). Zakaev discusses this telephone call again, in an interview with the BBC, where he says that according to Aushev, ‘who personally came into contact with the armed group’, not a single Chechen was among them. This was apparently well known to Dzasokhov, who has ‘preferred to keep silent’ about it (IV/13:27). When the siege ends, Zakaev lays the responsibility for the deaths of the hostages on the ‘occupying troops’ because ‘they stormed the school rather than fulfilling the demands of the armed group’ (IV/00:03), and shortly afterwards he issues a statement summarising the Chechen-Ichkerian response to the attack and the actions of the Russian authorities (IV/1:08) (see pp. 121–2). Everything Zakaev says directly contradicts official Russian narratives of the attack, attesting to other narrative possibilities and courses of action, so his total exclusion from the RIA-Novosti narrative as a temporary narrator is unsurprising, and Dzasokhov’s and Aushev’s contact with Zakaev is likely to explain their marginal positions in it. Lev Dzugaev, for example (Dzasokhov’s press-secretary), reports, according to Kavkazcenter, that ‘five minutes before the beginning of the storming of the school, the president of North Ossetia, Aleksandr Dzasokhov, appealed to President Aslan Maskhadov, asking him to be a mediator in the negotiations with the armed group who had seized the school’ (III/13:55). Dzugaev frequently acts as temporary narrator in the RIA-Novosti Russian narrative, yet this statement of his is not part of it.

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Other media Without a correspondent on the ground, Kavkazcenter relies heavily on information from other media sources, both Russian language3 and foreign.4 Mainstream Russian media is viewed with suspicion – Kavkazcenter adds the word ‘allegedly’ to statements and highlights conflicting information – and is characterised as biased (ангажированные) and controlled by the FSB and the Kremlin. In contrast, foreign media are generally reported without comment, enlisted to shore up the Kavkazcenter narrative that is so critical of the Russian authorities and reproduced (that is, translated into Russian) either in full with occasional omissions (see pp. 113–14) or highly selectively appropriated into Kavkazcenter bulletins. Speculation, for example, that the recent attacks in Russia are damaging President Putin’s credibility is quoted (II/12:45) from an Inopressa.Ru translation5 of an article by Jeremy Page originally published in The Times6 while Page’s three-paragraph discussion on ‘Chechen rebels’, ‘suicide attacks’ and the complicated, unsatisfactory situation in Chechnya is omitted. Similarly, in a post published a few minutes later (II/12:56), Kavkazcenter selects from an (Inopressa. Ru-translated) article from the Financial Times7 a quote from Russian defence minister, Sergei Lavrov (‘We are in a state of war’); a comment on the lack of information because the authorities had ‘sealed the area, blocked roads, switched off mobile phone connections and cancelled flights’; and Putin’s return to Moscow, which Kavkazcenter describes – in such a way as to suggest that the comment comes from the Financial Times – as Putin ‘distancing himself from the events in North Ossetia’. The actions of the hostage-takers, the previous explosions on the planes and at the Moscow metro station, reports of a ‘cell of four female Chechen suicide bombers’, and even comments on the UN meeting and the recent ‘elections’ in Chechnya are all omitted. Thus, while Kavkazcenter constructs its narrative text from other media sources, it continues to function undisturbed as narrator; its own narrative position remains unchallenged and other media sources serve only to reinforce it. Experts That narrative position is also reinforced by several ‘experts’ recruited, like RIA-Novosti, by Kavkazcenter to act as temporary narrators. The first is the late, renowned Russian sociologist Iurii Levada, whose comment on cooling public attitudes towards President Putin and his policies in Chechnya is lifted from The Times article discussed above. The second ‘expert’ is the results of a telephone poll conducted by independent radio station Ekho Moskvy, claiming that sixty-four per cent of respondents are not prepared to unconditionally support whatever

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action Putin will take to resolve the hostage-crisis (II/19:35). ‘Israeli specialist’ Assaf Hefetz, quoted from an interview with Reuters, stresses the urgency of the situation and the need to negotiate the release of the hostages. ‘Even Israel would suspend its policy of refusing to negotiate if children were taken hostage on such a mass scale,’ Hefetz says (II/21:58). Whereas RIA-Novosti narrates the involvement of children in the hostage-taking as evidence of the barbarity of the terrorists, here the involvement of children is narrated as a condition that makes negotiations crucial. Putin’s refusal to suspend policy and negotiate is characterised by Kavkazcenter as a mistaken, hard-line approach that may well (hopefully) be the undoing of him. After the siege, eight temporary narrators are recruited (under the headline ‘Terrible Unprofessionalism’ (IV/4:17)) to condemn the storming of the school and the actions of the Russian government. Hugh McManners, ‘former officer of the British SAS’, calls the way the siege ended ‘a catastrophe . . . in a political sense’. John McAleese, another former British SAS officer, has ‘the impression that they [the Russian special forces] wanted to get in there and kill the “bad guys”, not save the children’. Elmar Thevessen, ‘German expert on terrorism’, says ‘something unplanned happened [and] if the number of fatalities turns out to be significant, the terrorists and their sympathizers will consider this to be their victory’. Wilf Owen, ‘expert on defence and security’, compares the end of the siege to ‘a shootout in the spirit of the Wild West’ rather than ‘a co-ordinated military operation’. ‘Fatalities among children will provoke an extremely negative international reaction,’ says General Gromoslaw Czempinski, creator and first commander of the Polish special force group ‘GROM’. Alex Standish, editor of Jane’s Defence Digest, makes a comparison with the end of the Dubrovka siege in 2002, concluding that Putin’s chief concern in both cases was ‘his own reputation as a strong person’: First and foremost he wanted to demonstrate that there would be no compromise. As for the civilians, who found themselves between a hammer and an anvil [a rock and a hard place], I’m afraid there is no great concern for them.

Not all of these narrators are so unambiguously critical of Putin and the Russian government’s actions, although they remain pragmatic. Jorge Monteiro, ‘Portuguese specialist in negotiating the release of hostages’, admits that ‘[i]t is impossible to achieve anything in a short space of time, especially when you have to deal with such stubborn people.’ Tim Ripley, ‘expert on defence and terrorism at the University of Lancaster’, says, ‘President Putin is known for his hard-line approach

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[жесткостью] . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if the building was stormed.’ Together with Kavkazcenter, these voices find little to praise in the conduct of Putin and his government, who are seen to heartlessly value their own political position above the lives of the hostages. Commentators Kavkazcenter recruits a total of fourteen different commentators to act as temporary narrators within its primary narrative text. Five of these, Boris Stomakhin, Said Irbakhaev, Sirazhdin Sattaev, Musa Stone and Pavel Liuzakov, write in Russian and especially for Kavkazcenter. The remaining nine write for a range of mainly European mainstream newspapers and are translated into Russian from English, French and German for inclusion in the Russian narrative text. While RIA-Novosti characterises its commentators as active participants in Russian mainstream media and state institutions, honoured and rewarded by publication, awards and state endorsement (see p. 196), Kavkazcenter says nothing about the commentators who contribute directly to the agency, only that they have written especially for the site and, in the case of Liuzakov, that he is located in Russia. An open invitation for contributions addressed to ‘journalists and political observers’ is posted on the site in Russian, English, Ukrainian, Turkish and Arabic, and it might be assumed that these narrators, all of whom have written on more than one occasion for Kavkazcenter, have contributed by responding to this, or some other kind of, invitation. Attempts to construct biographies for Kavkazcenter’s commentators suggest they are either all but absent from cyberspace, save for traces on fringe websites and forums, or marginalised and criminalised by the Russian state. Boris Stomakhin, a Russian activist who opposes the Russian occupation of Chechnya, is a founding member of the Revolutionary Contact Association8 and founder and editor of the group’s newspaper, Radikalnaia politika (May 2000–March 2006). Criminal proceedings were launched against him in December 2003 for ‘the incitement of racial, ethnic and religious hatred’ (Article 282 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code).9 After his apartment was raided in April 2004, and his books and computer confiscated, Stomakhin applied for, and was refused, political asylum in Ukraine. In March 2006, he was arrested in Moscow, and broke his legs and his spine when he fell from the window of his third-floor apartment at the time of the arrest. Charged and tried, Stomakhin was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and incarcerated in a Moscow prison. Moved without explanation in June 200710 to the prison colony in Burepolom near Nizhnyi Novgorod, Stomakhin served the full term of his sentence and was

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released in March 2011. Pavel Liuzakov is also a Russian activist and journalist. He is editor of Free Speech,11 the publication of the political oppositional organisation, Democratic Union, formed in 1988 during the perestroika period.12 Charged for possessing firearms, Liuzakov served two years in prison and was released in January 2007. The fates of Stomakhin and Liuzakov perhaps account for the anonymity (or even pseudonyms) of Irbakhaev, Sattaev and Stone. Nine of Kavkazcenter’s commentators operate as temporary narrators when their work is taken from other, foreign media outlets, translated into Russian and incorporated into the Kavkazcenter primary narrative text. All of these commentators are professional journalists writing for wide-circulation, mainstream publications. Stefan Wagstyl and Tom Warner are experienced journalists with the Financial Times, Daniel Brössler writes for the broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung and was the Moscow correspondent at the time of the siege, and Serge Enderlen was writing for the leading Swiss daily Le Temps. Simon Tisdall, from The Guardian, is an assistant editor at the newspaper and a foreign affairs columnist. Simon Jenkins, writing for The Times, is an award-winning journalist, published author and editor, as are Karl Grobe, associated with Frankfurter Rundschau for almost forty years, Mark Huband and Andrew Jack. Kavkazcenter’s primary motivation for co-opting these writers into functioning as temporary narrators for the agency is most likely the inclusion of what they say (see pp. 124–6) rather than who they are professionally. Yet the choice of narrators consistently associated with high-profile, internationally renowned print and online media is most certainly an attempt to increase the credibility of both Kavkazcenter and its primary narrative text. While its own authors are sidelined into obscurity and silence by the Russian government, Kavkazcenter assembles an international cast of foreign commentators to act as its colleagues and to support and amplify its opinions. Eyewitnesses Like RIA-Novosti, very few of the Kavkazcenter posts include elements from eyewitnesses in Beslan, and most of these are both anonymous and indirectly reported. The first is an early estimate regarding the number of hostages, ‘around four hundred’ (I/11:43), cited by RIA-Novosti and also included in the RIA-Novosti Russian narrative (I/10:56). Later, eyewitnesses contribute elements that challenge or contradict official versions. ‘[I]ndependent sources from the town of Beslan’ report on the alarm among relatives of the hostages that the school will be stormed by Russian security forces (I/19:17), and on the Friday afternoon they

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report that ‘special forces are storming [штурмуют] the school building’ (III/14:30). On Saturday, 4 September, doctors from two local hospitals tell Gazeta.ru, ‘on condition of anonymity’, that the number of wounded is higher, and their condition worse, than the authorities are reporting. They also say, that it is already the second day they have literally not been allowed to leave the hospital. Staff have had their mobile phones confiscated in order to stop any contact with journalists and relatives and to bar the flow of information. (IV/15:15)

This is confirmed by Beslan residents, who, by observing the refrigerator trucks transporting bodies from the school to the city morgue, estimate the number of dead to be around six hundred. They report (again to Gazeta.ru) that ‘relatives of the dead are admitted only for identification’ (на опознание), and they are not allowed into the hospitals to see the wounded (IV/15:17). The only former hostages to act as temporary narrators for Kavkazcenter first enter the narrative on the morning of Friday, 3 September, about five hours before such appearances in the RIA-Novosti English narrative and almost thirty-six hours before such appearances in the RIA-Novosti Russian narrative. Adel Itskaeva, ‘one of the women released on Thursday after negotiations with .  .  . Ruslan Aushev’, speaks with a correspondent from the Gazeta newspaper, and Zalina Dzandarova, ‘another released hostage’, is interviewed by Kommersant (III/9:21).13 A third former hostage, Zalina, interviewed by Gazeta.ru, is the only one to narrate her story at length (IV/12:54). The personal narratives of these three eyewitnesses are discussed later in this chapter.14 Embedded non-narrative texts While the non-narrative material in the RIA-Novosti Russian-language primary narrative text is dominated by statements and condemnations from foreign states and organisations, Kavkazcenter’s non-narrative material is made up of completely different texts, including letters, Chechen-Ichkerian official statements and several commentaries. Yet, just as RIA-Novosti’s framing narrative is elaborated most clearly in this material, so too is Kavkazcenter’s framing narrative expressed here. Plea from Dubrovka survivors The first embedded non-narrative text is an impassioned plea addressed to President Putin from survivors of the 2002 Moscow theatre siege (I/19:14), variously referred to as Dubrovka, the name of the theatre

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complex, or ‘Nord-Ost’, the title of the musical that was in performance at the time of the hostage-taking. Recalling the ‘brilliant’ («блестящая») operation to save the hostages that orphaned ninety-six children, killed one hundred and thirty and left survivors still today in need of hospitalisation, the survivors beg Putin to ‘spare the children!’ (Пощадите детей!): You, Vladimir Vladimirovich, as the Guarantor of our right to life, are OBLIGED to do everything possible and impossible through peaceful negotiations. Do not conduct one of your new ‘brilliant’ storms to release the hostages and do not force us all to live again among the tombstones of our children!

Thus, in a refl ection of ‘the paradox of the threefold present’ (Ricouer 1979: 18), which, after Augustine, includes ‘a present of things past [memory], a present of things present [immediate awareness],15 and a present of things to come [expectation]’ (Chadwick 1998: 235), this plea connects the present narrative of events unfolding in Beslan to the past in a way which anticipates the future. The Dubrovka theatre attack is not recalled as an example of terrorism in Russia, as it is in the RIANovosti narrative, but as an ominous portent of what may yet happen in School No. 1 because of the government’s actions. The connection is made elsewhere in the Kavkazcenter narrative, to the extent that it can be thought of as a recurring theme; the two local narratives become so strongly linked that there comes to be no mention of a storm in Beslan that does not evoke the disastrous events of Dubrovka. Perhaps the hostage-takers themselves make this connection and, in their game of ritual and symbolism (Zulaika and Douglass 1996), invoke it by threatening to blow up the school if it is stormed (I/11:57) and ‘allegedly’ placing children in the school windows to prevent an assault (I/13:33).16 Already by the evening of 1 September, the deaths in Moscow loom large in the narrative. Kavkazcenter reports that ‘relatives of the hostages are not alarmed so much by the seizure [of the school] as by the possibility of a storm by the Russian security forces similar to the one carried out at the sadly well-known “Nord-Ost”’ (I/19:17). For Boris Stomakhin, a storm is inevitable, with the Russian brutality seen at Dubrovka and in Chechnya leaving no hope in such a storm at all, and he is certain that children ‘will die tomorrow or the day after tomorrow in the unavoidable “liberating” special forces operation a la “Nord-Ost”’ (II/2:14). Sergei Goncharov, president of the Russian Special Forces Alpha Veterans’ Association, attempts to disconnect these narrative links. He claims that Beslan cannot be compared to ‘Nord-Ost’ because the situa-

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tion in Beslan is worse for the Russian special forces due to the presence of ‘young children and even babies, people with diabetes, and . . . no medicines’ (II/18:53). Goncharov speaks not of a storm, but of ‘concrete actions on the part of the special forces, . . . possible only in the case of an order issued from the leadership’, the only alternative to peaceful political negotiations as a means of resolving the crisis. Yet, he also effectively rules out such negotiations, claiming the ‘bandits’ have made no concrete demands and dismissing their summons of Roshal. ‘This is senseless procrastination’ (Идет тупое затягивание времени), he says, but for Kavkazcenter Goncharov is still talking about a storm – ‘Two Ways: peaceful political negotiations or a storm’ reads the headline – and the implications are that Beslan is indeed worse than ‘Nord-Ost’, not because of any technical problems facing the special forces but because of the inevitable dangers of a storm on such vulnerable people. Russian government attempts to disconnect the two narratives of Beslan and the deadly storming of Dubrovka by insisting that there will be no storming of the school fail to convince Kavkazcenter. Putin’s statements claiming the most important task is to ‘save the lives and health of those who have been taken hostage’ (II/18:54) are regarded as a ‘signal to storm’ (к штурму) because they echo his statements to preserve the lives and health of the ‘Nord-Ost’ hostages, which were then followed by an assault leaving hundreds of people dead. Sattaev regards almost every action of the Russian authorities – the blocking of communications, the repeated claims that the hostage-takers have made no demands and refuse to communicate, the arrival of special forces divisions ‘who took part in the storming of the Dubrovka theatre’ and the preparation of beds in North Ossetian hospitals – as preparation for the storming of the school in Beslan. ‘A repetition of Nord-Ost is almost inevitable,’ Sattaev concludes; ‘only this time everything will be far more terrible’ (III/00:43). When, on 3 September, the predictions come true and the alarm of that first evening is finally realised, Kavkazcenter continues to connect the two narratives. ‘The events that took place in Nord-Ost are being repeated here,’ the site reports. ‘The Alpha group are destroying [уничтожает]17 hostages’ (III/14:30). It also points out the abject failure of the authorities to disconnect the narratives with their assurances that there would be no storm. ‘Dzasokhov ruled out an assault on the school,’ reports the site, and ‘[a]fter this the storm began’ (III/13:55). ‘We remind you that literally five minutes before the beginning of the storm, . . . Dzasokhov promised that there would be no storm’ (III/15:27). In the aftermath, Musa Stone comments on Russian claims that the storming of the school was successful, recalling the same official

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response to the storming of Dubrovka. Calculating with the available figures that, out of at least a thousand hostages, over two hundred died and at least six hundred were injured after the storm, Stone wonders, ‘[if] such a bloody mess [месиво] is called a success, then what, for Putin and his circle, would be a failure?’ (IV/2:20). As the horrors of Beslan eclipse those of Dubrovka and Budennovsk before it, the harshest words come from Pavel Liuzakov. ‘Right now they are saying that more than TWO HUNDRED people died!’, he writes in outrage under the mockingly bitter title, ‘Mister Putin, You are a Butcher’ (Дядя Путин, ты – палач). ‘It’s more than Dubrovka. It’s more than Budennovsk.’ Nobody believed that a storm was possible .  .  . nobody could believe that [Putin] would dare storm a school where children were being held hostage . . . After Dubrovka, when it became clear that any storm would mean the deaths of hostages . . . Did Putin know that having given such an order he was surely dooming the hostages to death? A stupid question. After Dubrovka . . . he knew that children would die. And he deliberately gave such an order . . . They say that Putin prayed for a long time before the storming of Dubrovka. Now it is clear that he was praying to Satan. (IV/4:34)

The dualistic ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ found in the RIA-Novosti narratives are completely reversed here. Far from the force for good, the Russian government is cast as evil, in league with ‘Satan’, that religious and mythological embodiment of evil, and planning the deliberate destruction of innocent children, mirroring the characterisation of terrorists as inhuman and inherently evil that makes it possible only to destroy them. While tapping into Soviet and post-Soviet societal narratives, in which those in power are characterised as unnatural, inhuman and ‘having sold their souls for access into the System’ (Pesmen 2000: 239), Liuzakov’s simplistic account effectively rules out other narrative configurations that might be made of the ‘storm elements’ in the Kavkazcenter narrative. Anonymous letter In the evening of 2 September, Kavkazcenter reports the receipt of an anonymous letter addressed to the agency, and publishes its contents (II/19:13). The letter reiterates the demands of the hostage-takers: the immediate cessation of Russian military action, the immediate end to the genocide of the Chechen people and the beginning of the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya. It goes on to demand that local residents and relatives of the hostages ‘immediately begin a total [сухая (without food or drink)] hunger strike for the end of the war and Putin’s resignation’, claiming that ‘the hostages in the school have already begun a total

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hunger strike’. The letter is signed ‘messenger’ (Связной) and gives no more details or instructions. This is the only place in the Kavkazcenter narrative that the letter appears, and while the demands of the hostage-takers regarding the end of Russian hostilities in Chechnya are repeated throughout the narrative, nothing more is said of the hunger strike. Kavkazcenter does not say whether the letter arrived as an email or in hard copy and it is difficult to evaluate its authenticity. That Kavkazcenter published it at all might suggest the agency believed it, at least at first, to be genuine, or even that they themselves invented it, and publicised it in order to both broadcast the demands of the hostage-takers and challenge the claims of the Russian authorities that the hostage-takers had no clear demands and refused to communicate. That the letter and its contents drop out of the narrative after this point suggest that Kavkazcenter may have come to doubt the letter’s authenticity, changed their minds over its usefulness, or were reluctant to appear too closely associated with the hostagetakers and unwilling to draw attention to their cruel demands. International statements and condemnations The inundation of international responses to the siege that make up such a large proportion of the RIA-Novosti narrative is completely absent from the Kavkazcenter narrative text, along with the explicit connections they create between the Beslan attack and ‘the war on terror(ism)’. In their place, Kavkazcenter includes just two international condemnations. The general secretary of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, demands the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages, thus, Kavkazcenter remarks wryly, ‘violat[ing] the principal position of his organisation: non-interference in Russia’s internal affairs’ (II/8:34). Irbakhaev is more outraged. ‘Why,’ he asks in an article accompanied by a photograph of the bloodied corpses of a man and a small child, ‘does the threat to the lives of 132 Russian schoolchildren provoke the burning need to call an emergency session of the UN Security Council, but the murder of 42 thousand (!!!) Chechen schoolchildren troubles nobody for ten years?’ (II/2:32). This is a clear reference to Russian military aggression in Chechnya since 1994, the beginning of the First Chechen War, and is part of the societal narrative that emerges most clearly as Kavkazcenter’s framing narrative for the local narrative of the Beslan attack, especially in the Russian-language commentaries (pp. 126–8). The figure of forty-two thousand children appears four times in the narrative text and, as a large, rounded figure suggesting crimes on a mass scale, indicates a theme of genocide, a core element of this framing narrative.18

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The European Union’s request for an explanation from Russia ‘in connection with the tragic events in Beslan’ that provoked expressions of outrage and indignation from several Russian officials is also reported (IV/5:24). Rather than characterised as provocation and ‘blasphemy’ as it is in the RIA-Novosti narratives, the request is reported here as an attempt to gain ‘accurate and reliable information about what happened in North Ossetia’. Regarded by Russian officials and RIA-Novosti as a serious diplomatic breach, Kavkazcenter is not at all insulted by Bernard Bot, who, speaking on behalf of the Council of the European Union in an informal meeting of EU Foreign ministers, ‘expressed regret that Russia could not resolve the problem of the hostage-taking by peaceful means’ (IV/5:24). On the contrary, Kavkazcenter’s headline of the story, ‘European Union Demands an Explanation [разъяснение] from Moscow in Connection with the Mass Murder of Children’, suggests that it too is keen for just such an explanation. Chechen-Ichkerian statements The first of two official statements from Chechnya-Ichkeria comes from Umar Khanbiev, ‘general representative abroad of the president of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria’ (I/20:17). Like many of the state representatives who contribute to the RIA-Novosti Russian narrative, Khanbiev condemns both the recent explosions in Moscow and the hostage-taking in Beslan as ‘inhuman, frantic zeal’ (бесчеловечное ожесточение) for which ‘there is no justification’. He goes on to connect this, however, not with ‘the war on terror(ism)’ but with societal narratives of Russia’s ‘genocidal war against the people of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria and the criminal-terrorist policies of the Kremlin regime’. Khanbiev condemns and does not condone the Beslan attack, but argues that neither is there ‘justification for the murder of 42,000 Chechen schoolchildren by Russian militarists acting on the order of the Kremlin regime and Putin himself’. He insists that ‘Russia’s countless crimes against humanity on Caucasian soil make retaliatory, desperate, and brutal steps like today’s act possible’ and that a ‘policy of terror against the people of the Caucasus’ can only bring about a ‘situation out of control and with unforeseen consequences’. This narrative of aggression and suffering is completely absent from the RIA-Novosti account of the events in Beslan. There is no reference to it at all in any of the international or Russian responses. Links to the situation in Chechnya are made, by Russian rather than foreign officials, but these are to the presidential election held in the republic three days before the school in Beslan was attacked (RIA-N I/12:17, I/15:24), with claims that ‘the process of stabilisation in Chechnya is not to the liking

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of those who want to wreck the process of peace and stabilisation in the Chechen republic’ (RIA-N I/19:15). Akhmed Zakaev’s statement (KC IV/1:08) echoes Khanbiev’s condemnations of the hostage-taking and reiterates his framing of the attack with Khanbiev’s narrative of genocide in Chechnya. The hostage-takers, according to Zakaev, wanted ‘to stop the genocide in Chechnya systematically being carried out by the criminal Kremlin regime’. This taking of ‘innocent children hostage’ is mirrored by the ‘cynical and coldblooded murder of these children’ by Russian security forces in the storming of the school, and the repeated murder of Chechen citizens, ‘a people, who, in this last war alone, have lost over forty thousand children’. Although hardly on a par with the puissant pervasiveness of ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative, the principal framing narrative in RIA-Novosti’s narrative text, the societal narrative of genocide is well known, and Kavkazcenter is not alone in applying it to Russian aggression in Chechnya. In August 2000, a press release from the Chechen Foreign Ministry stated that, ‘The Chechen Republic of Ichkeria has instituted legal proceedings against the Russian Federation before the International Court of Justice in The Hague .  .  . for violating every substantive provision of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.’19 In a written statement submitted in March 2001 to the UN Commission for Human Rights,20 the Society for Threatened People openly accused the Russian army and government of violating the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In the same year, another NGO, the Committee on Conscience at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, placed Chechnya on its Genocide Watch List.21 Scholars also commonly use the term, particularly with reference to the 1944 deportation (which was, in fact, officially recognised by the European Parliament in February 2004 as ‘an act of genocide’22) and it was also part of (first Chechen-Ichkerian president) Dzhokhar Dudaev’s rhetoric as Chechnya declared independence in 1991 (Dunlop 1998). Whether Russian military aggression in Chechnya over the past seventeen, sixty-seven, hundred or three hundred years amounts to genocide according to the 1948 United Nations convention is a legal matter that has not, so far, been tested in any court. The term itself, coined in World War Two, is highly charged – ‘[t]he horrible nature of the events it was meant to describe and the widespread disapproval of the perpetrators of these events have given the term a heavy negative loading’ (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990: 3) – tapping into powerful masterplots of good and evil, oppressor and oppressed, and it is this ‘threshold of genocide enshrined in Article II of the Genocide Convention’ (Scherbich 2005: 91)

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that users of the term hope to reach so as to gain international, legal and just recognition of their cause and plight. ‘Obviously,’ Scherbich admits, ‘NGO and media reports are tempted to call Russian actions in Chechnya genocide because they are outraged by the level of violence against civilians, the number of dead and the methods employed by the military forces’ (ibid.). President Aslan Maskhadov responded publicly to the European parliamentary declaration by gratefully acknowledging, in a statement that described a long and continuing history of Russian ‘terror’ against the Chechen people, the ‘principled decision’ to recognise the deportation as genocide, calling it an ‘additional moral stimulus in the struggle for survival’.23 In this framing narrative, the hostage-takers in Beslan are recast as bit-players in the conflict between Russia and Chechnya. Zakaev stresses that the Chechen leaders, ‘fighting not only for independence but for the very survival of their people’, were prepared to do anything to secure the release of all the hostages, including coming to Beslan in person, even without any assurances from the Russian government. The president of North Ossetia was prepared to receive President Aslan Maskhadov, and announced before the storm that there was ‘a real chance to resolve [разрядить] this terrible situation without victims and the shedding of blood’ (IV/1:08). Clearly, Zakaev continues, such a resolution to the crisis was not arranged by the Kremlin because Putin and his circle did not want to enter into any sort of negotiation with representatives of the lawful leadership of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. In stark contrast to the Chechen leaders, Zakaev argues, Putin valued his own ambitions and his own ‘dictatorial self-conceit’ above the lives of the children. Russian official responses and condemnations Only four of the numerous Russian officials narrating for RIA-Novosti act as temporary narrators for Kavkazcenter. With fewer officials saying less, and Kavkazcenter’s commenting on their contributions, ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative elaborated by RIA-Novosti is excised from the Kavkazcenter narrative. Rather, in its own demonisation of the Russian government as the force for evil in its genocide narrative, the site focuses on discrepancies between the Russian government’s words and actions, thus holding that government accountable to the rest of the world and justifying its own contempt for it. Russian Defence minister Sergei Ivanov’s statement, ‘We are in a state of war’ (II/12:56) is followed by a description of Putin as having nothing to say and the authorities’ clampdown on transport and communications; the situation seems more one of localised alarm, even panic, than

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of war. The ‘concrete actions’ by the special forces, advocated by ‘KGB veteran’ Sergei Goncharov as the only viable response to the crisis, can only be, for Kavkazcenter, a disastrous assault on the school. Putin’s first public statements on the siege are reported briefly in a single post (II/18:54) and Kavkazcenter expresses no confidence in either Putin’s assurances ‘to save the lives and health of those who have been taken hostage’ or the ‘actions of our forces, who are engaged in freeing the hostages’, reminding the reader that after Putin made such statements two years earlier, the Dubrovka theatre was stormed and hundreds of people died. When even more people are killed in the storming of the Beslan school, Russian Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s ‘indignation’ and charges of ‘blasphemy’ against Bernard Bot for questioning the ‘saving of the hostages’ are seen as almost ridiculous (IV/15:28). ‘We remind you,’ Kavkazcenter adds, ‘that as a result of the action to “save the hostages”, around 1000 hostages have been killed or wounded according to the latest figures.’ Putin’s nationally televised speech on the evening of 4 September is a significant element in both Russian and English RIA-Novosti narratives. Kavkazcenter gives it short shrift, summarising the speech in a single post that criticises Putin for what he both says and does not say (IV/18:51). Putin’s condolences ‘to the families of the several hundred dead hostages’ are hollow words for Kavkazcenter, who regards the deaths as a ‘result of’ the storming of the school that was persistently denied and ill-explained by the authorities. Putin’s ‘complaining’ (посетовать) about the unfortunate demise of the Soviet Union and the weakness of Russia in dangerous and difficult times is seen as ‘evidently hinting at Yeltsin’, yet, Kavkazcenter points out, ‘he said nothing about the fact that at least a third of that time of weakness . . . took place under the direction of Putin himself’. Attempts to incorporate the Beslan attack into ‘the war on international terror(ism)’ are seen as platitudinous, rhetorical ‘practically word for word’ repetitions of Putin’s response ‘five years ago after the events in Dagestan’.24 While ‘five years ago’ marked the beginning of the Second Chechen War, Kavkazcenter points out that Putin makes no mention of it, although he recalls ‘a never ending series of bloody conflicts, such as Karabakh and Pridnestrove and other similar tragedies’. ‘Obviously,’ Kavkazcenter comments drily, ‘Putin does not believe that the war he unleashed in the Caucasus . . . is a “bloody conflict”.’ The post ends with a summary of Putin’s proposed responses to the Beslan attack, that, in its repetition of bureaucratic language and use of the word очередный (‘yet another’), suggests that, for Kavkazcenter, these proposals are as meaningless and empty as the rest of the speech.

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Western European commentaries Six opinion pieces, originally published in Western European newspapers, are included in the Kavkazcenter primary narrative text. Three are lifted from Inopressa.Ru, a website that publishes anonymous translations of articles from various international newspapers, and three are taken from InoSMI.Ru, a similar site which generally includes the translators’ names and links to the original text. Like ChechenIchkerian representatives Umar Khanbiev and Akhmed Zakaev, all of these commentators allude to narratives of Russian military aggression in Chechnya characterised by Chechen suffering and Russian brutality, yet stop short of references to genocide. The first of these pieces is Simon Tisdall’s ‘Запад должен вмешаться. Хотя бы ради детей’ (The West Should Interfere. If only for the sake of the children) (IV/01:01),25 originally published in The Guardian.26 Tisdall’s main contention is summarised in the article’s subheading: ‘The west can no longer ignore the violence and killings in Chechnya’. He argues that ‘the siege in Ossetia is tightly interlaced’ with the Chechen conflict, that, since Russian involvement in 1994, Putin, his predecessor Yeltsin and the ‘once-proud’ army have become the cause of such adversities [невзгода], such injustice, such fury and despair, that, like the Americans in Iraq, they created a breeding ground [питательная среда] and a zone of attraction [зонa притяжения] for the religious extremists they are trying to destroy [уничтожить].

Because for years the West has done nothing concrete to hold Russia to account for abuses in Chechnya, it has contributed not only to the suffering there but also to the suffering of the children in the school in Beslan. Interestingly, Tisdall quotes Britain’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, citing the same words used by RIA-Novosti in its collection of international statements and responses to the attack in Beslan. ‘Their suffering is our suffering,’ Straw says. ‘The enormous responsibility of President Putin and his government is ours too.’ Yet, whereas RIANovosti uses this quote to refer to the suffering of the children in Beslan and Putin’s responsibility to act and save them, by placing the quotation immediately after a direct reference to the Chechen conflict, Tisdall widens the referents of Straw’s words to include the very people and nations that the West so typically ignores. The suffering of the Chechen people is our suffering, Tisdall infers. The enormous responsibility of President Putin and his government to stop it is our responsibility also. The second foreign commentary is Simon Jenkins’ ‘Господин Путин, подавление терроризма только подпитывает его!’ [Mr Putin, the Suppression of Terrorism Only Feeds It!] (IV/12:35), lifted from

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InoSMI27and originally published in The Times.28 Like Tisdall, Jenkins also makes a link between Putin’s ‘counter-productive harsh repressions’ (‘brutality’ in the original) and the violence of terrorists, arguing that, ‘[o] ver the last five years, Mr Putin’s rough [грубые] methods in Chechnya have regularly poured “fresh blood” into the ranks of Chechen extremists.’29 He also argues that the political and military counterterrorist responses of Russia and the West exaggerate the terrorist threat and serve only to perpetuate violence because it, in turn, perpetuates the power of those in power. ‘[G]overnments which respond to terror as Mr Putin and Mr Bush are doing are popular with the public,’30 he argues. ‘Mr Putin gained political capital31 from his ruthless policies in Chechnya just as Stalin gained his through repressions against the kulaks. He knows that even a blood bath in Beslan will do him no harm.’ Yet, unlike Putin, who in his televised speech to the nation on 4 September sees strength in this kind of brutal response, Jenkins calls it weakness, ‘capitulating to terror’ (капитуляция перед террором), ‘recognising its formulations and its rules of the game’ (признание его формулировок и правил игры).32 Real strength lies in addressing ‘the resentment [недовольство] and conflicts which can be cured only by politics and not by military means’.33 Karl Grobe, in his piece, ‘Беслан: случайность, а не освобождение’ (‘Beslan: an accident, not liberation’) (IV/14:34),34 reiterates these themes. The inactivity of the government, he argues, which resulted in the ‘chaotic’ end to the siege after three days, demonstrates a weak, rather than a strong, state. Putin’s reassurances that saving the children was a priority are seen as ‘nothing more than an illusion to soothe the populace [для успокоения населения]’, who, fed biased information about the ‘wicked acts of “blacks”’ (черны, a derogatory term used to refer to people from the Caucasus) and nothing about the ‘wicked acts of the state authorities’, are a people who ‘know only one side of terror and nothing about state terror’. The Financial Times argues that the ‘instability, ethnic conflicts and widespread poverty’ that characterise the Caucasus are evidence of Russia’s lack of strength in the region, and Russian government attempts to link Chechens with al-Qaeda, and so divert attention away from local problems, are met with scepticism: ‘Their motives are not jihad or Islamist ideology; they just want Russia to get out of Chechnya’ (IV/14:44).35 Daniel Brössler, writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (IV/15:15),36 attributes not strength to Putin but rigidity, or harshness (жесткость, Härte). Putin should understand, Brössler argues, that the almost boundless violence in Chechnya is giving birth to a new, boundless hatred; that the poverty in Grozny cannot be concealed by new renovations; that he could compromise, negotiate; that the continued existence of great Russia is not threatened by every

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concession. Not even the presence of children, continues Serge Anderlen from Le Temps (IV/23:50),37 was enough to shake Putin’s resolve to destroy, rather than talk to, the terrorists. Pointing to the ‘hand’ of ‘international terrorism’, Putin is, as always, trying to avoid a reconsideration of his own policies in the Caucasus. It is an avoidance mirrored in the international responses to the attack: the mountains of sympathy telegrams growing on Putin’s desk, received from all the capitals of the civilised countries, in the spirit of the notorious international fight against the terrorist hydra . . . Neither in Brussels, nor in Washington is a single word said about the Chechen conflict, about the terrifying [жуткий] background of the Beslan tragedy.

Russian-language commentaries The Kavkazcenter primary narrative text includes five commentaries written especially for the agency. While the commentaries included in the RIA-Novosti English narrative (see Chapter 5) steadfastly frame the local narrative of the Beslan attack with the meta-narrative of ‘the war on terror(ism)’, the commentaries here make other connections to the Chechen wars, and the policies and practices of Putin’s regime, which are configured into a framing narrative of genocide. Like the Chechen-Ichkerian representatives and the Western European commentators, two of these Russian commentators link the Beslan attack to narratives of the Chechen wars. Both Stomakhin (II/02:14) and Irbakhaev (II/02:32) invoke again the deaths of ‘forty-two thousand Chechen children’ as a kind of magnified parallel to the children taken hostage in Beslan, just as the Chechen people have been held hostage and threatened with death for the past ten years. This ‘genocide’ is causally linked to the violence in Beslan, ‘a result of Putin’s policies in the Caucasus and a response to the terrorism and crimes of the Kremlin camarilla’. Appalled at the demonisation of the ‘armed people who seized the school’ and who have only threatened to kill children, while ‘every day Western leaders kiss [лобызаются] the murderers of 42 thousand Chechen school children’, Irbakhaev angrily dares these ‘hypocrites and scoundrels [подлецы]’ to judge the hostage-takers, ‘because you are all direct accomplices in murder’. The attention of these commentators is focused not on the actions of the hostage-takers, but on the words and actions of Putin and the Russian government, who, as the perpetrators in the genocide narrative, are repeatedly characterised as dishonest and untrustworthy, and acting ruthlessly and violently towards their own citizens in order to maintain power. Stomakhin claims that Putin ‘readily’ (способный с легкостью) sacrifices the lives of tens, hundreds, even hundreds of thousands of

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people ‘for the sake of his own power’. The airplane crashes, the car bombs at Rizhskaia metro station, the blown-up apartment buildings in 1999, the blast on a metro train in March 2004 and the seizure of the school are viewed, not as the work of ‘international terrorists’, in spite of government attempts to lay blame on Chechens and ‘female suicide bombers’ (шахидки-смертницы), but of the Lubianka (headquarters of the FSB, formally the KGB and its predecessor, the NKVD) and ‘the Putin regime itself’.38 Sattaev argues that everything the Russian government has said and done concerning Beslan has been duplicitous. Official claims that the armed group refuse to communicate by telephone do not square with the fact that the hostage-takers themselves gave out their telephone number. If the videotape from the hostage-takers was blank, as officials claim, then why were there no provisions made for it to be re-recorded? ‘All the information put out by the Russian forces,’ Sattaev writes, ‘is aimed at suggesting to the population that the school was seized by crazy people without any particular demands, who are not making any contact, and from whom any unpredictable actions can be expected’ (III/00:43). The authorities claim that the school will not be stormed even as they are preparing to storm the school, and when it happens they can say it was ‘an emergency measure’. After the storm, Musa Stone continues this litany of lies coming from the Russian government (IV/2:20). The storming of the school was a success (even though eighty per cent of the hostages died or were injured). The armed group, including Arabs and a black person, was under the command of Chechen general Doku Umarov (even though hostages say the hostage-takers included Russians, Ossetians, Ingush, maybe Chechens, and said nothing of Arabs or black people). Twentyseven hostage-takers were killed during the fighting in Beslan (although no bodies have been shown). Claims that Magomed Evloev was in command of the group, was trapped in the basement, was about to be killed or arrested, all came to nothing. Liuzakov continues the tirade: The government was lying from the very beginning. Lying that the hostagetakers were not making any demands. Lying about the number of hostages. Lying about the mood around the school. From the very beginning the government was preparing for the very worst version [of events]. The government was preparing to shed blood. A lot of blood. Preparing for it deliberately. (IV/4:34)

For these commentators, the violence in Beslan is not just a result of Russian aggression in Chechnya, but is a direct consequence of the violence of the Russian government itself and its apparent disregard for the

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lives of all its citizens. It is a ‘regime established on blood and provocations’ that can continue ‘only through blood and provocations’ (II/2:04). Russia is a violent place, with provocations, murders and kidnapping a part of ‘our lives’. ‘You wanted a strong hand?’ Liuzakov asks. ‘You got it. You wanted strong special forces? Secretive and all-powerful? Afraid of no one, answerable to no one? You got it. Only the question is, who has whom?’ (IV/4:34). Embedded anachronic narrative texts: narratives from ‘before’ In the RIA-Novosti Russian primary narrative text, there are five external retroversions, which interrupt the narrative to relate events that occurred before the Beslan school was seized; together they position the Beslan attack within a narrative of terrorist attacks against Russia that situates the country in the frontline in ‘the international war on terror(ism)’. Unlike RIA-Novosti, Kavkazcenter does not interrupt its primary narrative to include anachronic narratives, yet, particularly in the commentaries, the narrative is full of allusions to other events and other narratives, sometimes indicated by nothing more than a date (9/11) or a place name (Karabakh). There is some overlap between RIA-Novosti’s retroversions and Kavkazcenter’s allusions. Both, for example, recall the hostage-takings in Budennovsk and the Dubrovka theatre, the explosion at the Rizhskaia Moscow metro station and the recent crashing of the passenger airplanes. The translation of the article from the Financial Times, calling Budennovsk a ‘bitter precedent’ (originally ‘gruesome forerunner’) to the hostage-taking in North Ossetia, relates that ‘in 1995, hostages were seized in a hospital in Budennovsk, southern Russia [and] around a hundred people were killed’ (IV/14:44). While the original English calls this ‘the first big Chechen terrorist incident’, the Russian translation is passive and subjectless. For Kavkazcenter, Budennovsk is not an example of (Chechen) terrorism but of Russian heavy-handedness. Liuzakov provides the subject when he claims that at Budennovsk, ‘most of the hostages were killed precisely by the bullets of the special forces storming the building’ (IV/4:34). Dubrovka too, as discussed above (pp. 115–18), is a ‘bitter precedent’ to Beslan, again not as a ‘terrorist attack’ but as an example of the Russian government’s callous disregard for the lives of its (and foreign) citizens, and its amazing ability to avoid taking any responsibility for its violent actions while unequivocally blaming ‘terrorists’. Russian media reports that the Rizhskaia and airplane explosions were the work of ‘female suicide bombers’ (шахидкисмертницы) are, for Stomakhin, simply absurd. He traces a narrative,

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not of ‘terrorist attacks’ but of ‘NKVD–KGB–FSB’ lies, propaganda and murderous involvement that includes the explosion on a metro train on 6 March 2004,39 the 1999 apartment building explosions, and reaches back to ‘Stalinist times’ when every factory accident, every train derailment was ‘an act of sabotage [диверсия] or wrecking [вредительство]’. ‘What else to expect,’ Stomakhin shrugs, ‘from agencies [органы] that, in 1941, changed into German uniforms and burnt down Soviet villages just to rouse up hatred for the Germans in the population’ (II/02:14). The Western European commentaries also contain many allusions to other narratives, although none deliberately interrupt themselves in order to reconstruct them in any detail, in the way that RIA-Novosti does. Simon Tisdall (IV/01:01), for example, compares the ‘terrorism’ (originally ‘terror’) in Beslan with the ‘tragedies in Columbine and Dunblane’ and ‘terrorist attacks of suicide bombers in Iraq’; compares the ‘Caucasus republics’ (originally ‘lands’) with ‘Czechoslovakia in another time’; contrasts prime minister Tony Blair’s talk of Britain’s ‘“moral responsibility”’ in Darfur and Iraq, and his ‘criteria for intervention, when he sends troops into Kabul and Freetown’, to forgotten Chechnya. The assumption behind the use of allusions, or ‘intertextuality’ in Kristeva’s term – and it is a technique commonly employed in opinion pieces – is that the events (or ‘texts’) to which they refer are well known enough to have become public societal narratives, usually a kind of reduced, often moralistic, form of the original local narratives. Connecting the local narrative of Beslan to these other narratives frames the events of Beslan and allows them to be interpreted in a certain way, although what this way turns out to be will depend on the reader’s grasp of the public narratives invoked, particularly when translated. It may be that Dunblane and Czechoslovakia ‘in a different time’ mean little or nothing to Kavkazcenter’s Russian readers (or Tisdall’s Anglophone readers, for that matter). It is as if the local narrative of the events in Beslan, itself fast becoming a public societal narrative, is located in a mesh of narrative connections that has the potential to add much (even more than Tisdall supposes) or little to the original narrative, to persuade, enlighten, confuse or even lose, the reader. .

Embedded synchronal narrative texts located beyond Beslan School No. 1 Unlike RIA-Novosti, where more than half of the posts report not on the actions of the hostage-takers and hostages in Beslan but on the actions of government officials and personnel, building up a narrative of a wellresourced and competent government responding quickly and effectively

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to the crisis, the attention of Kavkazcenter remains largely focused on events taking place in Beslan. Some official actions are included but, rather than a benign power, they portray an untrustworthy, insidious regime. The only official action reported on 1 September is Moscow’s appeal to the UN Security Council for an urgent extraneous session, along with the observation that the UN has never before acted so promptly with regard to Chechnya, and, in another reference to the genocide framing narrative, ‘has not yet considered it necessary to condemn the mass murder of Chechen children, women and elderly people’ (I/19:40). On 2 September, Kavkazcenter reports Putin’s return to Moscow, not as a man of action but as a president with nothing to say who sends his high-ranking officials off to Beslan to deal with the crisis (II/12:56). The announcement that celebrations planned for Moscow’s City Day have been cancelled for security reasons, and ‘to express solidarity with the citizens of North Ossetia’, are viewed as wavering from earlier assertions that the celebrations would be held ‘under any circumstances’ (II/19:04). The actions of the authorities, who have ‘closed the area, closed off the roads, turned off mobile telephone connections, and cancelled flights to Vladikavkaz’ (II/12:56), result in ‘little precise information’ rather than any sense of security. The website Information Agency Daymohk was hacked by ‘cyberterrorists from the FSB’ and out of action all day on 3 September until restored by the site’s technicians in the early hours of 4 September (IV/12:32). In place of the concern and kindness of strangers, who, in the RIA-Novosti Russian narrative, lay flowers and light candles at Russian embassies, Kavkazcenter reports only ‘anti-Chechen hysteria’ in Moscow where placards calling for ‘the eviction of criminal Chechens from our cities’ and ‘an end to financing Chechnya’ appeared in the metro (II/23:53). Kavkazcenter lays the blame on ‘official authorities’ because civil initiatives usually use leaflets, not placards. In place of official actions, the stories of journalists Anna Politkovskaya, Andrei Babitskii and Yana Dlugy, all minor characters in the RIANovosti narratives – Dlugy is missing from the Russian narrative and all three are absent from the English narrative – are embedded into the Kavkazcenter narrative text. On 2 September, Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitskii is detained en route to Beslan at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, ‘on suspicion of attempting to transport explosives’ (II/12:36). Released after an hour and a half (according to a colleague, who speaks to radio station Ekho Moskvy), Babitskii was immediately approached by two young men, who began bullying (задирать) him. Two policemen appeared, accusing the young men of hooliganism, and dispatched Babitskii to the police department, from where he was then taken to a first aid centre for a medical examination. The same post includes

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another temporary narrator, Aleksandr Salnikov, representing the pressservice of the main Department of Internal Affairs for transport, whose story is somewhat different. He claims Babitskii ‘was detained for “disorderly behaviour” in the arrivals hall of Vnukova airport: [A]t 10:15, ‘some kind of conflict’ took place . . . The journalist was reprimanded by an on-duty policeman but he did not react in the way he should have . . . That is why he had to be taken to the duty department for an examination [to see if he was] drunk or sober. (II/19:33)

Babitskii appeared before the Solntsevskii court in Moscow, was fined a thousand roubles and, with the case dismissed, released on Saturday, 4 September. Yana Dlugy, a France-Press correspondent and US citizen, who was travelling with Babitskii, was also detained for examination and then released. Her colleague, head of the France-Press Moscow bureau, Michel Viatto, said ‘she was asked to show her passport and answer several questions. All this created some difficulties, and so she did not make the plane flying to the North Caucasus’ (II/19:33). Another journalist who did not make it to the North Caucasus is Novaya Gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya, ‘admitted to hospital in Rostov [where she was to change planes] with a diagnosis of “poisoning”’. Dmitrii Muratov, chief editor of the newspaper, tells Newsru. com that ‘she began to feel ill, she lost consciousness . . . and only with difficulty did a doctor manage to revive her’ (II/19:29). Still in hospital, Politkovskaya’s condition is said to be stable but serious. The post is titled ‘FSB Poisons Journalist Politkovskaya on Her Way to Beslan’, signifying Kavkazcenter’s interpretation of the incident as another state response to the crisis in Beslan. Liuzakov connects the government’s deliberate preparations to storm the school with the episodes concerning Babitskii and Politkovskaya. ‘This is exactly why Andrei Babitskii and Anna Politkovskaya were not allowed into Beslan. This was the order: do not let them in at any cost, even [if you have to use] murder or any other provocation’ (IV/04:34). Grobe also makes the connection: ‘[t]hus were two witnesses removed: and for the state authorities this has turned out to be not inopportune’ (IV/14:34). Embedded synchronal narrative texts located in or near Beslan School No. 1 From place to space RIA-Novosti describes Beslan as a town in North Ossetia, about thirty kilometres north-west of Vladikavkaz (I/10:22). No more remarks are

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made about it and thus it seems an unremarkable place. English readers, who have probably never heard of any of these places, are given additional details – North Ossetia is a North Caucasus republic of Russia and Vladikavkaz is its capital. This ordinariness is an essential element of the politics of fear because it ensures the populace feel more vulnerable, since they can never predict what (type of) place could, or will, be attacked next. It is also an essential element of terrorism discourse because it establishes the notion of ‘innocence’ (and its antonym ‘guilt’) (Zulaika and Douglass 1996). Attacking an unassuming, provincial, ‘innocent’ town can only be more evidence of the terrorists’ cruelty and inhumanity, and ‘any warring faction’, as in the Russian government in the role it has cast for itself in ‘the war on terror(ism)’, ‘will advocate an innocent perspective for itself predicated upon the enemy’s culpability’ (Zulaika and Douglass 1996: 132). Kavkazcenter, however, problematises these categories. Beslan is ‘one of the military bases for Russian troops in the Caucasus’ (IV/13:01). Irbakhaev describes Beslan as ‘a frontline, military town, from where squads of murderers and sadists are sent out every day [to fight] against Chechen children’ (II/00:32). While not advocating that, therefore, Beslan deserved to be attacked – the ‘innocence’ of the Beslan children and the randomness of the attack remain unquestioned – Kavkazcenter’s portrayal of Beslan as not quite as unassuming and ‘innocent’ as RIANovosti would have its readers believe is an example of a ‘fault line within the totalising arguments’ (Zulaika and Douglass 1996: 123) of terrorism discourse. Like the other abstract nouns of terrorism discourse, innocence and guilt are political, narrative constructions. From actors to characters: who are the terrorists? Kavkazcenter pointedly avoids all the words RIA-Novosti uses to refer to the hostage-takers, instead using ‘armed unit’ (вооруженный отряд), ‘armed group’, ‘armed people’ or, more rarely, ‘attackers’ (нападавшие) or ‘hostage-takers’ (захватчики, which is more negative than its English ‘equivalent’). Of the women, virtually nothing is said except that there are women in the group. Words like ‘boeviki’, ‘bandits’ (бандиты) or ‘terrorists’ (террористы) only find their way into the narrative through other media, which is sometimes, but not always, ‘filtered’: ‘the children taken hostage by terrorists’ (RIA-N II/11:34) becomes ‘the children taken hostage’ (Kavkazcenter II/11:19), for example. The official speculation over the identity of the hostage-takers that appears at intervals in the RIA-Novosti Russian narrative is also present here. Kavkazcenter, however, highlights the speculative nature of the statements and uses them to portray officials as ignorant, dishonest and

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incompetent. The supposition that the hostage-taking was carried out by бойцы (‘fighters’ or ‘butchers’) of the ‘Ingush Jamaat’, and organised by Chechen–Ichkerian leaders, is promptly dismissed by pointing out that the Russians have produced no facts to support it, and immediately following it with Akhmed Zakaev’s disclaimer (I/17:29). The story reported at length by RIA-Novosti where one of the hostage-takers spoke ‘in Russian with a strong Chechen accent’ to a reporter from the New York Times, claiming that the hostage-takers are from the ‘Islamic Battalion of Martyrs’ (Riyad as-Salikhiin), is argued away by Kavkazcenter, who wonders how an American journalist might recognise a Chechen accent (I/21:58). Russian official and media reports that the hostage-takers were led by Magomed ‘Magas’ Evloev, ‘one of the leaders of the operation of mujihadeens in Ingushetia on 22 June’, are met with scepticism and claims that he ‘does not exist’ or is somebody else (IV/13:50). Claims from the Russian authorities on 4 September that ‘between ten and twenty of the armed people were allegedly Arabs’ are also disregarded, with counterclaims that ‘[t]here is no confirmation of this statement from independent sources’, nor ‘any concrete facts to support it’. Furthermore, ‘[u]sually Russian troops really like to pose with their dead enemies; however, as yet, there has not been a single video shot of the dead members of the armed group’ (IV/01:54). As the government continues to allege the participation of Arabs and one black person in the hostage-taking, Kavkazcenter turns to ridicule, asking, ‘where did the black people go?’ Russian television audiences are confused. In the news on Russian television today, . . . one of the hostages . . . said there were no black people or Arabs in the school. However, yesterday, on channel Rossiya, they showed one of the corridors of the school and showed the body of a dead person, calling him a black person. (IV/18:31)

Stone is more scathing, calling it a ‘pretty strange turn in the propagandist thoughts of the Liubanka pros’ given that not a single hostage had said anything about Arabs or black people. ‘You have to admit that it would be impossible not to notice a black person even in a stressful situation’ (IV/02:20). The inclusion of foreigners among the hostage-takers is seen by Kavkazcenter as nothing more than a political attempt to ‘internationalise’ the attack and detach it from the regional narratives of Russian aggression in Chechnya. Literally on the heels of Putin’s address, . . . as if to elaborate the directives of the Kremlin chief, the topic of ‘international terrorist Internationalism’ [международный террористический интернационал] could again be

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heard in the Russian media. Russian authorities said that under the debris in the Beslan school at least 36 bodies of members of the armed group were found strewn all over the school. A spokesperson .  .  . particularly emphasised that many of the dead were Arabs. He said ‘it is absolutely obvious that these were mercenaries: documents found during a search of the bodies prove this, as do packets of [US] dollars shoved into the pockets of the boeviki. (IV/19:01)

Kavkazcenter is dismissive. ‘Why Arabs and black people going to their deaths would hoard packets of dollars,’ it remarks, ‘was not explained by the Russian authorities.’ Nor does there seem to be an explanation for the statement that ‘the bodies of fighters of a Slavic appearance were also discovered in the school’ (IV/19:01). Kavkazcenter contributes some speculations of its own, in an attempt to shift the focus away from Chechens and Ingush and onto Ossetians and Russians. It reports, without comment, claims from Ingushetia.ru that ‘the armed group who seized the school could be made up of local Ossetians belonging to the Ossetian Jamaat [who] took part in the military operation of mujahideen in Ingushetia 21–22 June’ (II/03:07). It also reports, again without comment, the North Ossetian minister of Internal Affairs’ statement that the group is ‘made up of Ossetians, Ingush, Chechens, and Russians’ (II/8:35), yet later tries to remove Ingush and Chechens from this list. Kavkazcenter cites an official statement that explosives were brought into the school by a group of workmen several days before the attack as support for the view that ‘the unit of hostagetakers was mainly made up of local Ossetians, because no Ingush or Chechens are allowed to work in Beslan’ given that a Russian military base is located there (IV/13:01). Akhmed Zakaev states in an interview with the BBC that ‘according to Ruslan Aushev . . . there was not a single Chechen in the group’ (IV/13:27). If they were Ossetians, Stone suggests, then ‘this fact can explain how most of the unit scattered [растворилась] in Beslan and the Russian troops lost them’ (IV/02:20). Yet, assumptions that the hostage-takers are mainly Chechens and are motivated by Chechen grievances often underlie the positions of the foreign commentators that act as temporary narrators for Kavkazcenter. All of them connect the Beslan attack with ‘Chechen conflict’ in a region that has become ‘a breeding ground and a zone of attraction for religious extremists’ (IV/01:01), ‘a region tortured by instability, ethnic conflicts and widespread poverty’, whose political and ethnic complexities are exploited by ‘Chechen leaders . . . taking their military actions beyond the borders of Chechnya’ (IV/14:44). An anonymous ‘Western intelligence officer’ argues away Russian claims of Al-Qaeda involvement in the Caucasus by saying ‘the hostage-takers are a group of Chechens’

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and Anderlen calls them ‘Chechens or pro-Chechen fighters’, even while acknowledging that the identity of the group has not been established (IV/23:50). Brössler states that ‘Chechen and Islamist terror, of course, are interconnected [взаимосвязаиы]’ (IV/15:15), even as he argues their differences. In the translations of these articles, there are some attempts to eliminate the more obvious traces of ‘guilt by association’. Tisdall’s sweeping summary of Russian–Chechen conflict suggests that some kind of inherent violence in the local population is a contributing factor: Since the time of the tsars, the mountain tribes of the Caucasus have fought for land, faith and just for the hell of it. In A Hero of Our Time, novelist Mikhail Lermontov wrote admiringly in 1840 of the bravery of his opponents along Russia’s lawless southern flank.

The (anonymous) Russian translation from Inopressa included in the Kavkazcenter narrative omits the words in bold. The Financial Times calls the 1995 siege at Budennovsk ‘the first big Chechen terrorist incident’ and ‘a gruesome forerunner’ to the siege in Beslan, implying that this, too, is a big Chechen terrorist incident. Anton Bespalov’s Russian translation posted by InoSMI and Kavkazcenter turns the sentence into a subjectless passive one and thereby removes any mention of Chechens. In the same article, the authors argue that even though ‘there is no undisputed evidence of Chechen involvement’ in regional conflicts, these ‘create opportunities, starting with gun-running, in which the Chechens are expert’. Although Bespalov translates the whole sentence, Kavkazcenter again removes the reference to Chechens and their apparent penchant for contraband weapons. Perhaps it is the persistence of these pervasive connections made between Chechens and terrorists, along with Kavkazcenter’s attempts to streamline the Beslan attack into a narrative of genocide, where there can be only one enemy, that prompt the site, on occasion, to attempt to downplay the violence of the hostage-takers. The main aim of the hostage-takers, according to the first sentence of Brössler’s commentary, was to cause great suffering: According to the perverted [извращенная; pervers] logic of terror, the people, who seized the hostages in Beslan, have achieved their most important goal: since the morning of 1 September, Russia has been enduring hell. [ад; die Hölle]

Although, translated by Vladimir Sinitsa and published by InoSMI, Kavkazcenter omits the sentence. The Gazeta.ru article that Kavkazcenter appears to post in full (IV/12:17) is, in fact, missing the first five paragraphs. Much of this

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material is concerned with figures, estimates of the number of dead, wounded and hospitalised, but it also includes ghastly descriptions of the remains of the hostages in the burnt-out sports hall and the timeconsuming forensic analyses that will be needed in order to identify and account for all the dead. Kavkazcenter omits these details from its narrative – and there are other examples in the editorial decisions regarding some of the personal narratives (see pp. 137–40) – in an effort to both distance itself from the carnage and exclude any negative portrayals of the hostage-takers. While RIA-Novosti almost caricatures the hostage-takers as the embodiment of evil and brutality, Kavkazcenter is unwilling to admit the atrocities of the hostage-takers or draw attention to their cruelty and violence. For Kavkazcenter, the real terrorists in this narrative are Putin and the Russian authorities. Again and again, the agency emphasises the violence and deceit of the Russian government and the hypocrisy of those who refuse to admit it. Putin is ‘a bloody butcher, a sadist, a vampire’ (II/02:14) and the responsibility for the murder of the children in Beslan lies on him (IV/00:03). The FSB, seamlessly connected to its notorious forerunner, the KGB and the NKVD, and its Lubianka headquarters and prison, is repeatedly characterised as dangerous and obstructive. It is the FSB who poisons Politkovskaya (II/19:29), arrests Babitskii (II/19:30) and detains Dlugy (II/19:33). It is the FSB who controls the media (II/21:42), taught Putin his lying ways and infiltrated the government (IV/4:34). It is the FSB who destroys hostages and murders children in the same way it boasts of destroying the ‘terrorists’ (III/14:30). The hospitals in Beslan and Vladikavkaz, full of wounded hostages, are barricaded by members of the FSB, who confiscate mobile phones and forbid both staff from leaving and relatives and journalists from entering (IV/15:15). The rhetoric is strong, angry and uncompromising, and the characterisations of the Russian government contrast starkly with the benevolent state and quietly concerned president that feature in the RIA-Novosti narratives. For Kavkazcenter, Putin and his government are just as dangerous and untrustworthy, just as evil, as any group of terrorists. Each side resorts to the same rhetoric, elaborating almost mirror narratives of each other. Narratives from inside the school The first narratives from inside the school come from two of the women released late on Thursday afternoon, who enter the narrative on Friday morning. They describe the conditions in the sports hall, where the hostages were kept, and some of the deaths that occurred on the first day of the siege.

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The next narratives from inside the school appear in the narrative text on Saturday in an anonymous opinion piece taken in part from Gazeta. ru,40 which uses anonymous, indirect contributions from former hostages to piece together a narrative of the attack and its violent end. Thus, judging by the stories [рассказы] of hostages who escaped unharmed, the explosion, after which the storm began, was a tragic accident . . . one of the bottles became unstuck, fell down into the middle of the crowd and exploded, tearing to pieces everybody who was near it. (IV/12:17)

Another version held by ‘several hostages’ is that ‘the first explosion was fired from outside the school’. Furthermore, ‘it turns out that nobody had negotiated with the boeviki and their demands had been ignored’. Hostages said that ‘from the first hours of the seizure of the school the terrorists were making a single demand that did not change as the days passed: a signed order from Putin to withdraw Russian troops from Chechnya’. From ‘the testimonies of the hostages’ it becomes known that it was not the hostage-takers, but the authorities, who regularly broke off communications with headquarters, even when the boeviki threatened to shoot prisoners if they were ignored. Of the four negotiators the hostage-takers demanded to see, only Roshal turned up. None of the North Ossetian authorities, even though several of them had children among the hostages, even came to the telephone. In this way, the article builds up a narrative that challenges official versions of events, claiming that, contrary to official claims, the storming of the school was indeed being prepared by the authorities. Yet the hostages who contribute their elements to this counter-narrative remain anonymous and their words indirectly quoted. As in the case of RIANovosti, where Fridinskii and Tsomartova-Levitskaia re-narrate the stories of former hostages, the personal narratives of the anonymous former hostages in the Gazeta.ru piece are completely effaced by the interpretive voices of the authors. Personal narratives: eyewitness accounts Only three named and directly quoted eyewitnesses act as temporary narrators in the Kavkazcenter primary narrative text. The first is former hostage Adel Itskaeva, ‘one of the women released on Thursday after negotiations with former president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev’. In a post the following morning (IV/9:21), Itskaeva reacts to the authorities’ claim that there are only three hundred and fifty-four hostages: ‘What? Are they out of their minds? We’re 1020 people in there!’ (Да вы что? Обалдели? Нас там 1020 человек!)41 The same post includes twentyseven-year-old Zalina Dzandarova, ‘another released hostage’, who says

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that in the school ‘there are not 300 people, but more, maybe 1500 [а все 1500]’. Originally interviewed by (the Russian daily) Kommersant and published using a question and answer format, Kavkazcenter reproduces only one of Dzandarova’s six replies, where she describes the crowded, airless conditions in the sports hall. Dzandarova is selected as a temporary narrator not for her story but because of her claims regarding the large number of hostages, which, along with Itskaeva’s exclamation, clearly contradict the official figure of three hundred and fifty-four and thereby expose the authorities as, at best, incompetent and, at worst, deceitful. This is the focus of the Kavkazcenter post, which misquotes Dzandarova’s wild estimate and turns it into quasi-factual headline: ‘1500 People Held in the School in Beslan’. Kavkazcenter indirectly reports two other replies from Dzandarova, but only in part, and they are combined in such a way as to alter the original meaning. In the Kommersant interview, Dzandarova describes how twenty men were shot by the terrorists at the time of the attack on Wednesday morning, ‘finished off’ (добивали) along with the wounded lying in the schoolyard and others taken out of the sports hall, and ‘finished off’ in the corridor. She also talks about the shakhidkas (female suicide-bombers) when asked, ‘How many terrorists were there in all?’ About thirty, she says. ‘All men. At first there were two shakhidkas, but on Wednesday they blew themselves up in the corridor along with several men-hostages. Afterwards, the men-terrorists said to us that their sisters had vanquished [победили].’42 Compare this with the final paragraph from the Kavkazcenter post: The woman said that already on Wednesday two shakhidkas blew themselves up in the corridor where the men-hostages were. All the men who tried to resist were also allegedly killed that way. There were around 20 such men. (III/9:21)

By selecting certain elements from Dzandarova’s story concerning the shakhidkas (how they killed themselves and several hostages) and omitting any reference to the male terrorists (there were many more of them, they both approved and explained the women’s actions), Kavkazcenter effectively shifts the agency of violence onto the women while removing any involvement of the men. This is further achieved by the way Kavkazcenter combines Dzandarova’s account of the women suicidebombers with her story of the killing of the approximately twenty men who resisted the terrorists so that it seems that the men killed in the corridor by the shakhidkas were the twenty men who tried to resist the attack. Thus, in keeping with Kavkazcenter’s problematic ambivalence towards the hostage-takers, the merciless violence of the terrorists

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is completely removed from Dzandarova’s original account and the responsibility for the deaths of the twenty men shifted to the women hostage-takers. By shifting the violence onto the women, who embody a marginal or extreme element of Chechen armed resistance rather than the traditional core of Chechen boeviki, Kavkazcenter attempts to downplay the violence of the hostage-takers, disassociating itself from any possible accusations of affiliation with them, and keeping the focus of attention, reserved for the evils of the Russian government, away from them. The only eyewitness to narrate at length for Kavkazcenter is Zalina, ‘a Beslan resident, who was a hostage for two days and survived the storming of the school’.43 Her story appears on Saturday afternoon (IV/12:54) in an article lifted from Gazeta.ru44 and posted in the ‘Press’ section of the Kavkazcenter website. The article begins with an introductory paragraph, claiming that Zalina’s story clarifies three things. First, the boeviki killed hostages mercilessly; secondly, nobody negotiated with them; and finally, they somehow knew about the beginning of the assault on the school. Thus, even before her story begins, its themes are highlighted and its purpose stated. The temporary narrator is framed by the narrator before she even speaks. Furthermore, without quotation marks, it is difficult to be sure of what Zalina said as she communicated her narrative and what has been removed or lost in the transition from spoken to written, edited language. Yet once she begins, Zalina appears to narrate without interruption, relating the initial attack, the crowded, tortuous conditions in the school, words and actions of the hostagetakers, and how she herself was sent to the kitchen to prepare food for them (IV/12:54). While Kavkazcenter largely removes the violence of the hostagetakers from Dzandarova’s story, Zalina’s narrative retains the killing of the twenty men at the outset of the attack. Yet, in a way that offsets any emphasis on the hostage-takers’ violence, the terrorists are characterised here as less than ruthless. They are nervous, even amateur. They threaten to execute ten people, for example, but only kill four. They threaten to shoot the young lads, but don’t. They allow the hostages to drink water and use the toilet, they give blankets to the older people and one secretly brings dried milk for a hostage’s child. They threaten to kill hostages if the telephone line becomes disconnected, and although it does, they kill no one. Any cruelty on the part of the terrorists is characterised as a direct response to the provocations of the Russian and local governments, who are characterised as indifferent and incompetent. They refuse to come to the phone, deceive the terrorists, abandon the hostages to their fate, prepare to storm the building, even, in the case of the traffic

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policemen on the road to Beslan, betray the hostages by accepting bribes to allow the hostage-takers to pass and enter the town. Zalina’s narrative is selectively appropriated into the Kavkazcenter primary narrative text because it conforms to the characterisations of that narrative, where evil is located in untrustworthy, unreliable and ineffective government forces rather than in the hostage-takers. Yet, this personal narrative is, in fact, interrupted. Comparison with the original Gazeta.ru article reveals a final paragraph, where Zalina’s characterisations of hostage-takers and government forces are not so clear cut. In it, the hostage-takers are brutal, killing a woman with a grenade as she disobeys the rules and runs away from them: [T]hey threw it when our [forces] had already broken into the school. How our lot got in, I didn’t see. But the children started to yell loudly ‘Don’t shoot!’ Then the charges [заряды] blew up. Our lot found me and led me out of the school. When everything began, they shouted something in their own language, probably they were praying to Allah.

In contrast, government forces are characterised as ‘ours’. They manage to break into the school and lead the woman to safety, away from the violence, the terrorists, their language and their god. Kavkazcenter omits the entire paragraph. Conclusions Although Kavkazcenter aims ‘to report real events’ and ‘disseminate the truth’, the agency has no correspondents in Beslan at any time during the siege. Instead, the agency constructs its narrative text by assembling an array of temporary narrators selected from Russian and foreign media through which, in an unequal interplay of voices overseen by the highly critical voice of Kavkazcenter itself, the site constructs its narrative of the hostage-taking in Beslan. While brief, updated reports are published regularly throughout the duration of the siege and its aftermath, the primary narrative text is dominated by the inclusion of lengthy commentaries written by Kavkazcenter’s own commentators, marginalised, even criminalised, by the Russian government, and a selection of foreign commentators, lifted from internationally renowned print and online media sources in an effort to lend credibility to the site. It is in this material that Kavkazcenter’s ‘framing narrative’ of Beslan is so strongly elaborated. Rather than an episode in ‘the war on terror(ism)’, Kavkazcenter narrates Beslan as a consequence of Russian military genocide against the Chechen people, a narrative that is itself framed by a narrative of consistent brutality perpetrated by the Soviet/Russian regime against its

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own peoples, a narrative that, like ‘the war on terror(ism)’, is characterised by binary, oppositional divisions of good and evil. Cast in the role of good in this narrative are the innocent Chechen people. Temporary narrators from the Chechen-Ichkerian government in exile express their willingness, at great personal risk, to travel to Beslan to negotiate a peaceful end to the siege. The fate of the children in Beslan is compared repeatedly to the suffering of thousands of Chechen children and innocent Chechen civilians in a narrative of genocide perpetrated by a violent aggressor against a small peaceful nation, a genocide in which the West is implicit because of its inaction. Causal links between Russian brutality in Chechnya and the Beslan hostage-taking are made again and again, particularly by Western commentators, yet Kavkazcenter explores neither these links nor the hostage-takers themselves too closely. While the analogous, framing narrative of genocide against Chechen children serves to focus extensively on the evil of the Russian authorities and provides a (desperate) platform on which to catalogue and elaborate details of Chechen suffering ordinarily ignored and sidelined by Western governments, Kavkazcenter is distinctly uncomfortable with any focus on the cruelty and violence of the hostage-takers perpetrated against the Beslan children. Claims that the hostage-takers include Chechens are argued away, played down, ignored or deflected onto other ethnic groups. Western focus on Chechen violence is eliminated from commentaries translated into Russian. Eyewitness accounts of the hostage-takers’ violence are edited out or shifted onto the female members of the group, who can be dismissed as marginal, radical, even rogue elements of the group. The role of evil is categorically reserved for the Russian authorities. Disparaging of them and their authority, Kavkazcenter depersonalises and homogenises individual spokespersons, constantly challenging official versions of events by pointedly including elements absent from official narratives and drawing attention to discrepancies in official information, hence characterising officials as incompetent, deluded, obtuse and deceitful. Central to this characterisation is the repeated evocation of the 2002 Dubrovka siege, where the deaths of hostages are attributed to the actions of the Russian special forces and their storming of the theatre. Fear that the school in Beslan will also be stormed, with even more disastrous consequences, is a recurrent theme in the Kavkazcenter narrative, and when the siege comes to its horrific and bloody end, blame is laid unequivocally on the Russian government. Putin and his regime are accused not only of lying about their intention to storm the school and bungling the operation, but deliberately sacrificing the lives of the hostages in their aim to destroy the hostage-takers in a popular manifestation of strength over Russia’s enemies.

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Notes 1 All quotations from ‘О Nаs’, www.kavkazcenter.com/russ/about [accessed 21 July 2011]. 2 See Simons (2010) for a list of other Chechen sites and an account of the conflicts between Kavkazcenter and the Russian authorities. 3 These are ITAR-Tass, RIA-Novosti, Interfax, Gazeta.ru, television stations Rossiia and RTR, the generalised ‘Russian media’, Ingushetia.ru, Radio Svoboda, Inopressa.ru, Newsru.com, radio station Ekho Moskvy, Grani.ru, Kompromat.ru, Gazeta, Kommersant and Chechenpress. 4 These are Reuters, The Times, Financial Times, Sky News, Der Standard, the BBC and the generalised ‘Western media’. 5 ‘Прощай, тефленовый Путин!’ [Farewell, Teflon Putin!], www.inopressa.ru/ times/2004/09/02/11:02:22/teflonoviy [accessed 6 August 2008] and now available at http://kompromat.flb.ru/material1.phtml?id=6717 [accessed 21 July 2011]. 6 ‘Terrorist Outrages Take their Toll on Putin’, 2 September 2004, www. timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article477376.ece [accessed 21 July 2011]. 7 Andrew Jack, ‘New Crisis for Putin as Terror Gang Takes Hostages at School’, Financial Times, 2 September 2004, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ a7c67acc-fc7d-11d8-bb3a-00000e2511c8.html, trans. by Inopressa. ru, ‘Новый Кризис для Путина: заложники в школе’, www.inopressa.ru/ ft/2004/09/02/10:03:23/beslan [both accessed 6 August 2008]. 8 http://rko.marsho.net [accessed 21 July 2011]. 9 NGOs have observed the discriminatory application of this article, which is used to restrict freedom of expression and rarely applied to the use of violence by ultra-nationalist groups against minorities. See, for example, ‘Art, Religion and Hatred’, December 2005, www.article19.org/pdfs/publications/russia-art-religion-and-hatred.pdf, and ‘Russian–Chechen Friendship Society Under Threat’, 19 January 2007, www.article19.org/pdfs/press/ russia-chechen-friendship-soc.pdf by ARTICLE 19, a London-based NGO [both accessed 21 July 2011]. 10 ‘CJP Concerned about Health of Jailed Editor’, Committee to Protect Journalists, 3 July 2007, http://cpj.org/2007/07/cpj-concerned-about-healthof-jailed-editor.php#more [accessed 21 July 2011]. 11 http://slovods.narod.ru/. Liuzakov’s blog can be found at http://lyzakovpavel.livejournal.com [both accessed 21 July 2011]. 12 In its Charter, adopted at the party’s second congress held near Riga in January 1989, the party denounces the years of communism and the use of violence as a political tool, condemning the Stalinist mass terror, the Red Bolshevik terror begun in 1918, and the genocide against the peasants during the period of collectivisation. See ‘Партия Демократический Союз. 2-й съезд. Документы’, www.ds.ru/conv2.htm#a1 [accessed 21 July 2011]. 13 Dzandarova is also a temporary narrator in the RIA-Novosti English nar-

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rative (EIII/14:05), which draws on the same Kommersant source for her narrative (see Chapter 5). Anonymous former hostages are also sources in the Kavkazcenter post (IV/12:17) taken almost in its entirety from Gazeta.ru. Other translations for this are ‘direct perception’ (Pine-Coffin and Augustine 1961: 269) and ‘attention’ (Polkinghorne 1988: 129), which might be compared to Riessman’s ‘attending’ (1993: 9, see Chapter 1). The placing of children in the windows is also reported by RIA-Novosti (I/13:52) and is the only time a storm is mentioned until after the siege when Russian officials claim there were no plans to storm the school. The word is used in RIA-Novosti to describe the killing of the hostagetakers by Russian special forces (see Chapter 2, p. 74). Its use here is another example of the way terms can be appropriated as a means of resistance. The figure appears to come from Chechen claims that two hundred and fifty thousand people, or a quarter of the population, have been killed as a result of Russian warfare since 1994. See, for example, Boris Stomakhin, ‘Аннушка уже купила масло .  .  .’, Kavkazcenter, 8 February 2004, www.kavkazcenter.com/russ/content/2004/02/08/16920. shtml [accessed 21 July 2011]. Maskhadov claimed around seventy per cent of the Chechen people had been killed since 1991 (‘Обращение Президента ЧРИ Масхадова к Европарламенту’, Chechenpress, 18 March 2004, www.chechenpress.info/news/2004/03/18/06.shtml [accessed 13 January 2009]) and the European Parliament also quoted large numbers of victims: ‘over 200,000 people dead out of an original Chechen population of one million inhabitants, .  .  . hundreds of thousands [of] refugees . . . tens of thousands injured, tortured, handicapped or traumatised and .  .  . tens of thousands of deaths among the Russian military’ (‘European Parliament recommendation to the Council on EU–Russia relations’, 26 P5_TA(2004)0121, 26 February 2004, www.europarl. europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+TA+P5-TA-20040121+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN [accessed 21 July 2011). Other estimates differ, such as the Moscow Helsinki Group’s claim of approximately seventy thousand civilian deaths (and ‘nearly 12,000 servicemen and staffers of federal enforcement structures’), because ‘[e] xact figures are not known – only human rights activists counted civilian casualties, and military losses are classified’ (Cherkasov 2004: 12). Although, as Scherbich explains, ‘[o]bviously such a legal claim, apparently based on Article IX of the convention concerning disputes over the interpretation and application of the convention, has never been tried at the International Court of Justice because the Chechen Republic is not an independent state recognized by the United Nations and correspondingly cannot be a Contracting Party to the Genocide Convention’ (2005: 82). E/CN.4/2001/NGO/171. www.ushmm.org/conscience/alert/chechnya/contents/01-overview [accessed 13 January 2009].

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22 European Parliament Recommendation to the Council on EU–Russia Relations (2003/2230(INI)), P5_TA(2004)0121, www.europarl.europa.eu/ sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+TA+P5-TA-2004-0121+ 0+ DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN [accessed 21 July 2011]. 23 ‘Обращение Президента ЧРИ Масхадова к Европарламенту’, Chechenpress, 18 March 2004, www.chechenpress.info/news/2004/03/18/06.shtml [accessed 13 January 2009]. 24 In August and September 1999, Shamil Basaev and Ibn Al-Khattab led two armies of boeviki from Chechnya into Dagestan. Putin responded with aerial bombing that effectively launched the Second Chechen War. 25 www.inopressa.ru/guardian/2004/09/03/11:24:07/child [accessed 15 December 2007]. English quotations are my back translations from this article. 26 ‘A Terrible Lesson from a Classroom in Beslan’, 3 September 2004, www.guardian.co.uk/chechnya/Story/0,,1296373,00.html [accessed 21 July 2011]. 27 Trans. by Maksim Korobochkin, www.inosmi.ru/translation/212626.html [accessed 21 July 2011]. 28 ‘Mr Putin, Terrorism Feasts on its Own Suppression’, 3 September 2004, www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_jenkins/arti cle477794.ece [accessed 21 July 2011]. 29 Originally, ‘Mr Putin’s hamfisted handling of Chechnya has given a regular blood transfusion to Chechen extremists over the past five years.’ See pp. 132–6 for discussion of these Russian translations. 30 Originally, ‘are loved by their publics’. 31 Originally, ‘built his powerbase’. 32 Originally, ‘This is weakness, not strength. It gives in to terror. It concedes its language and its terms of engagement.’ 33 Originally, ‘the grievances and conflicts that no war can solve, only politics’. 34 Originally published in German in Frankfurter Rundschau and lifted from InoPressa, www.inopressa.ru/fraktuell/2004/09/04/12:12:49/terror [accessed 18 December 2007]. 35 Mark Huband, Andrew Jack, Stefan Wagstyl and Tom Warner, ‘Standoff Raises Tensions in Northern Caucasus Trouble Spots’, Financial Times, 3 September 2004, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/954d1abc-fd46-11d8-ab9f00000e2511c8.html?nclick_check=1 [accessed 19 December 2007]. Trans. by Anton Bespalov, ‘Тупик в ситуации с заложниками вызывает рост напряженности в горячих точках Северного Кавказа’, www.inosmi.ru/translation/212627.html [accessed 21 July 2011]. 36 ‘Putin und die Kinder’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2 September 2004, www.sueddeutsche.de/ausland/artikel/512/38474/ [accessed 31 January 2009]. Trans. by Vladimir Sinitsa, ‘Путин и дети’, www.inosmi.ru/translation/212619. html [accessed 21 July 2011]. 37 ‘Путин или бессилие сильного человека’, www.inopressa.ru/ letemps/2004/09/04/10:18:00/impuissance [accessed 19 December 2007].

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38 Stomakhin is not alone in blaming the FSB for the explosions in the apartment buildings. See, for example, Felshtinsky and Litvinenko (2007). 39 This is most likely a mistaken reference to the 6 February 2004 attack. At least thirty-nine people were killed and scores injured after a bomb exploded on a Moscow metro train. 40 Artur Ataev and Kseniia Solianskaia, ‘Шторм школы готовился .  .  .’, Gazeta.ru, 4 September 2004, www.gazeta.ru/2004/09/03/oa_132331. shtml [accessed 22 July 2011]. 41 This last exclamation is the title of the Gazeta article, in which it appears twice. In the first paragraph, one of the four Gazeta special correspondents is described as achieving the impossible (удалось невозможное): crossing the cordon and observing what is happening near the walls of the school, at which point one of the released hostages says to him ‘We’re 1020 people in there!’ Later, the phrase is used again, this time attributed to Itskaeva (described as the mother of three-month-old Alena) and as part of the rest of the quote found in the Kavkazcenter post. See ‘Нас там 1020 человек!’, 3 September 2004, www.gzt.ru/politics/2004/09/03/030926.html [accessed 12 December 2007]. 42 See Alek Lkhundov, ‘Две шахидки подорвали себя прямо в коридоре’, Kommersant, 3 September 2004, www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID =502659 [accessed 22 July 2011]. 43 This is not Zalina Dzandarova, who was released on Thursday, before the storming of the school. 44 Anatolii Goldovskii, ‘Они нам сразу сказали: ничего хорошего не будет’, 3 September 2004, www.gazeta.ru/2004/09/03/oa_132321.shtml [accessed 22 July 2011].

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Caucasian Knot: ‘I have five children in that school, do you understand?’

Caucasian Knot (Кавказский Узел) describes itself as ‘an independent electronic medium .  .  . founded by the International Society “Memorial” in 2001’ and since 2007, ‘operating under the aegis of the Information Agency MEMO.RU’.1 Memorial is the renowned Russian human rights organisation that grew out of the perestroika years, when its main goal was to preserve the memory of twentiethcentury political oppression in the Soviet Union. With numerous branches across the former Soviet Union, Memorial is instrumental in establishing and maintaining museum collections, research and education centres, specialised libraries and public memorials. Working with prison camp survivors, refugees and political prisoners, Memorial continues to document human rights abuses in Russia and the former Soviet Union, particularly in regions of armed conflict, such as Chechnya and the North Caucasus. Funded ‘by various charitable foundations’, Caucasian Knot works in partnership with The Human Rights Institute, founded in 1996 by Soviet dissident and Russian human rights commissioner, Sergei Kovalyov; the Panorama Information and Research Centre, a watchdog group established in 1989 concerned with Russian politics, particularly the rise of nationalist extremist groups; the BBC Russian Service; and the online news site, Gazeta.ru. Caucasian Knot’s stated goals are to ensure free access to truthful [правдивый] and unbiased [не ангажированный] information about events in the Caucasus; informing the Russian and global community about cases of human rights violations, the situation in the zone of armed conflict, ethnic [национальный] or political discrimination, and refugee problems, and providing information support for the development of civil initiatives and independent mass media.2

The agency distinguishes itself by its focus on the Caucasus, its ‘encyclopaedic’ depth (энциклопедичность) and ‘presentation of dif-

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ferent viewpoints’, and while, like Memorial, it is based in Moscow, Caucasian Knot boasts a team of twenty-six regional correspondents providing ‘exclusive material and interviews’. As well as news, the Russian and English versions of the site publish analyses, biographies on regional personalities and public figures, official documents and legislation, regional administrative and statistical information, contact names and telephone numbers for regional government departments, information on and contacts for regional media and local NGOs, region-specific encyclopaedia articles, and links to relevant books and reports. Press Now, a Dutch association of journalists formed in 1993 in response to concerns over the war in Yugoslavia and merged in 2011 into Unlimited Free Press, began a training and professionalisation project with Caucasian Knot in 2006, considering the site to be ‘one of the most prominent internet sources on the region, . . . with a focus on human rights issues, war, corruption, crime and authoritarianism’.3 At the same time, it acknowledges that while Caucasian Knot is ‘highly popular amongst specialists for its objective information – journalists, editors, academics, NGO and state officials’, the impact of the site on public opinion ‘remains limited’. The collaborative project seeks to redress this and develop new strategies for targeting mainstream media, evidence of which can be seen in the updated, redesigned website available since 2009. Primary narrative text On Wednesday 1 September, Caucasian Knot published thirteen articles (just over 3000 words) that refer to the hostage-taking in Beslan. The articles are generally longer than the brief news bulletins posted on the other two sites, averaging three or four paragraphs, and some are accompanied by photographs, most of which are stills taken from Russian television news coverage. There is some repetition of information, but typically only a sentence here and there rather than whole bulletins and paragraphs as in the case of RIA-Novosti. As with Kavkazcenter, there are no summaries. Over the next two days, the number of articles referring to events in Beslan increases, with thirtytwo reports (almost 8000 words) posted on Thursday, 2 September, and thirty-four reports (over 7500 words) on Friday, 3 September 2004. Less material was published on Saturday, 4 September: just twenty-two such reports (over 3500 words). The text has a total word count of almost twenty-two thousand five hundred words (see Figure 5).

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8000 6000 4000

Caucasian Knot Russian Primary Narrative Text

2000 0

Wed 1 Sep Thur 2 Sep

Fri 3 Sep

Sat 4 Sep

Figure 5 Caucasian Knot Russian primary narrative text (number of words)

Narrators Unlike RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter, Caucasian Knot draws very little attention to itself as a narrator. Its temporary narrators narrate without direct comment or critique from the agency. Official sources Like RIA-Novosti, Caucasian Knot draws much of its information from official sources. Most of these are also found in the RIA-Novosti narrative and presented in the same manner, that is, reported by name and position, as authoritative and appropriate, and without comment, although with less repetition. The same approach is used for official sources quoted by Kavkazcenter but absent from RIA-Novosti. Thus, the narrative includes statements from Stanislav Kesaev, deputy chair of the North Ossetian Parliament, Soslan Sikoev, North Ossetian deputy minister of Internal Affairs (I/254),4 and Russian State Duma deputy, Mikhail Markelov (I/235), although Markelov’s claim that the terrorists are watching the television reports of the seizure (KC I/11:45) is not reported. Caucasian Knot also includes comments and statements from Chechen-Ichkerian officials, including presidential emissary, Akhmed Zakaev; president, Aslan Maskhadov; presidential representative abroad, Umar Khanbiev; and minister of Foreign Affairs, Ilias Akhmadov. All of these are dismissed by RIA-Novosti as ‘terrorists’ and so automatically excluded from acting as temporary narrators, while Kavkazcenter selects only Zakaev and Khabiev. Of the three sites, Caucasian Knot enlists the widest selection of officials from across the political spectrum, and also includes narrators – such as North Ossetian mufti Ruslan Valgasov, head of the State Duma Committee for Security, Vladimir Vasiliv; and Beslan City Hospital chief doctor, Viacheslav Karpinov – who are selected by neither RIA-Novosti nor Kavkazcenter, suggesting that, possibly through its extensive local knowledge of the region, the agency is able to offer alternative sources

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of information from those presented in the mainstream press and in other fringe media. Other media Like Kavkazcenter, Caucasian Knot draws on other media for information on the events occurring in Beslan, including Russian mainstream, Russian-language fringe and English-language foreign media.5 It does so, however, far less frequently and the tone of the site remains far less critical than that of Kavkazcenter; only occasionally, usually with regard to the numbers of dead and wounded, does it draw attention to conflicting information between media reports and official statements. Information is gathered from a variety of sources, from across the political spectrum, not, in the manner of Kavkazcenter, to highlight errors and discrepancies and make accusations of duplicity, but more in an attempt to establish what is going on. Particularly during the days of the siege, this presents a complex narrative that more closely reflects the complicated situation on the ground. Experts Unlike RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter, who both recruit several experts to act as temporary narrators, Caucasian Knot selects only one: Aleksandr Mukomolov, head of the General Lebed Peacekeeping Mission in the North Caucasus, who narrates in an ‘exclusive interview’ with a Caucasian Knot correspondent (II/9220). Mukomolov took over the leadership of the Mission after the untimely death of its founder, General Aleksandr Lebed, who, as head of the Russian Federation Security Council in 1996, negotiated an end to the First Chechen War with Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and was a signatory to the 1996 Khasavyurt Accords that brought hostilities to an end. Lebed’s Peacekeeping Mission has been ‘credited with negotiating freedom for scores of soldiers and others taken hostage in the volatile region’.6 Of all the ‘experts’ enlisted by all three agencies, Mukomolov, with his experience of negotiating the release of hostages in the North Caucasus, is arguably the one most likely to be able to speak with the greatest relevance to the situation in Beslan. His selection as an expert temporary narrator for Caucasian Knot frames the crisis in Beslan not as an ethical issue for the media, a clash with the Muslim world, a military operation, a war between terrorism and counter-terrorism or a litmus test of public opinion on President Putin and his policies, but as a hostage crisis. First and foremost, the resolution of such a crisis involves the safe rescue of the hostages, a key element of Caucasian Knot’s narrative.

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Correspondents On 1 September, the source for all but one of the bulletins (Sultan Abubakarov’s report from Chechnya (I/238)) is given as ‘our own information’ (собственная информация), and although none are attributed to a particular correspondent, firsthand reports without recourse to other media or official statements suggest that a Caucasian Knot correspondent is already present in Beslan that day. ‘At the moment,’ one report reads, for example, ‘single shots can be heard coming from the school’ and ‘several hundred people . . . have gathered near the school’. Sixteen ambulance cars stationed nearby are also reported, although ‘as yet, nobody has needed medical assistance’ (I/223). There is also an account, not found in any of the other narrative texts, of the boeviki audibly negotiating in Russian with members of operation headquarters through a loudspeaker (I/225). By 2 September, it is clear that, as well as others in the region (an anonymous correspondent in Chechnya (II/8420) and Malika Suleimanova in Ingushetia (II/8920)), Caucasian Knot has a correspondent on the ground, who often narrates from the position of an eyewitness. Although the parents and relatives of the children taken hostage are ‘demanding the authorities do something to free the children’, are prepared to become hostages themselves in exchange for their children, and are demanding to be told what is going on, the Caucasian Knot correspondent, describing the situation around the school as ‘very tense’, remarks that he ‘has not observed particular instances of hysteria or panic among the civilians, including the women’ (II/8341). The correspondent describes how he ‘saw a person lying motionless . . . directly in front of the school’, and a conversation with ‘lieutenant-colonel Guram Driaev’, who is guarding the civilians and the cordon, reveals that ‘they can’t reach the man because the space in front of the school is exposed to firing’ (II/8341). The correspondent also reports the release of seven women and three babies, part of the group released after Ruslan Aushev’s negotiations (II/8921). Longer descriptions, however, are rare. The only one to compare with the few evocative reports from RIA-Novosti’s correspondent(s) is a post on 2 September that also describes relatives of the hostages waiting for their loved ones: In spite of a heavy downpour in Beslan, relatives of the hostages spent the whole night near the cordon around the school. Many relatives spent the night in the Palace of Culture in the Right Bank district of Beslan, which is situated in the centre of a residential area 70–100m from School No.1. There are around 1,500 people there. Many people are also sitting in their cars, which are parked in great numbers near the Palace. Spokespersons from operation headquarters met with the relatives during the night and

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promised that storming the building where the children are ‘simply would not happen’ (однозначно, не будет). (II/8501)

The correspondent also relates a narrative of himself in the third person, how ‘in Beslan that evening’ he was ‘detained without charge by two civilians . . . and taken to the police. After a brief interrogation, the police released the correspondent, who was clearly made to understand that he should leave town’ (II/8341). While the correspondent makes no further comment on the incident, and accounts for it by referring to the ‘uneasy [нервный] situation’ near the school, it appears to be an attempt by the authorities (and two civilians) to remove this temporary narrator from the scene. The correspondent’s later post reporting several explosions in the school building (II/8742), however, suggests that he did not heed police instructions, or another correspondent took his place, or even that this is an earlier report posted later. On 3 September, Caucasian Knot’s correspondent on the ground is named for the first time, with ‘Valerii Dzutsev’ given in the by-line, although whether this is the same correspondent who was admonished by police the previous day is not clear.7 Narrating as an eyewitness, Dzutsev’s brief report is full of immediate description: ‘At 13:00, two explosions thundered from the school’, ‘shooting with automatic weapons began and still continues’, ‘several helicopters appeared’ and ‘troops carried out several wounded, three children and a woman, from the school’ (III/421). Details are added three posts later: two explosions went off, a shout rang out: ‘Run!’ and several hostages ran out from the school. At the moment, the wounded are being carried out in groups. Several of them are being driven away in private cars, one or two in each car. (III/461)

Dzutsev also reports that ‘journalists were asked to move further away from the school’ because of continued shooting (III/482), yet he continues to narrate as an eyewitness, describing the shooting from grenade throwers coming from the school, and the sound of responding fire from the streets and sniper rifles, concluding that ‘contrary to reports that the boeviki have abandoned the school, it is obvious that some of them are still in there shooting’ (III/482). Medics evacuate the wounded and the dead (III/484), including children (III/503), while troops and police set up a transport corridor ‘so that cars could quickly drive up to the school, collect the wounded, and take them to hospital’ (III/580). A nearby fire is attended, in spite of ‘explosions and shooting’, by several fire engines and more than ten ambulance cars. When a suspected boevik is lynched, a policeman fires into the air to disperse the crowd and prevent it from killing the ‘terrorist’ (III/720).

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On 4 September, the correspondent in Beslan no longer narrates. Only one of the day’s posts is attributed to ‘our own information’, and the correspondent’s voice is absent from it. Correspondents report from Chechnya (IV/260) and Nalchik (IV/440), but the remainder of the articles are attributed to other media sources, either to particular publications or just to ‘information agencies’. Dzutsev’s retrospective comments on his work in Beslan at the time of the siege reveal the extent to which the correspondent as a temporary narrator in the Caucasian Knot narrative is a function of the linguistic constructions of the text rather than a person, even though, as we read the text, we imagine the person evoked by those linguistic constructions. Dzutsev recollects that, to the best of my knowledge I was the only reporter with CK in Beslan. If there were other reports before my report on Beslan, they could have been compilations or written by someone in Moscow. I was there 1 September from about 12pm to 7–8pm and 3 September from 11am to 5–6pm. And then I came on 5th September and a few more times afterwards. I recall reporting for CK only on the phone. When the storm began 3 September, I telephoned them and told them what was happening around.8

Thus, although the local narrative of Dzutsev’s encounter with Beslan police occurred on the first day of the siege, it is temporarily located in the second day of the narrative text. There was no Caucasian Knot correspondent in Beslan on 2 September. All of the elements posted on 2 September that suggest a correspondent narrating as an eyewitness are either anachronies and temporally dislocated in the narrative, most probably because of the delay between reporting and publishing, or are illusions created by the linguistic structures (‘many people are also sitting in their cars’) that create the effect of a temporary narrator narrating as an eyewitness. Dzutsev’s reporting from Beslan on 3 September, communicated by telephone as the events described are occurring, suffers no such delay, an example of the short reach of an internal retroversion indicating the significance of an event.9 Eyewitnesses Caucasian Knot’s primary narrative text includes the highest number of eyewitnesses to act as temporary narrators. Many of these, like those narrating for RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter, remain anonymous and are quoted only indirectly, but several are named and quoted directly, and contrast to the other agencies where eyewitness accounts are placed late in the narrative texts, are posted much sooner after the initial attack.

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On 1 September, anonymous eyewitnesses indirectly narrate three times: ‘according to eyewitnesses’, there could be around 200–400 hostages in the school [I/220] . . . The area around the school is mined and set with wires (расставлены растяжки), which blew up a cow soon after the school was seized [I/223] [and] .  .  . the attack happened during the school assembly. Boeviki in masks and dressed in dark clothing and bullet-proof vests immediately began to fire into the air. Around fifty children ran away [разбежались]. (I/249)

One of these children, a school girl, reports that ‘the boeviki are behaving aggressively towards the hostages and frightening the children’, a comment that contradicts North Ossetian presidential representative Lev Dzugaev’s remark in the same post that the hostage-takers are treating the children ‘more or less tolerably’. The first named eyewitness to act as a temporary narrator for the agency is Soslan Fraev, whose brother, Ruslan, is one of two policemen killed during the capture of the school. Fraev, who is given a brief narrative identity of his own – he is a free-wrestling European champion and Asian Games prize-winner, so probably a local celebrity – relates how his brother drove his children to school that morning and, when he realised the school was being attacked, jumped out of the car and ran up to the school, where he was killed (I/290). Ruslan’s body lies in the school yard, unable to be reached because of firing, information included in both the RIA-Novosti (I/10:49, I/11:58) and Kavkazcenter (I/12:52) narratives, but only Caucasian Knot reports the local narrative of how Ruslan, father and brother as well as policeman, was killed. The story is brief, no more than a few lines, but it is told as an integral part of the news; in the same bulletin, officials talk of numbers: ‘seven people dead’, ‘two dead’, ‘eleven wounded’, ‘a seventy-one-year-old man seriously injured’, while Fraev’s narrative is of a person, ‘a life that qualifies for recognition’ (Butler 2004: 34). Indeed, the anonymity found in the RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter narratives of the hostages and their anxious relatives is frequently off-set by Caucasian Knot’s provision of names. On 2 September, when tallies of the dead and wounded are circulated by officials, Caucasian Knot publishes a numbered list of the names and dates of birth of thirteen wounded people (II/8640).10 The names of the women and children released that afternoon are also published on 2 September, and again on 3 September, along with each person’s date of birth. On 4 September, among the everincreasing numbers of dead and wounded, three children are named, along with their ages and the injuries from which they died (IV/320). The direct naming of otherwise anonymous individuals turns them

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from actors into characters in a way that minimises the effects of the narrator who is normally constantly evaluating and structuring their utterances in the construction of the primary narrative text (Scollon 1998). A name gives form and identity to what is otherwise formless and unknowable (think of the inscriptions on certain war memorials and the record-keeping efforts of Memorial and various war graves commissions). A name makes an actor present.11 Caucasian Knot names more hostages and local Beslan residents than any of the other narrators, peopling its narrative with ordinary civilians caught up in the violence of the siege, its end and its aftermath. Their presence in the narrative text shapes it so that it might become a narrative about them, rather than a narrative about ‘the war on terror(ism)’, or the grievances of one group against another, or the nature of the Russian government. Direct quotations also counteract the otherwise depersonalising anonymity of civilians. The silent masses of parents and relatives described by RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter are given voice by Caucasian Knot’s correspondent among them: ‘I have five children in that school, do you understand?’ cries a man from the crowd (II/8341); ‘The first director of the school, he’s 95 years old, all his grandchildren are in there. Why don’t they let us, the parents, go in there? Every one of us would go in there for them,’ says a former teacher from the school (II/8800); and people’s anger and frustration with both the authorities (omitted by RIA-Novosti) and the hostage-takers (omitted by Kavkazcenter) are expressed in direct speech: ‘They look after themselves and don’t give a damn about [spit on] us’ (а на нас наплевать) is said of the authorities, and of the hostagetakers: ‘Nothing is sacred to them. They are not people. They will never live peacefully [они никогда мирно жить не будут]’ (II/8341).12 The second personal narrative included on the first day of the siege is that of a local policeman, who is captured and his vehicle commandeered by the hostage-takers on their way to Beslan. His story adds detail to the local narrative (how many hostage-takers there were, the two dogs with them and from which direction they came), which are missing from RIANovosti and Kavkazcenter, and may seem insignificant until questions are later asked about how the hostage-takers and their weapons could have moved so freely into Beslan and its School No. 1 (Dunlop 2006: 28). The detail of the two dogs brought into the school with the terrorists is mentioned only this once and is missing from the RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter narratives. Clearly it is not deemed to be significant, yet if the dogs were brought to act as ‘gas-detectors’, then their presence might reveal something about the thinking of the hostage-takers as they planned the attack and anticipated the response from the authorities; gas was used in the storming of the Dubrovka theatre.

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On 2 September, anonymous eyewitnesses contribute twice to the narrative text. Relatives express their frustrations with the situation and, when a young man is found in a nearby unfinished house and arrested, eyewitnesses are reported to say that he was holding a ‘radio transmitter’, leading to the suspicion that he might be an informer for the boeviki (II/8540). On the same day, six identified eyewitnesses, including two escaped hostages, act as temporary narrators, and five of them are quoted directly. Thus, a full day before any such eyewitnesses contribute to the RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter narratives, Caucasian Knot includes stories from Aslan Kudzoev, a teacher who escaped from the school on the Wednesday night (II/8640); tenth-grader Zaur Dzafarov, who escaped with his younger sister; Roza Dudieva, a grandmother whose daughter and grandchildren were taken hostage, but who herself managed to escape when the school was attacked; Ruslan Boroev, an employee of the local district Department of Internal Affairs (РОВД) at the scene of the attack; a former teacher, who rails against the situation; and twenty-one-year-old Kazik Torchinyi, who had taken his sister, a seventh-grader, to the school assembly (II/8800). All of these are directly quoted (see pp. 172–5), apart from Aslan Kudzoev, whose story is paraphrased at length. Eyewitnesses continue to act as temporary narrators on 3 September, including Adel Itskaeva and twenty-seven-year-old Zalina Dzandarova, released after the intervention of Ruslan Aushev (III/324). Igor Gabuev, father of two boys taken hostage, the younger of whom cannot be found, and the relatives of twenty-eight-year-old Svetlana Kantemirova and her five-year-old son, Alan, also missing, all contribute to the narrative, albeit briefly and quoted indirectly. In an effort to calculate more accurately the number of hostages and missing people, one mother estimates that eight hundred and ninety children are enrolled in the school and fifty-nine people work there. There are four first-grade classes with thirty children in each one. ‘Why lie so clumsily [бездарно]?’ she says of the official figures (III/9341). Other anonymous, indirectly quoted eyewitnesses add elements to the primary narrative relating the end and immediate aftermath of the siege. People are running in all directions with bullets whistling over their heads (III/441). The school doesn’t appear to be severely damaged and catastrophic destruction is not visible, although a column of smoke is rising over the building (III/482). Cars and ambulances are speeding up to the school and evacuating the wounded children (III/484). A man taken for a boevik is shot by a local resident (III/720). A Gazeta.ru correspondent, who manages to breech the cordon and enter the remains of the sports hall, reports that it will be impossible to identify many people

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or even count them. He reports in fragmented sentences, as if he can barely articulate what he has seen: There are burnt pieces of flesh, skulls, impossible to identify, the roof fell in, pieces of roof slate. Scraps of roof and tiles fell on them from overhead. Two of the bodies are special forces and, by all appearances, FSB men. (III/9840)

On 4 September, former hostages, including a woman called Zalina, a school girl and thirty-four-year-old Alla Gadzieva, who briefly and graphically describes the boeviki shooting fleeing and wounded hostages as the siege comes to an end (IV/310), all act as temporary narrators. Beslan residents guess that, judging by the number of refrigerator trucks transporting bodies to the morgue – ‘four already’ – there must be around six hundred who died in the siege. They say relatives are allowed into the morgue to identify the dead but are refused entry into the hospitals to see the wounded, substantiating the claims of the two anonymous Beslan doctors (who also narrate for Kavkazcenter see Chapter 3, p. 115) that doctors are not permitted to leave the hospitals and have had their mobile phones confiscated so as not to make any contact with journalists or relatives (IV/0300). Anonymous hostages interviewed by the security forces apparently report that ‘the terrorists uncovered a cache [of arms] immediately after the seizure of the school’, evidence that explosives, weapons and ammunition had been brought into the school prior to the attack. Yet, the former hostages also say, the terrorists did not even know which town they were in, what it was called. In the first hours they were asking us directly, ‘which town are we in?’ They told us our traffic policemen had betrayed us, that they’d paid them a little bit of money; otherwise the terrorist attack would have been in a large town. (IV/0060)

The post concludes that, therefore, the story about the advance cache of explosives is doubtful. Yet, in an example that demonstrates the way apparently incompatible elements can compel a re-narration of events, rather than simply discarding the ‘awkward element’, the two pieces of information can be reconciled in a narrative that includes a different group of people planting the weapons ahead of time. Embedded non-narrative texts Statements and condemnations from foreign countries, and international and religious organisations Of the numerous statements of condemnation and condolences received from abroad and reported by RIA-Novosti, Caucasian Knot reports

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only the first four: statements from the PACE, the European Parliament, Poland and Georgia. These are reported in a single bulletin (I/258), which is, in fact, patched together almost word for word from four RIANovosti posts.13 Together, the statements condemn the attacks in Beslan and Moscow, with Poland and Georgia condemning all or any forms of terrorism, and Europe offering solidarity with the victims’ families and ‘any help that might bring about a peaceful resolution to this most difficult situation’. There is no further elaboration. Neither ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative that emerged in the RIA-Novosti narrative, nor the societal narratives of war and genocide in Chechnya and the storming of the Dubrovka theatre that emerged in the Kavkazcenter narrative are found here. Over the next three days, Caucasian Knot includes a number of official condemnations of the attack, expressions of support and offers of assistance, yet apart from the United Nations Security Council (II/8300), these come from a completely different set of people and organisations from those included in the RIA-Novosti narratives. Rather than the profusion of statements from high-ranking politicians and international representatives of state, statements are posted from Ichkerian officials (see pp. 159–63) and various local and international NGOs, including Memorial (II/8360, IV/307), Human Rights Watch (II/9020), Caucasian Forum (II/9040), the Russian–Chechen Friendship Society (II/9240, III/502, III/682) and the Council of Chechen NGOs (IV/303). Responses from the Board of Muslims of the Caucasus and Akhmad-Khadzhi Shamaev, mufti of Chechnya (II/8420), are also reported.14 Just as the framing narratives of ‘the war on terror(ism)’ and genocide in Chechnya are most clearly articulated in the non-narrative texts of RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter it is in these statements from human rights and non-governmental organisations that the framing narrative of Caucasian Knot is most clearly formulated, often, as in the statement from Caucasian Forum, in eloquent and dignified language that is a marked contrast to the clichés found in RIA-Novosti and the invective of some of Kavkazcenter’s commentators. All plainly condemn the hostage-taking in Beslan, particularly the involvement of children, stating unequivocally that there is no justification for ‘spilling the blood of innocent people’ (IV/303); it cannot be justified ‘as a consequence of the bloody conflict in Chechnya’, nor by any ‘previous injustices, underlying the motives’ of the perpetrators (II/9040). Yet unlike the international condemnations that make up such a large part of the RIA-Novosti narratives, these groups link abstract condemnations to local narratives, providing reasons for their condemnations and delineating their narrative position. That there is never any justification for hostage-taking has

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been codified in ‘article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949’ (II/9020). Sympathy is extended to the relatives and loved ones of ‘the victims of the terrorist attacks which have rolled across Russia in recent days’ and also to the loved ones of ‘the victims of extrajudicial executions, torture and disappearances, which, with unabated force, continue to be carried out by representatives of the Russian security forces in the Chechen Republic’ (II/9240). Claims of Russian aggression in Chechnya are not made in abstract terms of genocide or large, unsubstantiated numbers, but in local narratives that include dates and places of atrocities, from the indiscriminate carpet bombing of towns and villages and the mass murder of the civilian population in the village of Novye Aldy 5 February 2000, to the murder of children on the Rigakh farm [хутор] 8 April 2004 and the shooting in the Sernovodskii hospital of members of the Sadulaev family 27 August 2004. (II/9240)

Condemnation of Putin’s ‘criminal, irrational and openly terrorist policies’ in Chechnya, ‘the reason and catalyst for reciprocal terror’, is a repeated element of the framing narrative elaborated here, not as a means of characterising the Russian authorities as aggressive and duplicitous in the way that Kavkazcenter does, but because acknowledgement of Russia’s impact on the region is seen as crucial to finding for the Russian and Chechen peoples a way out of the impasse (тупик). Violence breeds only violence, a ‘forcible logic of terror’ in which the people of North Ossetia, Russia and the Caucasus are trapped (II/9040). Negotiations, a cessation of hostilities and international assistance to ensure that the cycle of violence is broken and peace is brokered are all essential elements of Caucasian Knot’s framing narrative here, which places civilians and their right to be safeguarded from violence at its very core. The crisis in Beslan urgently demands that this narrative be put into practice immediately, that this narrative of non-violence ultimately determines the local Beslan narrative. ‘Today,’ writes Memorial, acknowledging that over the years it has sharply and constantly criticised Russian government policy, ‘when hundreds of children are held at gunpoint, it is not the time for reproaches and accusations . . . This, the protection of civilians from violence, must be the only priority in the actions of the .  .  . authorities’ (II/8360). These statements express approval of Aslan Maskhadov’s expressed willingness to come to Beslan to negotiate with the hostage-takers, and they include pleas addressed to the Russian government and international community that Maskhadov be guaranteed safe passage so that he might do so, for ‘[n]ow is not the

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time for the squaring of political and military accounts!’ (III/9502). Like the Dubrovka survivors (Chapter 3, pp. 115–16), Stanislav Dmitrievskii, executive director of the Russian–Chechen Friendship Society, appeals directly to President Putin: Not a single drop of a child’s blood is worth your differences with President Maskhadov! Not a single tear of a child, shed in this nightmare, is worth your ratings. Show courage at last! Show humaneness at last! It is precisely this that is expected of you from those who are in the hands of the bandits! (III/502)

When ‘all hope for a peaceful outcome of this drama turned out to be an illusion’, blame is attributed not just to one side only, but to both ‘terrorists’ and ‘members of the special forces who were not able to provide security for the hostages’ (IV/303). Memorial, in a telegram of condolence to the Beslan town administration, calls for the ‘inspirers and executors of the monstrous evil deed’ to be ‘found and punished’, rather than destroyed (IV/307). Chechen-Ichkerian statements The first official statement from Chechnya-Ichkeria comes from Umar Khanbiev, ‘general representative abroad of the president of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria’ (II/8340). Attributed to Kavkazcenter, it is an unedited copy of his statement published there the previous day (KC I/20:17). An accompanying photograph of Khanbiev in a suit and tie and speaking into a microphone against a background showing the stars of the European Union all serve to frame him as a legitimate spokesperson, in contrast to the ‘terrorist’ that RIA-Novosti characterises all Chechen-Ichkerian actors. The second statement comes from the Chechen Republic Ichkeria Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is attributed to the ministry’s press office (II/8740). It begins by ‘categorically reject[ing] the attempts of the Russian government to lay responsibility for the hostage-taking . . . on the leadership of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria’, and continues with a disclaimer confirming President Maskhadov’s ‘categorical condemnation of terrorism in all its forms’ and a reiteration of the United Nations Security Council’s call for the immediate release of the hostages. The statement goes on to express regret that the UNSC has, as yet, neither condemned nor expressed sympathy regarding the killing of ‘42,000 Chechen children, murdered in Chechnya by order of the Russian government’, thus invoking a societal narrative of state terrorism and genocide to contrast the international responses to the Beslan hostage-taking with the international silence concerning Chechnya:

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The UN Security Council and all other international organisations and national government must either force Russia to answer for its mass and systematic crimes in Chechnya, or recognise the hypocrisy of their position with regard to the continuing genocide of the Chechen people.

The third statement comes from Aslan Maskhadov himself, ‘leader of the Chechen separatists’, pictured wearing a combat fatigue jacket and a knitted cap, and sitting in front of a Chechen-Ichkerian flag. Maskhadov condemns the taking of children hostage because it ‘contradicts the standards I have established for the struggle [борьба] against the invaders [захватчики]’, and he goes on to make five declarations. The first reiterates his condemnation of the involvement of any children in combat: ‘We are fighting against the Russian authorities, not against Russian children . . . Even though Chechen children have already suffered for many years, there is no need to make other children suffer.’ Maskhadov’s second declaration states that the hostage-taking in Beslan took place ‘without my agreement as Chief Commander of the military forces of the Republic of Ichkeria’, and demands that the international community and the Russian authorities do not connect his name with the taking of children hostage. Yet, in a statement that reveals tension within the official Chechen-Ichkerian narrative, Maskhadov stresses that ‘the Russian authorities, unwilling to end the occupation of Ichkeria, carry the blame for the tragic events in Beslan’. Maskhadov is unwilling to take responsibility for being unable to exert his authority as chief commander, nor can he accept that the boeviki are also guilty of committing crimes and atrocities against innocent people. In Maskhadov’s third declaration, he endorses the UN Security Council’s demand for the ‘immediate and unconditional release of all hostages’, but goes on to reserve for himself ‘the right to qualify the actions of Ichkerian freedom fighters [борцы за свободу] not as a “heinous terrorist act” but as “exceeding their authorities with regard to a saboteur-reconnaissance [диверсионно-разведывательный] operation”’. Maskhadov rejects the label of ‘terrorism’, and attempts to reassert the narrative of Chechen struggle for freedom and independence from Russian tyranny and occupation. This struggle is narrated as a legitimate violent conflict, but like all such conflict is governed by rules and conventions which have, in the case of Beslan, been contravened. Doing so taints the struggle and its narrative, as Maskhadov states in his fourth declaration: No genuine Ichkerian freedom fighter has the right to connect, by means of his own actions such as the taking of children hostage, the sacred struggle of his people for freedom with crimes against humanity. No honourable citizen of Ichkeria can support such methods of struggle.

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Maskhadov’s final declaration is a directive to Chechen-Ichkerian representatives abroad to distribute his statement through diplomatic and mass-media channels. Differing as it does from both Russian official narratives and the crude, dichotomous narrative of Kavkazcenter, Maskhadov is keen for his narrative to be circulated. While Maskhadov’s denial of any involvement or approval of the hostage-taking does appear in the wider foreign press – he is absent, of course, as a temporary narrator in the Russian mainstream press – his carefully enunciated narrative of legitimate struggle rejecting illegitimate means is absent. Not even Kavkazcenter circulates it, and Caucasian Knot fails to translate his message, featuring it only in its Russian narrative text. In a departure from both Kavkazcenter, which publishes only two statements from Chechen-Ichkerian officials, and RIA-Novosti, which characterises them all as terrorists and completely marginalises them, Caucasian Knot includes two substantial interviews with Ichkerian officials, the first with presidential representative, Akhmed Zakaev, attributed to Chechnpress (III/340), and the second with Ilias Akhmadov, the minister for Foreign Affairs, attributed to the Russian–Chechen Friendship Society (III/1430). Published in a question and answer format, Zakaev speaks after his alleged telephone conversation with North Ossetian president, Aleksandr Dzasokhov, and former Ingushetian president, Ruslan Aushev. He expresses hope for a resolution, states that there are more than a thousand hostages and describes his contact with Maskhadov, who is trying to do everything possible to avert tragedy and save the lives of the hostages. He and other Ichkerian officials are involved in attempting to resolve the crisis, not because they are connected to the hostage-takers as their involvement might suggest, but because the political demands of the hostage-takers concern Chechnya. Dzasokhov and Aushev spoke with Zakaev because they wanted to know how actively prepared the Chechen-Ichkerian side was to participate in resolving the crisis, to which Zakaev replied that he was prepared to travel to Beslan to negotiate with the hostage-takers, although he recognised that this would hardly stop ‘people who seem prepared to die for their demands’. Zakaev believes that because of Maskhadov’s authority, he is the only possible negotiator who can resolve the crisis and reports Maskhadov’s willingness to come to Beslan if the Russian authorities will guarantee his safety and allow him to act as a negotiator. Dzasokhov agreed, said that he would need to discuss this and make arrangements for it, and they agreed to speak again as soon as something of this plan had become clear. Zakaev also expresses his hope in the support of the UN and international community, remarking that the extraneous session of the Security Council, convened at Russia’s request,

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at last raised the issue of Chechnya, which had until then always been considered an ‘internal affair’. He believes that the leaders of Europe and the West, ‘who call themselves friends of Russia and of Putin personally’ and who have the means to secure the safety of political leaders, will do all they can to prevent another ‘mass murder on Russian territory’. Finally, Zakaev calls on both the hostage-takers and the Russian security forces ‘to curb their emotions and ambitions and do everything possible to avoid bloodshed and the death of people’. Zakaev’s narrative is given ample space for elaboration because it is consistent with Caucasian Knot’s framing narrative of non-violence. ‘Human life,’ says Zakaev, ‘especially the lives of children, cannot be small change in the deciding of political problems because the chief concern of any responsible politician must first include the provision of people’s safety’. Ilias Akhmadov, also interviewed at length in a question and answer format, expresses his regret at being so far removed from the situation – he is in Washington DC – and unable to influence events in Beslan. With the interview obviously taking place before the end of the siege and yet posted at the end of the third day, after the siege has ended, Akhmadov’s hopes that the hostages will be safe, and his view that the Russians are negotiating, have both become unhappily meaningless. Nevertheless, Akhmadov’s interview reinforces and adds detail to both Caucasian Knot’s narrative of non-violence and Maskhadov’s narrative of legitimate violent conflict bounded by the rule of law. Akhmadov elaborates a narrative of ‘radicalisation’, which could help explain Maskhadov’s apparent inability to exert control over his ‘Ichkerian freedom fighters’. Akhmadov describes the Second Chechen War as a ‘long, hopeless war’ in which, for those caught up in it, Russia’s recent ‘terrible August’ has become routine, a terrible, everyday reality. ‘Do you understand,’ Akhmadov asks, ‘what it is like to live in a war for five years, without any rights and with absolutely no guarantee that you will live?’ This is what ‘radicalises’ people, he argues. Moreover, the war in Chechnya has spread, attracting ‘new lots of people, including people with completely unknown aims and missions’. He utterly condemns the hostage-takers and their actions, even dismisses their demand for troops to be withdrawn from Chechnya as ‘more than stupid’; obviously nobody is going to withdraw troops from Chechnya and such a demand can only ‘increase the level of mutual hatred’. The Chechen Resistance can legitimately distance itself from the Beslan attack and claim no involvement because it does not consider these attackers as part of the Resistance. They are war-traumatised, rogue elements that do not fit into the Chechen Resistance’s narrative of itself, its causes, its hope in the West and its readiness to negotiate a political settlement to the conflict.

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Akhmadov also understands how disastrous the Beslan attack is because it can be so easily co-opted into ‘the war on terror(ism)’ narrative, especially when the more complex Chechen Resistance narrative is so little known and understood. ‘We are frightening away the West, our only hope,’ he says, ‘who will someday, somehow, intervene in this bloody conflict.’ Acts like Beslan ‘place us amongst the ranks of international terrorism’ and ‘only make us out to be like Al-Qaeda and other such organisations’, which turns out to be exactly what the Russian government wants. ‘Russian special forces have long dreamed about having their own Al-Qaeda,’ Akhmadov says. Akhmadov repeatedly reiterates President Maskhadov’s readiness for a politically negotiated end to the hostilities, the West’s silence and Russia’s refusal to even mention what it considers a taboo subject. If once there had been deputies in the Russian State Duma who tried in some way to discuss the problem, now there is nobody, ‘not a single official forum in Russia, where this situation is talked about with any sense of alarm’. Yet Akhmadov still offers a way out of this deadlock. As a member of the UN Security Council, Russia could control the details (механизм) of a peace agreement and the creation of a temporary international administration in Chechnya, which could be implemented if Russia is serious about establishing peace along its southern border and in Chechnya. Russian official responses and condemnations Caucasian Knot includes only two of the Russian officials who narrate for RIA-Novosti: Foreign Affairs minister, Sergei Lavrov, and President Putin. A single post reports Lavrov’s objection to the comments from The Netherlands’ Foreign minister, Bernard Bot (IV/0323), quoting unchanged Lavrov’s statements as reported by RIA-Novosti (IV/14:22, IV/15:08), but omitting without comment his assertion that the international live television coverage of the events in Beslan ‘leaves no doubt that the bloody drama was provoked by the terrorists, who lost their nerve’. The post does include, however, Bot’s statement, given here as, ‘We would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy happened,’15 arguably a mildly expressed request that contrasts with Lavrov’s accusations of ‘blasphemy’. While the matter is revisited several times in the RIA-Novosti narrative, it is of minimal significance for Caucasian Knot, who reports it only once. Putin’s first official reaction to the hostage-taking, given in the afternoon of 2 September, is reported by Caucasian Knot in a post attributed to RIA-Novosti (II/8700), and constructed without comment or interference from three RIA-Novosti posts.16 Putin’s early morning visit

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to Beslan on 4 September is reported in a single post (IV/0040) also constructed from RIA-Novosti posts17 and again without comment, although uncharacteristically, given Caucasian Knot’s propensity to include the names and details of civilians, it omits the element of Putin’s inadvertent visit to the bedside of Lidiia Tsalievaia, the director of School No. 1. The post ends with Putin’s and Dzasokhov’s departure from the hospital for headquarters, and mentions the meeting held there, but in contrast to RIA-Novosti, who follows closely their opening speeches at the meeting, Caucasian Knot says nothing more about it. Similarly, while RIA-Novosti avidly, over several posts, reports Putin’s televised speech that evening, Caucasian Knot reports the occasion in a single post (IV/0325) attributed to and lifted from Gazeta.ru.18 Although the speech is summarised with only a selection of quotations, Putin’s themes of Russia’s weakness, the attack on Beslan seen as an attack on the whole country, the inadmissibility of blackmail and the development of ‘complex measures’ aimed at strengthening the unity of the country are all included. Caucasian Knot makes no overt comments on the speech, as Kavkazcenter does, but, by so abridging and diluting Putin’s original binary language and his elaboration of a particular Russian interpretation of ‘the war on terror(ism)’, the site manages to keep this powerful meta-narrative from interfering in its own framing narrative. The link to the full text of Putin’s speech provided at the end of the original Gazeta. ru article is not provided here. One additional Russian official narrates for Caucasian Knot. Boris Nemtsov (former State Duma deputy), speaking on radio station Ekho Moskvy, says ‘the declaration of political demands connected with the situation in Chechnya is a specific character of Russian terrorism’, and that to resolve this problem, we ‘need to look for political means of resolution, including speaking with separatists’ (II/8300). Congruent with Caucasian Knot’s framing narrative advocating political rather than violent resolutions to conflict, Nemtsov and his opinions are missing from both RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter. Commentaries In contrast to the profusion of commentaries included in the RIANovosti and Kavkazcenter narratives, Caucasian Knot posts only two, very different pieces: an anonymous report from (the Russian daily) Izvestiia on female suicide-bombers (II/8720)19 and the interview with Aleksandr Mukomolov (II/9220, see p. 149 above). The Izvestiia article draws on sources from the Russian FSB to claim that ‘Chechen boeviki’ had prepared twelve suicide-bombers (смертницы) ‘to carry out terrorist attacks in different cities in Russia’. Three of these can be accounted

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for by the two attacks on the passenger airplanes and the explosion at the Rizhskaia metro station, a fourth is apparently still at large in Moscow, while the ‘eight remaining “living bombs” are already wandering around several Russian cities, or maybe they are still preparing to head out for them’, suggesting that ‘the recent terrorist attacks in Moscow and the hostage-taking in North Ossetia could be diversionary manoeuvres ahead of the final [заключительный] and far more terrible attack’. The article is an anomaly, an ‘awkward element’, in the Caucasian Knot narrative. Nowhere else does the site focus so heavily on Chechen female suicide-bombers, nor does Caucasian Knot ever use the word shakhidka to refer to the women hostage-takers at Beslan; in the three instances it occurs outside of this article it is always used by an eyewitness acting as a temporary narrator.20 ‘Suicide-bomber’ (смертниц) is also rare, used just once to report how, after the siege, ‘one of the terrorist-suicide-bombers [террористка-смертниц] managed to change her clothes and hide herself [amongst the crowd]’ (III/9700), and twice by temporary narrators referring to the attacks at Dubrovka and Rizhskaia metro station. The alarmist tone of the article is also difficult to reconcile with that of the narrative text, which focuses on events in Beslan itself rather than on any other wider, more generalised threat. It is difficult to draw conclusions on the nature and purpose of the article’s inclusion except to wonder whether it was not done as scrupulously as it could have been; on another occasion, in a text imported from another source (and translated from English), there is evidence that editorial changes were made to better align the text with Caucasian Knot’s overall narrative (see p. 172). The interview with Aleksandr Mukomolov (II/9220) is brief; he replies to only two questions (and, as such, is less in ‘control’ of his narrative than if he himself had written a full commentary). Mukomolov argues that if the siege ends with ‘explosions and the deaths of children’, this will escalate conflict between Ossetians and Ingush, a conflict already inflamed by unsubstantiated media reports that the attack was done by the ‘terrorist branch of the so-called Ingush dzhamaat’. To counteract this, the Peacekeeping Mission, working as consultants to the officials involved in negotiations with the hostage-takers, contacted media outlets and Russian security forces about such reports and, consequently, the information was changed to emphasise the ‘international’ make-up of the group. Unlike the commentaries included in the RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter narrative texts, that so strongly emphasise and reinforce the framing narratives of those sites, this interview adds only a little to Caucasian Knot’s framing narrative. Mukomolov

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expresses an awareness of the media’s role in affecting public opinion and the benefits of negotiation and consultation to diffuse rather than escalate conflict, and thus squares with Caucasian Knot’s narrative of non-violence. His hope that the terrorists themselves might call off the siege for the sake of such large numbers of children and in order not to damage their cause and reputation in the eyes of the watching world could be dismissed as naïve but could also be a key point of appeal to and negotiation with the hostage-takers. Embedded anachronic narrative texts: narratives from ‘before’ On 2 September, Caucasian Knot interrupts the narrative using four external retroversions with a reach of between two and eleven years to relate events that occurred before the Beslan attack. The site posts an anonymous article (II/8501) that narrates four previous hostage crises and presents four different scenarios that could develop in the school. The first three of these, headed ‘Surrender a la Budennovsk’ (Капитуляция по-буденновски), ‘Pervomaiskan Show of Force’ and ‘The Tragedy of “Nord-Ost”’, also appear in the RIA-Novosti Russian and English narrative texts, where they serve to reinforce Russia’s characterisation of itself as a victim in ‘the war on terror(ism)’. Here, however, the narratives link negotiations between officials and hostage-takers to lives saved and also connect the role of Russian forces to the casualties in each case: at Budennovsk in 1995, both hostages and boeviki remained alive, and at Kizliar/Pervomaiskoe in 1996 negotiations secured the release of all but sixty of the roughly two thousand hostages. These were later killed when Russian forces prematurely attacked the retreating convoy of hostage-takers and hostages, while at the Dubrovka theatre in 2002, storming the building killed not only all the terrorists but one hundred and twenty-eight hostages.21 The fourth anachronic narrative, ‘Peruvian Success’ (not included in any of the other narrative texts), relates the seizure of the Japanese embassy in Peru (in December 1996), when over a hundred diplomats and officials were taken hostage by terrorists. Peruvian special forces waited four months, by which time the terrorists had lost their vigilance and were taken by surprise while playing football on the lawn. They were destroyed in a ‘lightning storm’ (молниеносный штурм), in which not a single hostage was killed. Although the author doubts whether this scenario is applicable to Beslan because ‘children are not diplomats [and] unable to control their nerves, they would inevitably provoke the terrorists into desperate actions’, this story, by opening up narratives of terrorism to include others, not only undermines the official narratives

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of Russia as a victim of terrorism (Russia cannot claim any special role as victim), but also shifts the emphasis of the narrative from victimhood to response. All four narratives suggest possible responses to the Beslan situation that carry with them varying degrees of ‘success’, or means of liberating the hostages alive. This post, then, offers alternatives to the RIA-Novosti and official narratives, as well as to the Kavkazcenter narrative, where a devastating storming of the school is considered inevitable. The anonymous post is attributed to Obozrevatel, a Ukrainian online information agency, and can be found on a Siberian news site, where it is attributed to Vladimir Perekrest and copyrighted to Izvestiya.Ru.22 Comparison between this and Caucasian Knot’s versions reveals five omissions, including the introductory sentence where Beslan is grouped together with the events of Budennovsk, Kizliar and ‘Nord-Ost’ as ‘the fourth such terrorist attack carried out in Russia by Chechen terrorists’, thus maintaining Caucasian Knot’s circumspection with regard to the identity of the Beslan hostage-takers. The reasons for other editorial omissions are less obvious. Caucasian Knot offers the first scenario, where the hostages ‘stayed alive’, as a possible course of action for those involved in Beslan. Perekrest, the original author, disagrees, claiming that one hundred and thirty civilians and thirty-six members of the police and army were killed, and more than four hundred people wounded. He quotes Anatolii Kulikov, the minister of Internal Affairs at the time, who called it ‘a mistake. If the terrorists had not been allowed to escape then, there would have been no Pervomaiskoe.’ Thus, Perekrest concludes, a repeat of this scenario in Beslan is ‘possible, but unlikely’, because the ‘political leadership of the country will hardly want to repeat the disgrace [позор] of their predecessors’. Caucasian Knot erases this pessimism, and with it, perhaps, an astute assessment of the authorities’ position. The second scenario in the original is appraised as a more likely outcome for Beslan, again with a fairly accurate understanding of the official narrative position that characterises terrorists as fit only for destruction. Once the special forces have negotiated the release of the children by providing certain guarantees, Perekrest observes, then they could try to destroy the boeviki as they retreated, or later, ‘one by one’. Caucasian Knot removes this observation. The third scenario is regarded not only as a failure because of the number of hostages who died, but as an avoidable tragedy. The majority of the hostages could have survived, Perekrest claims, ‘if the medical part of the operation had been more efficiently organised, [and] if the medics had known of an antidote [to the gas used by special forces]’. Caucasian Knot again removes the observation.

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The final scenario, the most successful in terms of both saving the hostages and destroying the terrorists, is seen as problematic because of the involvement of children. Yet Perekrest is confident that it could be possible for Beslan. ‘The Russian special forces can repeat the success of their Peruvian colleagues,’ he writes. ‘They have enough resources for this.’ Caucasian Knot omits this sentence. Embedded synchronal narrative texts located beyond Beslan School No. 1 Like RIA-Novosti, Caucasian Knot also covers not only events in Beslan, but official movements and actions across the region and in Moscow, with particular focus on regional activities. These include the cancellation of the celebratory assemblies in all North Ossetian schools (I/220); the preparation of medical aid and supplies (I/223); the indefinite closure of Beslan airport; the cancellation of flights; the closing of all border crossings into North Ossetia; increased security in all North Ossetian towns, schools, kindergartens and higher education institutes; the closure of the Caucasus Federal Highway, of all exit points in the large towns of Ingushetia and North Ossetia; the setting up of checkpoints on all major roads in North Ossetia (I/224); the mobilisation of troops (and other special forces (I/282)); and the closure of the Russian– Georgian border (I/224). President Putin’s interruption of his holiday in Sochi and return to Moscow, his high-level meeting and his phone call with President Dzasokhov are also reported (I/224), but the details emphasise less a mobilised state responding to a crisis, and more the provision of information for local residents regarding the practical and immediate effects of the state’s action. This continues throughout the narrative. On 2 September, Caucasian Knot reports the number of the telephone hotline (II/8300); the arrival of one hundred and sixty-six Ministry of Emergency Situations personnel and rescue workers in Vladikavkaz and Nalchik (II/8320); the tightening of security in Dagestan (II/8820) and Chechnya; and the closure of the administrative border between Chechnya and North Ossetia (II/8600). The seriousness of the crisis is marked by the extraneous session of the United Nations Security Council held in New York (I/8301), the departure of a ‘large delegation’ of representatives of public and religious life from neighbouring Ingushetia (II/8920), and the cancellation of all official and entertainment events scheduled to mark Moscow City Day (I/8980). On 3 September, Caucasian Knot reports a demonstration held the previous day in Nazran, Ingushetia, to express ‘solidarity and support for those in the hands of the terrorists’ (III/9420), and similar

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demonstrations in Grozny, Gudermes and other towns in Chechnya (III/9682). It also reports increased security in Ingushetia, particularly in schools (III/9460), and the closure of the administrative border between Ingushetia and Chechnya (III/9703). This closure was ‘to prevent the boeviki, now trying to escape from .  .  . Beslan, from possibly entering Chechnya’, a small element in the narrative that nevertheless undermines RIA-Novosti’s insistence that all the terrorists were destroyed. Little is made of it at this point, but the element appears again on 4 September in reports from the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs that security measures in Chechnya have been increased, including the closure of the administrative borders, ‘in order to rule out the possibility of infiltration into Chechnya by the terrorists, who managed to escape from the school in Beslan’ (IV/0260, emphasis added). In the last post of the day, a brief local narrative of an encounter in Nalchik (capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, the republic bordering North Ossetia to the west) further corroborates this element. A source in the Kabardino-Balkaria Ministry of Internal Affairs tells Caucasian Knot’s correspondent, Liudmilla Maratova, that, on 3 September, at 17:00, near an entrance into Nalchik, members of the GAI [traffic police] attempted to stop a Volga car for inspection, but it did not obey the command and drove through into the town. The car managed to reach the region of the Volnoaulsky Bridge. In it were three Chechen boeviki, armed with automatic weapons and pistols. During the shootout that followed, the boeviki were destroyed. Operation information that the boeviki who had escaped from the cordon in Beslan possibly drove off towards Nalchik, had been released earlier. (IV/440, emphasis added)

These stories originate from official, rather than unofficial sources, yet they contradict the government version that claims all of the hostage-takers were either destroyed or taken into custody in Beslan. RIA-Novosti quotes General-Lieutenant Viktor Sobolev, commander of the 58th Army, for example, who claims that ‘several bandits have been arrested, but in general, almost all of them have been destroyed’ (RIA-N III/23:45). Valerii Andreev, local head of the FSB, states that ‘the operation to free the hostages and destroy the terrorists is complete’ (RIA-N IV/14:27). The Chechen and Kabardino-Balkarian Ministries of Internal Affairs seem unaware of the official version being articulated at the time, and their contributions are examples of ‘awkward elements’ which, by failing to be included in official narratives, no longer need to be accounted for and are readily forgotten. The Torshin report, the Russian government’s final say on the events of Beslan, claims that there were thirty-two hostage-takers, thirty-one of whom were destroyed.23

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The local narratives of Russian journalists Andrei Babitskii and Anna Politkovskaya are also included in the Caucasian Knot primary narrative, similar to the way they are embedded into the Kavkazcenter narrative and in contrast to RIA-Novosti, where they are very minor characters. Babitskii’s apprehension at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport is reported three times (II/8660, II/9260, III/9360), with the latest post including Yana Dlugy in the story, the France Presse journalist and US citizen who was also detained, and the beginning of Babitskii’s case brought before the Solntsevskii court in Moscow. Details of the hearing, its dismissal and Babitskii’s release on 4 September are reported briefly in a post lifted from RIA-Novosti (IV/15:24) without change or comment. Politkovskaya’s story, although constructed from the same source used by Kavkazcenter, Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief Dmitri Muratov, includes additional elements (II/9260). Here Politkovskaya is characterised not only as a ‘well-known journalist’, but as a potential negotiator, describing her intention ‘to take part in the negotiations with the boeviki’. Although preparing to fly together with Leonid Roshal, another potential negotiator, Politkovskaya, ‘along with other journalists, is not permitted on the same flight. Nor is she allowed on another flight. At last, the commander of the crew of yet another airplane, headed for Rostov-on-Don, recognised the journalist and himself accompanied her onboard’, where she fell ill and was taken to hospital on arrival in Rostov. Her fate is in direct contrast to Roshal, who, heralded and highly acclaimed in the RIA-Novosti narratives, reaches Beslan and is welcomed into operation headquarters (I/8254). Muratov compares Politkovskaya’s fate to that of Iurii Shchekochikhin (another Novaya Gazeta reporter who died suddenly and under suspicious circumstances in 2003), and so ‘cannot rule out that [she] was poisoned deliberately’. However, unlike Kavkazcenter and its accusations against the FSB, Caucasian Knot’s story ends inconclusively. Politkovskaya is diagnosed with ‘poisoning by an unknown toxin’ and sent to a Moscow clinic, with the results of laboratory investigations not yet known (III/9361). On 4 September, narrative texts located beyond Beslan focus on the details of numbers of wounded admitted to, and discharged from, various local and regional hospitals, which, in keeping with Caucasian Knot’s tendency to include local details, are all named. These people are apparently only the seriously wounded, as ‘former hostages who received light injuries were sent home after receiving the necessary help’ (IV/920), yet evidently there are no attempts to follow up those hostages sent home, even though they are likely to have been valuable witnesses to the events of the siege and its end. Instead, in a manner reminiscent

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of RIA-Novosti, more is made of the losses suffered by members of the Russian security forces, including the FSB officer, who, in the words of local FSB chief Valerii Andreev, ‘saved two girls at the cost of his own life’ (IV/940). Embedded synchronal narrative texts located in or near Beslan School No. 1 From actors to characters: who are the hostage-takers? Unlike RIA-Novosti, which quickly characterises the hostage-takers as Chechen and, by implication ‘international’ terrorists, Caucasian Knot is largely circumspect with regard to their identity, drawing no firm conclusions and reporting a range of claims and speculations. Thus, the narrative text includes the suggestion (found in RIA-Novosti) that the group is led by the Ingush ‘Magas’, and the claim (reported and dismissed by Kavkazcenter) that the hostage-takers are members of the ‘socalled “Ingush Dzhamaat”’ with strong ties to Basaev and Maskhadov (I/241). But it also includes disclaimers from both Akhmed Zakaev and Maskhadov himself (I/241) and statements from the Ingushetian lawenforcement agencies arguing that, with no proof that they belong to an ‘Ingush Dzhamaat’, it is too soon to draw any conclusions about the nationality of the hostage-takers (I/284). Later, the narrative includes counterclaims from the news website, Ingushetia.ru (also reported by Kavkazcenter) that the information about ‘Magas’ had been ‘tossed’ (вброшена) to the media and that (confusingly) there is no such person; he is, in fact, Taziev Ali Musaevich, an Ingush and former policeman (IV/0304). The site refers to the hostage-takers as boeviki and ‘terrorists’, using the terms interchangeably and almost exclusively. ‘Bandits’ and ‘armed group’ are also used occasionally, and the women are simply described as ‘wearing suicide-bomber belts’ (снабженные поясами смертников). By 2 September, the official line has changed and, like RIA-Novosti, Caucasian Knot now reports suggestions that the group is multiethnic, made up of ‘Ossetians, Ingush, Chechens, and Russians’ (II/8302) or ‘Chechens and Ingush and several other nationalities’ (II/8304). On 3 September, as official claims regarding the number and nationalities of the terrorists are made in the hours after the siege, Caucasian Knot reports them without comment, thus losing the sense of circumspection towards the identity of the hostage-takers which the site displayed earlier in the narrative. Like RIA-Novosti, Caucasian Knot quotes, without comment, local FSB chief Valerii Andreev’s claim that twenty terrorists had been destroyed, ‘including ten originating from countries

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of the Arab world and one black man [негр]’, and North Ossetian lawenforcement agencies claiming the group of terrorists was made up of Chechens, Ingush, and Arab and Turkish mercenaries (II/820). In the RIA-Novosti narrative, this identification of the hostages as multiethnic is an essential part of their characterisation as ‘international terrorists’, the root cause for ‘the war on terror(ism)’. In the absence of this metanarrative in Caucasian Knot’s narrative text, the agency seems ready to accept the multi-ethnicity of the hostage-takers, probably in the hope that it will play down local ethnic divisions and conflicts, and is careful not to accuse any one particular ethnic group. From the original Englishlanguage statement by Human Rights Watch posted on the organisation’s website,24 (II/9020) three references to ‘Chechen rebels’ or ‘rebels operating from Chechnya’ as the perpetrators of the June 2004 attack on Ingushetia, the explosions on the passenger airplanes, the bombs in Moscow, the attack in Beslan and the hostage-taking at the Dubrovka theatre are all deleted from the Russian translation of the statement posted by Caucasian Knot.25 Yet, by reiterating official claims that the hostage-taking was led by Magomed ‘Magas’ Evloev (III/820, III/841), masterminded by Shamil Basaev and financed by ‘one of the Wahhabism ideologues, Abu Omar As-Seif, who is a representative of “Al-Qaeda” in Chechnya’ (III/841), Caucasian Knot constructs no firm opposition to the official narrative that Beslan is the latest attack on Russia by international terrorists. In addition, the site’s characterisation of the hostage-takers as multiethnic, and its use of boeviki and ‘terrorists’ to refer to them (both terms also used extensively and interchangeably in official narratives), means that Caucasian Knot’s narrative can be easily co-opted into official narratives that frame Beslan as part of ‘the war on terror(ism)’. Personal narratives: eyewitness accounts The inclusion of personal narratives already on the first day of the siege immediately distinguishes the Caucasian Knot narrative from those constructed by RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter. The first personal narrative of a former hostage is published on 2 September, a day before any such narratives are published by Kavkazcenter, and two days before they appear in RIA-Novosti’s Russian narrative. The story of Aslan Kudsoev, ‘a teacher, who managed to escape from the school last night’, is told indirectly in a post lifted in its entirety from the Caucasus Times internet site (II/640).26 Kudsoev’s chilling story of the shooting of fifteen male hostages on the morning of 1 September more than doubles the official tally at that point of twelve deaths given in the same post by North Ossetian minister for Internal Affairs, Kazbek Dzantiev. Ordered to

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throw the bodies out of the window, Kudzoev jumps from a first floor window and escapes into the darkness as the hostage-takers shoot at him. His story is absent from the narratives of both RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter. Four more personal narratives are included on 2 September, all taken from other Russian print media sources and grouped together under the headline, ‘Russian Media Publish Interviews with Eyewitnesses of Yesterday’s Seizure of the School in Beslan’ (II/8800). The first of these is that of tenth-grader Zaur Dzafarov, quoted in Kommersant: ‘We were standing with our backs to the street and did not notice the vehicle pull up. We only saw people begin to jump out of it, and men in masks walking in front. Behind them were bearded men in camouflage and two women in black clothing. They threw some kind of grenades (sound grenades, it seems, because there were practically no victims from the explosions), began shooting and surrounding us. I grabbed my little sister and ran over to the trees. Nobody fired at us. The boeviki just shouted for us to come back,’ Zaur said.

The second of these personal narratives is that of Roza Dudieva, a representative of the local Department for National (народный) Education, also quoted in Kommersant: After the assembly, my daughter went with the children into the school building, while I stayed in the yard to talk to the teachers. Just then, a covered [тентованный] military truck drove into the yard, out of which jumped people wearing camouflage and masks. Only their eyes and beards were visible. Shooting, they divided up the crowd, which had gathered in the yard, into two. The boeviki drove those who ended up closer to the school into the building, the others, including me, managed to hide behind a low fence. We peeked out, trying to find out what was happening to our children, but did not dare go closer. The boeviki guarding the entrance shouted to us in perfect [чистый] Russian, ‘Russians, Russians, come here, don’t be afraid.’ One of them even tried to coax [подманить] the schoolchildren with a chocolate bar.

Ruslan Boroev, an employee of the local district Department of Internal Affairs (РОВД), told journalists that, during the seizure, the terrorists were shooting with automatic weapons, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade throwers. ‘They weren’t aiming at anything, this was defensive fire. We couldn’t even remove the bodies from the yard. We couldn’t shoot back: the boeviki had put children into the windows near them,’ he said. ‘I saw them kill only one person. They shot some guy straight in the head; he’s still lying in the school yard. Then, after they drove the hostages into the school, several boeviki began to unload some kind of big boxes from the vehicle.’

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Finally, twenty-one-year-old Kazik Torchinyi, who took his sister to the school assembly, said, Around nine o’clock, an old GAZ-66 truck drove up to the school. About two dozen boeviki in black clothing and black masks jumped out, armed to the teeth. [*] Next, a ‘GAZel’ [vehicle] came flying in and four women calmly [степенно] got out. They were wearing shakhidka belts. They moved to the side of the school yard where there was a group of children, who ran off in all directions. [*] There were snipers positioned in the corners. They fired at the children running away. They wounded an old woman right in front of the children. A girl, maybe an eleventh-grader, was shot in the back by a sniper. She died on the spot. I lost my sister in all the confusion. She ended up among the hostages.

All of these temporary narrators add original details to the narrative of the initial attack that are not found in either RIA-Novosti or Kavkazcenter. Furthermore, each temporary narrator’s perspective is particular to them, with each personal narrative contributing details not found in the others. Together, along with the stories from Fraev and the local policeman, they build up a narrative of the attack that is more complex and more complete than any single narrative of that event. Yet they do not all narrate without interference. Boroev’s narrative, lifted, like Dzafarov’s and Dudieva’s, from a piece originally published in Kommersant,27 appears to be, like the others, an account of the initial attack. Comparison with the original, however, reveals that it is actually two quotations stitched together in reverse order, so that Boroev’s report of the hostage-takers’ volley of firing from ‘automatic weapons, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade throwers’ appears as an element of the initial attack when it is, instead, a description of the hostage-takers’ response to the ‘arrival of the first police units’. Caucasian Knot thus effectively removes these police from the scene. Kazik’s story is the only one lifted from an article published by Komsomolskaya Pravda28 that includes the three correspondents’ eyewitness accounts and brief quotations from eyewitnesses, local residents and soldiers gathered near the school. It is selectively appropriated into the Caucasian Knot narrative with over a third of the original omitted, effectively lessening the brutishness of the attack and its impact on those who witnessed it. The missing sections (indicated by asterisks in the quotation above) include the brutality of the hostage-takers as they drive the hostages into the school building ‘like cattle, . . . shoving and kicking and throwing them into the building through the windows’, and the addition of the word степенно now has the women calmly getting out of the vehicle. Kazik’s emotion, expressed through his clenched fists as he tells his story – his sister, Dziera (whose name is also missing from the Caucasian Knot

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version) was ‘lost in the confusion’ and ‘ended up among the hostages’ – is also missing. Temporary narrators on 3 September include released hostages Adel Itskaeva and Zalina Dzandarova, who also narrate for Kavkazcenter (see Chapter 3, pp. 137–9). Itskaeva’s exclamation at the official number of hostages (354) is the only quotation lifted from a piece by four Gazeta correspondents in Beslan.29 Their article, in which the correspondents themselves frequently narrate as eyewitnesses, includes conversations and exchanges with a number of eyewitnesses: special forces patrolling the area; Timur Bukhaev, whose wife and two children are among the hostages; armed local residents, Alan and Tamerlan Khasiev; Lidiia Prsieva, whose two children are among the hostages; and local resident, Zarema Tsinaeva, who spent the whole night out on the street. All of these could have been included in the Caucasian Knot narrative, but are not. Only Itskaeva is chosen, for her shock at the official estimate and her much higher figure, just as she was chosen by Kavkazcenter for the same reasons. Other potential temporary narrators from the Gazeta article, including the Gazeta correspondents themselves, all add details to a complex, unfinished narrative, but they are omitted by Caucasian Knot. Other hostages released along with Itskaeva also narrate in the original article, including a woman leaving hospital with her baby and described as barefoot and hysterical. She speaks to no one but when people try to photograph her shouts, ‘I still have a daughter in there! They said that if I talk to journalists they will kill her!’ This narrator is lost from Caucasian Knot, who paraphrases her words into ‘according to the publication, [the hostage-takers] had forbidden the released hostages to speak to journalists, and threatened, in the case of disobedience, to begin killing hostages’, an account that loses the distress, terror and danger expressed by this poor woman (III/324). The same post includes the quote from Zalina Dzandarova, her reply to the fourth of six questions put to her by Kommersant’s correspondent and also found in Kavkazcenter’s Russian narrative. Her replies to the first question, asking about the initial attack, and the last, asking about the identity of the hostage-takers, are omitted completely, and the remainder of her replies are paraphrased, sometimes with added details and sometimes with details omitted. Thus, for example, those who remain lying in the school yard after the attack are ‘finished off’ by the boeviki, who shot them with automatic weapons. In Dzandarova’s original answer to a question regarding the hostage-takers’ treatment of the children, she explains how, at first, the older children were permitted to bring water from the nearby shower rooms, but,

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[t]hen one of the terrorists said that on account of the fact that Dzasokhov (president of North Ossetia) was not coming to them, nobody would get any more water. They were also demanding Murat Ziazikov (president of Ingushetia) and Aslambek Aslakhanov (advisor to the president of Russia).

Caucasian Knot paraphrases this into, ‘but then, irritated that the leaders of North Ossetia and Ingushetia weren’t coming to them, [the boeviki] forbade giving water even to the children’. Thus, what is originally a possible indictment on the authorities who, by ignoring the hostagetakers’ demands and refusing to show up, arguably place the children in further jeopardy, becomes a description of the terrorists’ cruelty and edginess. Finally, while Caucasian Knot includes Dzandarova’s narration of the two shakhidkas blowing themselves up, like Kavkazcenter it fails to include the male terrorists’ remark that ‘their sisters had vanquished’. This brief comment offers a very small possibility of constructing some sort of explanation for what otherwise seems an inexplicable act, yet it is excised from the Caucasian Knot paraphrase. On 4 September, Zalina, a former hostage who also narrates for Kavkazcenter, is brought into the Caucasian Knot narrative by the selective appropriation of the first paragraph of the Gazeta.ru story where her narrative originally appears. At this point in the text, however, Zalina’s narrative is completely erased, and only the introductory framing of her story remains. In fact, Zalina’s personal narrative turns up seven posts later (IV/310), where she is again identified as a former hostage but is now without her name. She reports to a Gazeta.ru correspondent that immediately after the seizure of the school the boeviki killed ‘twelve or twenty men. They killed them one by one [по очереди].’ When one of the terrorists was killed in a shootout with police, ‘they sat several of our people near the window and shot them. They said that they would execute 10 people for this, but they shot less than that, about four people probably. [*] ‘In the sports hall there were at least a thousand of us sitting there. Every mum had two or three children. Near me there was a woman with three children. There were a lot of children. We sat on the floor. Of course, they threatened us, they were nervous, especially when there was noise in the hall. They would shoot into the air. Putting their automatics against a temple, they’d lift up several lads, saying, if there is noise in the hall, we’ll shoot all of them [*] At first they gave us water and let us go to the toilet and spread out into the corridor. From the very beginning, mums with nursing infants were taken to another room to stay. [*][*] Middle-aged people were taken to a cooler building and all given blankets,’[*] said the former hostage. When it became clear that the authorities were not going to negotiate with the terrorists, ‘they forbade us to drink water. Adults and

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children drank urine. The children near me in the sports hall did not die, but all of them were near death. The children could not stand on their feet.’ [*]

While Kavkazcenter includes all but the last paragraph of Zalina’s story as originally published by Gazeta.ru, Caucasian Knot includes only excerpts from the first part of the story, so that what looks like a seamless narrative, has, in fact, a number of significant omissions. The story is picked up at the point where the boeviki kill the group of male hostages, omitting details of the initial attack and the way people were driven into the school building. Zalina’s next statement, which describes a tank driving up to the school, firing once and ‘killing one of their men’ is paraphrased into ‘a shootout [перестрелка] with police’, implying an exchange of fire between two sides. Caucasian Knot also omits Zalina’s remark that the four people killed were killed ‘not near us’, and that, although the fighters threatened to shoot several lads, ‘they didn’t kill anybody’ in this way. The hostage-taker who, on the sly, brought powdered milk to one of the small children, is also missing from this version. The next two paragraphs (where Zalina describes Aushev’s promise to take the boveviki’s videotape to President Putin and return with an answer, the lack of negotiators, and the boeviki’s taunts that the hostages were not necessary to their government but that there would be a storm, just like Nord-Ost) are both omitted, but for the detail of the blankets given out. Zalina’s next phrase, ‘when our government deceived them’, is paraphrased, replacing any notion of deception with the commonly accepted notion that authorities do not ‘negotiate with terrorists’. Thus, while Kavkazcenter arguably appropriates Zalina’s narrative because it characterises the hostage-takers as human rather than ‘pure evil’, and because it undermines the portrayal of Russian government forces as the force for good, here Zalina’s narrative is manipulated in a way that removes some of the ambiguities of its characterisations. In a manner that is seen to increase over the course of the Caucasian Knot narrative, the narrator interferes with Zalina’s personal narrative; the part the authorities play by attacking the school with a tank and deceiving the terrorists is removed, as are the inconsistencies in the hostage-takers’ behaviour. The middle section of this post appears to be the indirect quotation of ‘one of the released school girls’, who says, [*] the sports hall, where almost all the children were, was mined soon after the seizure. The boeviki forced the hostages themselves to hang the explosive devices around the hall. Plastic bottles with plastic explosives were secured between two basketball rings on a line, to which they were fastened with Scotch tape. [*] One of the bottles came unstuck, fell down

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into the middle of the crowd and exploded, tearing to pieces everybody who was near. [*] After this, the special forces burst inside and the terrorists began to beat them off, throwing grenades into the crowd. [*] (IV/310)

It seems to be a straightforward eyewitness account that relates the explosion of one of the homemade devices inside the school and the immediate response to this from the special forces. It comes, however, from the second Gazeta.ru article (‘Шторм школы готовился . . .’), which is quoted in part by both Caucasian Knot (IV/080) and Kavkazcenter (IV/12:17, see Chapter 3, p. 137), where the only part of this narrative directly attributed to the school girl hostage is the sentence in italic. It is not, in fact, an eyewitness account, but a report originally pieced together by the correspondents from ‘what was known’ and ‘the stories of hostages who managed to escape unharmed’. The sentence placed after the explosion of the bottle in the original piece is missing: ‘Then wreckage from the roof began to fall down onto the children, [and] somebody was thrown out of the window by a blast’, as is the rest of the paragraph where the correspondents speculate on the ‘strange coincidence’ of the accidental explosion and the arrival of the rescuers to evacuate the bodies as had been agreed with the terrorists. ‘[T]here is another version,’ they write; ‘several hostages claim that the first explosion sounded from outside the school.’ Conclusions Of the three primary narrative texts, Caucasian Knot’s includes the widest range of temporary narrators selected from Russian, North Ossetian and Chechen-Ichkerian officials, other media, Russian and foreign NGOs and eyewitnesses. In doing so, the site avoids overtly characterising any particular narrator(s) as either ‘good’ or ‘evil’: both Russian government officials and Chechen-Ichkerian officials are identified by their names and positions and speak without comment from Caucasian Knot; the activities of the Russian government are neither adulated nor lambasted, and while RIA-Novosti’s narrative text is dominated by the (unquestioned) authorities, and Kavkazcenter’s highly vocal narrator (editor) frequently intervenes to sharply challenge official sources, Caucasian Knot reports discrepancies and inconsistencies without comment, building up a complex, multi-vocal narrative that is not, arguably, to be unexpected from the crowded, confused and dangerous place that Beslan became that Wednesday morning. Valerii Dzutsev, Caucasian Knot’s correspondent, is already on the ground on 1 September, and while detailed descriptions from Dzutsev

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are rare, he does narrate as an eyewitness, including the case of his own detention by local police (an example of local civilians and authorities attempting to prevent a journalist from narrating) and the highly visual, yet chaotic end and aftermath of the siege, after which he no longer narrates. Retrospective accounts of Dzutsev’s time in Beslan are temporally at odds with the way his narratives are incorporated into Caucasian Knot’s narrative text on 2 September, an example that demonstrates Bal’s (2009) argument that, when text is all we have, narrators remain linguistic functions of that text. Caucasian Knot also includes the greatest number of eyewitnesses that function as temporary narrators. Many of these, as in the case of those narrating for RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter, are anonymous and quoted only indirectly, but several are named and quoted directly, and, in a marked departure from the other two sites, included already on the first day of the siege. Thus, these eyewitness narrators are able to contribute to the narrative of Beslan even as it is occurring, and before the attack has been fixed into other, more abstract and reductionist frame narratives. Caucasian Knot also, uniquely, includes the names and dates of birth of wounded civilians and released hostages, which, together with the early temporal placement of personal narratives, contribute to the construction of a narrative of the Beslan attack that is focused not on any international war on terror(ism) or the enduring suffering of an entire nation, but about the ordinary people caught up currently in this particular attack. Like those constructed by RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter, this narrative is framed by a larger, societal narrative elaborated most clearly in the non-narrative material of the primary text. These are well-, often elegantly, articulated arguments from human rights organisations that espouse a narrative of non-violent, political resolution to conflict, making the safety of the children the utmost priority to which all other political differences; grievances and power struggles must be subordinated. The only ‘expert’ to narrate for the site represents a peacekeeping mission working in the North Caucasus, and as an experienced negotiator, his comments also frame the Beslan attack as a hostage-crisis, a particular, limited, situation to be diffused and resolved without loss of life before attention can be turned to larger narratives that accuse and apportion blame. Yet, some of Caucasian Knot’s editorial choices, such as the inclusion of the speculative piece on shakhidkas and the editorial omissions from the four different hostage-crises, suggest the site is not always aware of the nature and strength of its narrative position. Similarly, its emphasis on eyewitnesses appears to diminish over the course of the

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narrative, with fewer, rather than more eyewitnesses narrating on 3 and 4 September, whereas the opposite might be expected given the release of the group of women on 2 September, and the escape of hundreds of hostages from the school into the streets and hospitals as the siege comes to an end. Those that do narrate are selected from other media sources, their stories edited and paraphrased from articles that include an array of eyewitnesses, yet the opportunity to include more of these is not taken up and these potential eyewitnesses are absent from the Caucasian Knot narrative. Thus, the potential for eyewitnesses to contribute to the construction of a complex, multivalent narrative, as they do in the first couple of days, does not seem to be recognised by Caucasian Knot. Perhaps the site is attempting to avoid sensationalism. There is always a voyeuristic aspect to using eyewitness and victim accounts in times of violent conflict and catastrophe that raises ethical issues for media. ‘Cut and paste’ journalism, that requires relatively few resources and enables stories to be rapidly assembled and published, also seems to ‘homogenise’ narrative, with the same few people, such as Adel Itksaeva and Zalina Dzandarova, quoted by several news outlets, and their conflicting, emotional stories reduced to sound bites. Nevertheless, Caucasian Knot does construct a narrative of Beslan that provides a distinct alternative to official narratives. Not only does it assemble the most disparate selection of temporary narrators, it also includes elements, particularly from Chechen-Ichkerian officials, that are excluded from, and ultimately challenge the coherency of, other accounts. Details of how the terrorists commandeered the police vehicle and drove into Beslan, for example, are found only in Caucasian Knot’s narrative, as are details of how an unaccounted number of them escaped into the crowds, into neighbouring apartment blocks, into the town and even as far as Nalchik. Notes 1 ‘About Us’, www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/AboutCaucasianKnot [accessed 22 July 2011]. 2 ‘O Nas’, www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/AboutCaucasianKnot [accessed 22 July 2011]. 3 ‘Press Now Professionalizes Website “Caucasian Knot” and Management of Independent News Agency through Trainings and Consultation’, Press Now, 28 September 2006, www.pressnow.nl/asp/countries_news_details. asp?NewsID=69&CountryID=53&offset [accessed 31 October 2008]. 4 Unlike RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter, the times of posting are not given by Caucasian Knot. Articles are identified here according to the date (in Roman

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numerals) and the last part of their original html address, which indicates the (approximate) order in which they were posted with higher numbers being posted later. Including RIA-Novosti, RosBusinessConsulting, Gazeta.Ru, Interfax, Caucasus Times, Radio Liberty/ Radio Free Europe, radio stations Ekho Moskvy and Ekho Rostova, CNN, Reuters, Kommersant, Izvestiia, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Novaya Gazeta, Regnum Information Agency, Gazeta, Chechenpress, Itar-TASS, Rossiia television station, Ingushetia.ru and the BBC. Judith Ingram, ‘Russian Governor Aleksandr Lebed Dies’, Associated Press, 28 April 2002, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chechnya-sl/message/22852 [accessed 22 July 2011]. Dzutsev writes, ‘It was actually me and I was taken to the police 1 September. As I was the only English-speaking reporter at the time, some local men must have suspected I was an enemy (the town’s folk were in disarray), so they surrounded me and demanded I prove my identity. I tried, but then the police got involved, so I was taken to the police and they told me to leave the town, which I did. I actually left not because of their orders to do so, but because my mobile was discharged by then and there was no way of recharging it again unless I went home, and [my] mobile was my only way of communication with the world outside. So I just went home’ (personal correspondence, 12 March 2008). Personal correspondence, 12 March 2008. Dzutsev’s personal narrative also highlights the complex nature of agency, dominance and resistance. He writes: ‘As far as I remember, Moscow Times reporter, Simon Ostrovsky, was detained in Beslan on one of those days as well. There were numerous other reporters that had problems with the police afterwards. But I would say that it did not influence the quality of reporting much. I felt compelled to do as much as I can to spread the news about what happened and I think, the police and the authorities were just as much horrified by the attack, that they could not properly prevent reporters from doing their job (even though they tried of course and sometimes succeeded). Also the number of media outlets grew to such an extent, that the authorities could hardly control them. All these circumstances led to very extensive coverage of the Beslan attack and especially its aftermath.’ Dzutsev also observes that as ‘the only English-speaking reporter on the ground’ on 1 September, he ‘also answered numerous phone calls from various news agencies, BBC different services, Channel 4, etc’, raising questions about the roles and positions of translators and translation in the process of newsgathering and transmission. Attributed to Utro.ru and published there in ‘Список раненых в Беслане’, 2 September 2004, www.utro.ru/articles/2004/09/02/346404.shtml [accessed 22 July 2011]. Caucasian Knot reports how, after the siege, relatives of the hostages gathering at the Palace of Culture ‘demand to be told the names of the boeviki

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who seized the school’ (IV/0322, emphasis added). In reply, Soslan Tsikoev, a spokesperson for operation headquarters, claims that ‘the names of the terrorists are already known, but were being checked and, in the interests of the investigation, were not being released’. Thus, the hostage-takers remain unidentified and hence easily assumed into official narratives of quintessential evil. This phrase echoes nineteenth-century Russian literary narrative constructions of the Caucasus found in the works of Pushkin (1799–1837), Lermontov (1814–41) and Lev Tolstoi (1828–1910). See Layton (1994, 1997), Ram (1999) and Russell (2005b). RIA-Novosti (I/15:14), (I/16:47), (I/14:57) and (I/14:23). Characterisations of the hostage-takers as inhuman can be found in the responses of these last two, such as in claims that ‘this unprecedented act places its perpetrators beyond civilised society’ and that the ‘criminalterrorists . . . have once again shown their bestial [звериное] face’. It is difficult to know exactly what Bernard Bot said, as each time his statement appears as a direct quotation in any of the narratives, the wording is slightly different. This is an example of what might be called a ‘quotation trail’, where an original, often official, statement is translated and circulated throughout various media. At what point translation occurs in this process and the impact translation might have on the quotation itself and the narratives in which it becomes embedded, have yet to be fully investigated. II/14:08, II/14:26, II/14:05. IV/4:46, IV/5:32, IV/5:10. ‘Путин выступил с обращением в связи с событиями в Беслане’, Gazeta. ru, 4 September 2004, www.gazeta.ru/2004/09/04/na1094307060.shtml [accessed 22 July 2011]. ‘К терактам в России подготовлены еще 8 смертниц-шахидок’, published by the Irkutsk website, БАБР.RU, where it is attributed to Утро.ru, http://babr. ru/?pt=news&event=v1&IDE=14965 [accessed 22 July 2011]. It is also used, again by a temporary narrator, to refer to the female hostagetakers at Dubrovka (II/8501). Similar to its inclusion in the Kavkazcenter narrative, the memory of Dubrovka is narrated as an ominous portent of the outcome at Beslan, as expressed by the Russian–Chechen Friendship Society: ‘With the experience of Nord-Ost weighing on our shoulders, we call on the highest leaders of Russia not to storm the school; in this most difficult situation this would be madness and a crime’ (II/9240). ‘Захват школы в Беслане: возможные варианты развития событий’, БАБР. RU, 2 September 2004, http://babr.ru/?pt=news&event=v1&IDE=14958 [accessed 22 July 2011]. ‘Доклад Парламентской комиссии по расследованию причин и обстоятельств совершения террористического акта в городе Беслане Республики Северная Осетия – Алания 1-3 сентября 2004 года’, Moscow 2006, www.pravdabeslana.ru/dokladkomissii.htm. See also ‘Тезисы Выступления А. Торшина,

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Промежуточный доклад’, 28 December 2005, www.pravdabeslana.ru/torshintez.htm [both accessed 22 July 2011]. ‘Russia: New Attacks on Civilians Condemned’, 1 September 2004, http:// hrw.org/english/docs/2004/09/01/russia9295.htm [accessed 22 July 2011]. Although Human Rights Watch publishes some material in Russian, it has not published a Russian version of this statement, suggesting that Caucasian Knot translated the statement, or is at least responsible for the editorial cuts. The fact that the Human Rights Watch statement assumes ‘Chechen rebel’ responsibility for all of these attacks indicates the effectiveness of Russian official narratives that equate terrorists with Chechens and vice versa. That the organisation uses the word ‘rebel’ and invokes the Geneva Conventions prohibiting hostage-taking ‘during an internal armed conflict’ also indicates a particular narrative position influenced by Russian officials, which characterises Chechnya as an integral part of the Russian Federation. Others, pointing to the Chechen Republic’s declaration of sovereignty in October 1991 (during the break-up of the Soviet Union and before the creation of the current Russian Federation), and to the adoption of the Chechen constitution on 12 March 1992, over a year prior to the adoption of Russia’s constitution, on 12 December 1993, characterise Chechen fighters as defenders of their state against occupation by a foreign power. Islam Tekushev and Asiat Sagmatova, ‘Подробности расстрела заложников’, Caucasus Times, 2 September 2004, www.caucasustimes.com/article. asp?id=3844 [accessed 22 July 2011]. Olga Allenova, Zaur Farniev, Sergei Konovalov and Sergei Mashkin, ‘Школа выживания’, Kommersant, 2 September 2004, www.kommersant. ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=502387 [accessed 22 July 2011]. Dmitrii Steshin, Ekaterina Malik and Natalia Kornienko, ‘«НордОст» превратился в «Зюйд-Вест»?’, 1 September 2004, www.kp.ru/ daily/23351/31693 [accessed 22 July 2011]. Pavel Aptekar, Ivan Egorov, Iaroslav Zoring and Dmitirii Solokov-Mitrich, ‘Нас там 1020 человек!’, Gazeta, 3 September 2004, www.gzt.ru/politics/2004/09/03/030926.html [accessed 31 January 2009].

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Translated narratives: a narrow gate

RIA-Novosti, Kavkazcenter and Caucasian Knot all state that, in addition to their Russophone readers, they publish for, and strive to reach, non-Russian audiences, goals which indubitably necessitate translation. RIA-Novosti lists ‘foreign business communities, diplomatic missions and public organizations’ among its clientele, and claims its foreignlanguage sites are leading sources (занимают высокие позиции)1 of news reporting on Russia. The agency includes designated departments of foreign-language news production and translation as well as an international media press centre, the English-language Moscow News and the Arabic-language Anbaa Mosku, and boasts of its ability ‘to deliver news and information in all possible formats, including video, animated infographics and cartoons to professional clients and the end user in 14 languages’.2 Kavkazcenter publishes in five languages and not only aims to reach ‘the world community’ with ‘the truth about the war’, but also provides ‘international news agencies with news-letters, background information and assistance in making independent journalistic work in [the] Caucasus’.3 Although it publishes in just Russian and English, Caucasian Knot also aims to reach ‘the global community’.4 This chapter investigates the English-language primary narrative texts published by each of these three websites (Stories 4, 5 and 6),5 comparing narrative elements and construction with both the corresponding Russian primary narrative texts and with each other, and highlighting the differences between the Russian texts and their English versions. While the structure of the chapter loosely follows that of the previous three analytical chapters (all of which are structured around the intratextual model described in Chapter 1), some of the categories have been collapsed together in order to facilitate the discussion of primary texts which are much shorter than those analysed in Chapters 2–4. Some sections, such as ‘Embedded synchronal narrative texts located beyond Beslan School No. 1’, where it was found that a discussion of the English narrative texts would make no significant contribution to the previous

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discussions of the Russian narrative text, have been omitted altogether. The chapter also discusses some issues regarding the publication and presentation of translated texts. Primary narrative texts On Wednesday 1 September, RIA-Novosti published sixteen English articles (about 5700 words) that mention the hostage-taking in Beslan, with the first posted at 12:04, almost two hours after the first Russian report. Most of these, although presented as separate dispatches, are, in fact, translated amalgamations of bulletins from the Russian text, and are thus longer than the Russian posts, with headlines and times of publication that do not closely reflect the content of the bulletin in the way the Russian posts do. ‘Militants Mine Gym where Hostages are Kept’ (EI/13:15), for example, also includes the apparent refusal of the hostage-takers to negotiate, the number of hostages and people wounded in the attack, the arrival of various government officials at the scene, and the increase in security measures in the region. Similarly, an event such as ‘fire exchange is continuing near the school’, originally posted at 10:49, is potentially incorrect when posted at 12:04. Amalgamating several posts into one not only removes the immediacy of the Russian bulletins (usually posted every few minutes), by increasing the reach of the retroversion between the chronological sequence of the fabula (the events happening in real time) and the sequential ordering of the reporter’s story, but can also create a new text that presents conflicting information (usually regarding estimated numbers of hostagetakers, hostages or wounded) or even alters the chronological order in which events appeared in the Russian version. As these posts are neither marked as translations nor hyper-linked to the original Russian posts, there is no way for Anglophone readers to know when, or if, these modifications occur. This textual composition remains similar over the next two days. On Thursday, 2 September, RIA-Novosti published seventeen posts in English (about 5800 words) that mention the hostage-taking in Beslan, thirty-seven such posts (about 5500 words) on Friday, 3 September, fourteen (4300 words) on Saturday 4, and nine (3300 words) on Sunday, 5 September. With a total of around twenty-four thousand five hundred words, the English primary narrative text is just over a third of the length of its Russian counterpart, and unlike the Russian, which steadily increases in word count, the length of the English narrative, counted in number of words, steadily decreases over the four days (see Figure 6).

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25000 20000 Russian Primary Narrative Text

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In addition to differences between the composition and word count of RIA-Novosti’s two primary narrative texts, the English text also includes nine articles that have no apparent direct connection to any parts of the Russian text: a list of terrorist attacks occurring in Moscow since 1999, two political commentaries and six other pieces. Five of these, in a departure from the way the Russian text is constructed, are sourced from other Russian mainstream media,6 and are all co-opted into the English primary narrative text without any comment or critique of either the media sources or the temporary narrators they introduce. Together, these pieces account for just over four thousand words, about eighteen per cent of the English primary narrative text, with the remainder of the text corresponding to the Russian text. Thus, in the end, just under a third (20,289 words) of the Russian primary narrative (65,000 words) is translated into English. Similar ratios and patterns can be found in a comparison of the Russian and English primary narrative texts published by the other two websites investigated in this study. Kavkazcenter’s first English-language post appears in the early hours of 2 September 2004, and, at six hundred and fifty-three words, provides only a tiny proportion of the information published in Russian on 1 September. In fact, it is not a translation of any part of the Kavkazcenter Russian text but a single piece attributed to IslamOnline.net and ‘News Agencies’ that briefly relates the initial attack.7 The increased reach of the retroversion between the publication of this material and the fabula, which it relates, means that even from this early stage the English narrative has none of the immediacy of the Russian, which is constructed at brief and regular intervals throughout the day. This first English post is largely made up of statements from officials and other media sources, and while this is similar to the way the Russian narrative draws not from the agency’s own correspondent but on other media, who in turn tend to draw on official statements, this

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English post has none of the scepticism and criticism that so characterise the original. The critical, sometimes bitter, sometimes droll, tone of the Kavkazcenter Russian narrative is completely missing. In fact, none of the Kavkazcenter reportage is translated and the remainder of the English primary narrative text is made up solely from translations of the site’s five commentaries, two posted in quick succession in the early hours of 3 September, one later that morning and two more early on 5 September. Together, these bring the English primary narrative text to less than five thousand words (4797), less than a quarter of the Russian primary narrative text (see Figure 7). When the first (non-translated) English post is excluded, then even less again of the Russian text is translated into English. On Wednesday, 1 September, Caucasian Knot published one article (164 words) on the hostage-taking in Beslan, an amalgamation of translated excerpts taken from five of the Caucasian Knot Russian bulletins published that day.8 The effect of this ‘cut and paste’ approach is, as in RIA-Novosti’s English narrative text, to distort aspects of the Russian narrative. Thus, while the post is headlined ‘15 Children Released from Captured School’, the excerpts selected for inclusion are, for the most part, concerned with the demands and identity of the hostage-takers. Two English pieces, amounting to just over eight hundred words, are posted on Thursday, 2 September: a translation of the Russian bulletin (II/8921) reporting the release of twenty-six hostages (EII/9120) and a statement issued by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) and the Moscow Helsinki Group (EII/9160). On Friday, 3 September, Caucasian Knot posted a single article (293 words), which, like that posted on 1 September, is a collection of translated excerpts taken from four of the site’s Russian posts.9 This is where the English

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narrative ends; nothing in English is published on Saturday 4 or Sunday 5 September (see Figure 8). Thus, Caucasian Knot’s English primary narrative text is just six per cent of the length in words of the site’s Russian primary narrative text. When the IHF statement is excluded – it is not a translation of any part of the Russian text but is lifted from the IHF website – this percentage halves: just on three per cent of the Russian primary text is translated into English. The brevity of the English narrative means, of course, that the greater part of the Russian is simply missing; none of the elements that make Caucasian Knot’s Russian narrative distinctive, neither the range of information sources, the regional focus, the lists of names, the many personal stories, nor the eloquently argued case for political resolutions to the crisis and the urgent call to refrain from violence, are included in the English narrative. Thus, in all three cases the English primary narrative text is much shorter than the corresponding Russian narrative text, raising the question of what is translated and what is not. In addition, all three websites include material in English that is not a part of the Russian text. What is included? And what is the impact of these additional elements on each English narrative? Narrators Kavkazcenter and Caucasian Knot The Kavkazcenter Russian primary narrative text draws on several temporary narrators that include Russian and Chechen-Ichkerian official sources, Russian-language and foreign media, social and military experts, in-house commentators and foreign journalists writing for European and North American mainstream newspapers. In addition, Kavkazcenter directly adds its own voice, using comments and uncon-

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ventional headlines to draw attention to what it regards as discrepancies and falsities in the Russian statements. All of these, apart from the five in-house commentators, (see pp. 198–202) are missing from the site’s English narrative text. Assembling an even more diverse cast of temporary narrators, the Caucasian Knot Russian primary narrative text includes Russian and Chechen-Ichkerian officials, Russian and foreign media, an experienced hostage-crisis expert, representatives from NGOs and its own correspondents in Beslan and the region. In particular, Caucasian Knot distinguishes itself from both RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter; it includes the greatest number of named eyewitnesses, whose personal narratives are quoted at greater length and at earlier temporal locations than in either of the other two Russian narrative texts. Yet neither are these distinctions found in Caucasian Knot’s English narrative text. The three posts made up of translated selections of the Russian text draw exclusively on Russian and North Ossetian officials, and include operation headquarters (I/8281, II/9120); the Ingush and North Ossetian security agencies (I/8281); a spokesperson for the Emergencies Ministry’s operation headquarters deployed in Beslan’s School No. 6 (II/9120); the North Ossetian Health minister (III/9800); Ismel Shaov, head of the North Ossetian Interior Ministry’s information and public relations department (III/9800); Russian authorities (III/9800); and Taymuraz Mamsurov, head of the North Ossetian Parliament (III/9800). The Chechen-Ichkerian statements from Umar Khanbiev, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, President Aslan Maskhadov, and the interviews with Akhmed Zakaev and Ilias Akhmadov are all missing. Caucasian Knot’s correspondent reports only the release of seven women and three babies on the afternoon of 2 September (EII/9120) and, on 3 September, the lynching of the suspected hostagetaker by local residents, reporting that ‘police frightened away [originally by ‘shooting into the air’ but omitted here] the crowds of locals in order not to let them kill the terrorist’ (EIII/9800). The same post also includes witnesses’ reports that, nevertheless, ‘the man who was considered a rebel [originally боевик] was shot dead by a local man’. This is the extent of the contribution to the narrative text from the correspondent and eyewitnesses. Neither the correspondent’s detention by local police nor any of the personal narratives that contribute so markedly and extensively to the Russian narrative text are included. RIA-Novosti While Kavkazcenter’s narrator is excised from its English narrative text (and Caucasian Knot’s remains discreet even in Russian), RIA-Novosti

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has the same high profile in its English narrative text as it does in the Russian. Statements are frequently ‘told to’ or ‘received by’ RIANovosti, information comes from a ‘RIA-Novosti source’, and both named and unnamed correspondents and commentators are identified as belonging to the agency. Similarly, the function of narrator continues to be most frequently and consistently temporarily transferred to local, regional and federal government officials, who remain respected, yet impersonalised, un-critiqued sources of information. While there are significant differences in the ways other temporary narrators, such as experts, correspondents and eyewitnesses, contribute to the English narrative text, analysis shows that these not only elaborate but reinforce RIA-Novosti’s emphasis on official sources and their framing narrative of ‘the war on terror(ism)’. Experts While four experts act as temporary narrators in RIA-Novosti’s Russian primary narrative text (see Chapter 2, pp. 65–9), the English text includes six such experts, none of whom are found in the Russian text. The first of these is Oleg Nechiporenko, described by one journalist as ‘the general director of the National Anti-Criminal and AntiTerrorist Foundation’, with a long career in the KGB behind him.10 Quoted at length, Nechiporenko frames the Beslan hostage-crisis by elaborating a narrative of international terrorist organisations, linking Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basaev to ‘warlord Oybek “Uzbek” Rakhimov’, ‘the Egyptians Mohammed Islambuli and Mustafa Hamsa’, the ‘inner circle of Ayman al-Zawahiri’ and, finally, to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, concluding that ‘Chechen fighters are also sponsored by international Islamic extremist organisations’ (EI/19:12). Nechiporenko makes the same links with regard to ‘the Islambuli Brigades’, the group apparently claiming responsibility for the airplane attacks and the Rizhskaia metro station explosion, calling the group ‘a Chechen militant organisation with links to al-Qaeda’, and tracing the name back to Haled Islambuli, ‘who organised the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat [in] 1981’, and to ‘various extremist organisations – in Chechnya, the Balkans and Southeast Asia’, who have also adopted Islambuli’s name. ‘In essence,’ Nechiporenko states, ‘this confirms what we have long been telling the world: the separatists in the Caucasus, in particular, the Chechen Republic, maintain links with international terrorists.’ Egypt’s response to Sadat’s assassination, which included arrests, executions, convictions, the banning of ‘various illegal religious organisations’ and the introduction of a prolonged state of emergency, is approved by Nechiporenko as effective. ‘Egypt has not

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fallen victim to any major terrorist attacks in the past seven years,’ he concludes. This framing narrative of Chechen and international terrorism is reinforced by the title of this post, ‘Who is Behind the Chechen Terrorists?’, and the introductory comments from RIA-Novosti political commentator, Viacheslav Lashkul, who opens the piece with the unequivocal, ‘Chechen terrorists have committed another crime’, even though at this stage of the crisis the identity of the hostage-takers had not been established. Lashkul also claims that ‘the suspected suicide bombers who blew up the planes were Chechens’ and links them to ‘the international extremist group the Islambouli Brigades, with apparent ties to al-Qaeda’. The framing narrative continues to be elaborated by a further four experts. Viacheslav Nikonov, ‘head of the Politika foundation’, characterises Russia as an exceptional victim in this ‘terrorist war’, having ‘experienced far more terrorist attacks in the past few years than any other country’, and he calls for ‘tougher state policy’ and legislation to further empower law enforcement and military structures (EIII/14:07). Sergei Markov, head of ‘the Institute of Political Studies’, sees the recent attacks as evidence of ‘a new military and political force .  .  . operating against Russia’, one that is ‘“far better” than Chechen separatists’, ‘provided with resources and finances’ and linked ‘with the international Islamic terrorism’ (EIII/14:07).11 Aleksandr Ignatenko, ‘president of the Region and Politics Institute’, claims that, in Russia, ‘al-Qaeda ranks include members from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and other Arab countries, as well as Chechens, Ingushes [sic] and Russians who have adopted wahhabism’. Any national or ethnic distinctions apparently become irrelevant when ‘[o]n returning home al-Qaeda’s foreign members are called “Chechens”’ (EIII/14:11). Iosif Lindner, ‘president of the International Counter-Terrorist Training Organization’, is indirectly quoted as stating that ‘a counter-terrorist should be well ahead of the enemy rather than just one or two steps’ (EIII/14:11). The only expert not to frame the Beslan attack by a ‘war on terror(ism)’ narrative is Sergei Tobolov, ‘head of the North Ossetian state broadcasting company and former minister for Ethnic Affairs’. Tobolov instead refers to ‘the Ossetian–Ingush conflict’, remarking that ‘if the outcome [of the hostage-taking] is more or less positive, peace will probably be preserved’ (EIII/14:13). RIA-Novosti goes on to provide details of this conflict, placing Beslan at its very centre: In autumn 1992, Beslan became the cause of a conflict between Ossetians and Ingushes [sic] who claimed that they had owned the territory before

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they were deported in 1944 and tried to return it by force. The move produced quite the opposite effect: over 30,000 Ingushes had to leave their homes and hide in Ingushetia. The federal government had to work hard to return refugees to their permanent residences. Now some Ossetian observers fear that the results of 12-year work may be undone by the Beslan terrorist attack.

This is another framing narrative. It is echoed in President Putin’s fears for ‘the fragile balance of inter-confessional and inter-ethnic relations in the region’ (EII/15:34), and his claim (at the meeting held in Beslan on Saturday, 4 September) that ‘[o]ne of the terrorists’ aims was to incite inter-ethnic hatred and explode the entire North Caucasus’ (EIV/10:56). Temporally and geo-spatially more confined than ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative, it suggests a more localised understanding of the circumstances of the Beslan attack. Yet both Putin’s failure to consider the complex nature and causes of such strife, and the story of the 1992 conflict given here, indicate a narrative construction of the North Caucasus that is closer to the metanarrative of ‘civilisation versus barbarism’ than to any politically, sociologically and historically astute narrative construction of the region. In the narrative above, regional conflict is characterised as arising from territorial claims between ethnic groups affected by random historical catastrophes such as the agent-less 1944 deportation. In contrast, the federal government is characterised as working hard in the region to restore order, which remains fragile because of the volatile nature of the ethnic groups: how else to explain the ‘force’ of the Ingush and the reason they, in turn, had to ‘leave . . . and hide’? Anglophone readers may well be unfamiliar with the 1944 deportation, yet the brutal details of the event ordered and carried out by the Soviet Union are not mentioned. Instead, it is Beslan itself that is ‘the cause’ of conflict, and the Russian federal government’s contribution to the ‘fragile balance’ (EIII/15:34) of the region is disregarded and excluded from the story. Thus, while the six experts who act as temporary narrators are selected from an array of institutions (political science think-tanks, counter-terrorism organisations, media and local government), suggesting a wide variation of comment and opinion, all frame Beslan with narratives of war against a pervasive, barbaric, terrorist enemy. These narratives are reinforced in the way both experts and the institutions from which they hail are included without critique, thus assuming an aura of specialist authority and respectability. Furthermore, whether the temporary narrators are quoted briefly or at length, RIA-Novosti itself always frames each one, continually reiterating ‘the war on terror(ism)’ narrative.

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Correspondents and eyewitnesses From the first English post on 1 September, it is evident that RIANovosti has at least one correspondent in Beslan, described as reporting ‘from the site’, ‘on location’, ‘from the scene of action’ or ‘at the scene’, yet, as in the Russian narrative text, these temporary narrators seldom act as witnesses. The exception to this pattern of occasional observation is on Friday, 3 September; when the siege is brought to its violent end, the correspondent reports, in a series of posts, not what they are told by officials but what they see and hear. But for the last of these, which is delayed overnight, most of these posts are published within an hour of the original Russian posts, a short retroversion indicating the importance placed on their content. The RIA-Novosti correspondent, as a temporary narrator present at the scene of the action with direct access to its sights and sounds, contributes significantly at this point to the narrative. Yet, this role does not continue, and the correspondents are not mentioned again in the English narrative text. The scene describing relatives, ‘who have not found their loved ones’, gathering on Saturday at the Palace of Culture (IV/12:36) is also in the English narrative (EIV/14:57), but the correspondent’s position as observer has been removed, along with the follow-up scenes from the Russian narrative where the relatives begin to compile their own lists of the missing, working late into the evening. The final descriptive post from the Russian narrative, describing the tragic atmosphere permeating Beslan’s streets, is also missing. Thus, the minimal role of eyewitness temporary narrators played by RIA-Novosti’s correspondents in the Russian narrative text is further minimalised in the English text. At the point in the Russian narrative where the correspondents narrate most candidly, they are missing entirely from the English text. Similarly, of the few anonymous eyewitnesses that act as temporary narrators in the RIA-Novosti Russian primary narrative text, even fewer narrate in the English narrative. Anonymous eyewitnesses are mentioned five times in two posts on 1 September (12:04, 14:02) and six times in four posts published at the height of the violent, visible action on 3 September (13:50, 14:04, 14:17, 14:44). All but one of these are reported using indirect speech, and the sole direct quote is the same as that found in the Russian narrative text (III/13:37) – ‘People started to run away from the school hall. Terrorists opened fire. Power departments [sic] opened return fire to save those who escaped’ (EIII/13:50) – a brief narrative that, with its clear apportions of blame and approval, conforms wholly to official narratives of the end of the siege. The two named eyewitnesses who contribute to the narrative are discussed below (pp. 207–9).

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Embedded non-narrative texts RIA-Novosti International statements and Russian official responses Of the almost sixty countries, international organisations and religious groups whose official statements and responses to the hostage-taking make up a substantial part of the Russian narrative text, only fourteen are present in the English.12 As in the Russian narrative, these statements all make specific references to the hostage-taking in Beslan. Some refer to the attacks on the airplanes and the Moscow metro, and some offer help and practical assistance. Condolences, sympathy and solidarity with not only the victims and families in Beslan but with the Russian people and the Russian leadership are expressed again and again. Yet, while the phrase ‘war on terrorism’ is included only once (Egypt), and literal translations of the Russian expression, the ‘struggle’ or ‘fight’ (борьба) against terrorism are included just three times (PACE, Chechnya, South Ossetia), the abstract, dichotomous language of ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative that emerged so persistently through this material in the Russian narrative is also apparent here. Nowhere is ‘terrorism’ defined, yet it is ‘one of the most serious threats to international peace and security’ (Britain), or ‘the greatest threat’ (Turkey), and repeatedly characterised as ‘international’ (PACE, Chechnya, Germany, Spain, South Ossetia), implying that it is serious, omnipresent and emanating from a single, yet vague, undetermined source.13 The act of the hostage-takers, called variously ‘a group of Chechen militants’ (PACE), ‘devils’ (the Coordination Centre of North Caucasian Muslims) and ‘frenzied fanatics’ (South Ossetia), ‘without a shred of human compassion’ (Britain), is described as odious, appalling, heinous, un-Muslim, barbarous, disgusting, a horrible crime, inhuman, barbaric and unprecedented in its brutality. In contrast, the ‘international community’ (Egypt) is called upon to unite in ‘the struggle against this evil’ (Spain), action expressed in abstract terms of ‘closer co-operation’ (PACE), ‘actively cooperat[ing] with the Russian authorities’ (UNSC) and ‘coordinate[ing] efforts’ (Egypt). South Ossetia urges ‘all peoples of the Caucasus to rally together’ and ‘combine their efforts’, and Jack Straw, Britain’s Foreign secretary, turns to rhetoric. ‘Their suffering is our suffering,’ he says. ‘The awesome responsibility of President Putin and his Government is our responsibility too.’ Similarly, just as only a small proportion of the international statements and responses are included in the English-language narrative, only seven out of the original twenty different sources of Russian

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official statements and responses are included in the English narrative. These original twenty include President Putin and five sources from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and both remain well represented in the English narrative. Putin’s first comments on the hostagetaking, made alongside those of visiting King Abdullah II of Jordan, are translated and published as a single post within ninety minutes of the originals (EII/15:34). The sixteen Russian posts that closely track Putin’s visit to Beslan early on Saturday, 4 September are summarised into a single post focusing on Putin’s speech at the meeting with headquarters (EIV/10:56). An abridged translation – references to Russia’s history and the fall of the Soviet Union are omitted – of the president’s televised address is posted within ninety minutes of the original publication of the full text, and a full retranslation is posted on Sunday, 5 September (EV/12:55). Again, despite the smaller number of Russian responses included in the narrative, the abstract, dichotomous language of ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative and its themes of an inhuman, widespread threat calling for responses of unity and cooperation remain evident. Occasionally weakened by odd translation – a statement from Russia’s Foreign Ministry calls the Beslan attack an ‘unprecedented form of “terrorism infinity”’ (беспредел)’ (EIV/16:11) – or omission – Konstantin Kosachev’s description of terrorism as ‘the sinister [зловещий] phenomenon of the 21st century’ (I/13:13) is dropped (EI/17:40) – the meta-narrative is also reinforced by small editorial choices. The original brief exchange between a journalist and presidential advisor Aslambek Aslakhanov (see Chapter 2, p. 64), for example, is summarised into the assertion that Aslakhanov ‘discerns one and the same Arab terrorist organisation behind the latest terror acts in Russia’ and published under the English headline, ‘Terrorists Seize School – Arabs Behind Curtain?’ (EI/19:59). Other editorial additions in the English narrative make ‘Chechen militants’ (EI/18:38) and ‘Chechen rebels’ (EIII/17:40) the perpetrators of the attack, and call Shamil Basaev and Aslan Maskhadov the ‘notorious Chechen warlords’ who ‘masterminded’ the ‘heinous’ school hostage-taking (EIII/19:57), thus reinforcing the Russian version of ‘the war on terror(ism)’ that merges Chechens, Arabs and al-Qaeda into a single enemy. Commentaries A striking difference between the RIA-Novosti Russian and English narrative texts is the inclusion of three commentaries in English not found in the Russian primary text, two penned by RIA-Novosti political commentators and an anonymous opinion piece from ‘the widely-read

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Moscow-based daily’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta (EII/21:22). All three commentaries strongly and clearly reinforce the framing of the local narrative of the Beslan attack with the meta-narrative of ‘the war on terror(ism)’, effectively compensating for the ‘gap’ left in the English narrative text by the absence of the majority of the international statements and responses found in RIA-Novosti’s Russian text. The space allocated to the in-house commentators reflects the high esteem in which they, and, by extension, their opinions, are held by the agency. Petr Romanov is described as an experienced journalist, published author, documentary film-writer and contributor to two ‘white papers’ on Chechnya, with extensive travel experience in a number of Western countries.14 Vladimir Simonov, a graduate from Moscow State University, with a long association with RIA-Novosti, is described as an experienced foreign correspondent, prize winner, published author and documentary film-writer.15 Romanov and Simonov are strong advocates for framing Beslan as part of ‘the war on terror(ism)’. Romanov’s ‘Terrorism in Russia. War on an Invisible Enemy’ (EI/16:31), published on the first day of the siege, begins by briefly summarising the attack in Beslan and linking it to ‘yesterday’s explosion in Moscow’, ‘the recent explosion near Moscow’s Kashirskoe metro station16 and the August 24 airplane explosions, which, when taken together’, he writes, ‘paint a gloomy picture’. In his piece posted the next day, ‘The War on Terror: the West has neither the right nor the time for inconsistency’ (EII/17:18), Simonov begins with a similar account of recent attacks in Russia, adding a reference to the ‘countless [terrorist attacks] in Russia’ after 11 September 2001, and remarking pointedly that ‘[i]t seems that Russia, not America, has become the main target of terrorists’. Both commentators refer to a quote from Russian Defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, that quickly fuses these particular terrorist attacks to a meta-narrative of a larger conflict with an insidious opponent and a vague but ominous threat: ‘In essence, a war has been declared on us, with an invisible enemy and no front line.’ In the words of Simonov, ‘With such rampant terror, there can no longer be any talk of a FIGHT against terrorism. Russia has embarked on a real WAR against this evil’. Neither Romanov nor Simonov define the word ‘terrorism’. Instead, Romanov discusses ‘the problem of modern terrorism . . . encountered worldwide’ and waged on a ‘vast territory’, and gives several examples of both incidents and perpetrators which he sees as constituting the phenomenon: the ‘Brigade Islambuli, which is not based in Russia’, who claimed responsibility for the Rizhskaia metro attack and the loss of the two airliners; ‘extremists linked to al-Qaeda’, also allegedly involved

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in the air crashes; the ‘suicide bombers’ who ‘targeted buses in Israel . . . [a]s Moscow reverberated to the sounds of yesterday’s explosion’; ‘[a]rmed people in a mosque, and explosives at Muslim cemeteries’, which has apparently ‘happened more than once in Chechnya and now in Iraq’; and suicide-bombers who ‘come from Chechnya, but are not trained there’. Simonov also refers to Chechen gangs, militants in Chechnya, the ‘Islambouli Brigades’ believed to be ‘a Chechen branch of al-Qaeda’, notorious field commanders, Chechnya’s armed underground and Shamil Basaev, ‘Chechnya’s most dangerous terrorist’. Yet all of these various and particular instances and accusations of political violence, including the attack in Beslan, are conflated into a single threat. For Romanov, they are ‘mere episodes in the protracted war between modern civilisation and a new challenge – international terrorism’, and Simonov insists that ‘“classic” international terrorism and Chechen terrorism are one and the same thing’. The anonymous piece from Nezavisimaya Gazeta discusses the threat of ‘today’s terrorists [who] come for prey to town streets, [where] [a]ny bus stop offers them several dozen victims’. Furthermore, in keeping with ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative, both commentators characterise this threat as ‘evil’. Romanov calls it a ‘new evil’, suggesting that it is even more unknowable and impossible to understand or account for. Suicidebombers are ‘zombie-like’, no longer human, and Simonov refers to ‘the devil of terrorism’ and the ‘barbaric acts of terrorists’. At the same time, as in the narratives elaborated by several Russian government officials, the unity of the ‘anti-terrorist coalition’, characterised in the meta-narrative as the undisputed force for good, is, for both commentators, particularly Simonov, suspect, supporting the idea that there is more than one ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative in circulation. Romanov considers Europe’s criticism of Israel and Russia to be invalid because Europe, unlike Israel and Russia, is not suffering ‘on the front line’. Simonov complains that ‘[e]very year, the EU pedantically introduces to the UN Human Rights Committee draft resolutions on certain “human rights abuses in Chechnya”’ and that ‘[t]heir authors go out of their way to criticise Russia for what it fails to do in the republic’ while at the same time forgetting to mention ‘the real positive changes that are taking place there’ and refusing to cooperate with Russia ‘on the Chechen problem’. Both commentators bemoan the ‘clear demonstration of double standards’ (Romanov) by the US and Britain in their granting of asylum to leaders of ‘the so-called Ichkerian republic’, characterised by Romanov as ‘Chechen separatists and terrorists’. Simonov mocks the United States’ apparent belief that Ilias Akhmadov, former Foreign minister in Aslan Maskhadov’s government granted asylum in

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August 2004, is ‘such a quiet, decent guy, much better than bin Laden’, and berates Great Britain, which ‘has for years seen money to finance Chechen terrorism being raised in London mosques’. In contrast to these inconsistencies and ‘unfriendly actions’ (Simonov), Russia is sure of its role in the meta-narrative. It ‘is not going to surrender and will fight the enemy both by using force and with political methods’ (Romanov). President Putin, quoted by Romanov, summarises the crystallisation of this abstract, dichotomous meta-narrative in Russian state policy: ‘We are ready for a dialogue with all forces, except for terrorists and separatists.’ Thus, Russia’s ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative is reinforced by the commentaries added to the RIA-Novosti English narrative. The evil, inhuman, amorphous and omnipresent menace of terrorists and terrorism, which threatens the whole world, is manifested on Russian soil as Chechen terrorists and separatists, and Russia, as the force for good in the meta-narrative and according to its plot, must destroy and eliminate them. The failure of other states, professing to subscribe to ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative, to acknowledge Russia’s characterisation of Chechens as belonging to this evil, international threat, undermines the professed unity of the ‘international community’ and is paramount in sabotaging Russia’s efforts in ‘the fight against international terrorism’. Kavkazcenter As described above, Kavkazcenter’s English primary narrative text is made up almost entirely of anonymous translations of all five of the commentaries written for the agency: Boris Stomakhin’s ‘What Measure Ye Mete, It Shall Be Measured To You’ (EIII/00:14), Said Irbakhaev’s ‘How Can 42 Thousand Children be Killed Legally?’ (EIII/00:32), Sirajin Sattayev’s ‘School in Beslan to be Stormed’ (EIII/9:03), Musa Stone’s ‘Beslan: 80 Percent of Hostages Killed or Injured’ (EV/00:20) and Pavel Liuzakov’s ‘Putin, You Are A Murderer’ (EV/00:34). The discussion of these five commentaries in Russian (Chapter 3, pp. 126–8) examines the ways in which they frame the Beslan hostageattack within larger societal narratives of Russian military aggression and genocide against the Chechen people, in which President Putin, the Russian government and security forces are characterised as the deceitful perpetrators of violence against innocent people. This narrative, articulated most virulently and scathingly in these five commentaries, is, as argued in the conclusion to Chapter 3, the framing narrative used most consistently throughout Kavkazcenter’s Russian narrative text. The most conspicuous impact of translation on these commentaries is

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their rendering into awkward, sometimes clumsy, sometimes incorrect English. One effect of this is that the overall tone of the commentaries becomes even more abrasive, as if the ire of the authors is expressed in language that seems almost broken by their outrage. ‘The whole information provided by Russian law enforcement is aimed at suggesting the thought that the school was seized by some lunatics’, reads the translation from Sattayev’s piece (EIII/9:03), and from Stomakhin: ‘The way [the hostage-taking] must be understood is that by its bloody crimes, by its aggressor policies and its sadistic brutalities Russia is putting its children, and not just adults, under attacks’ (EIII/00:14). This awkward English can also remove the persuasive rhetoric of the original Russian. Irbakhaev’s original declaration addressed to the hypocrites who condemn the hostage-taking while ignoring the plight of Chechen children is proud, bitter, defiant. ‘Это мы осуждаем и обвиняем вас’ (‘It is we who judge and accuse you’), he writes. ‘Никогда больше, во веки веков, ни вы, ни ваши выкормыши не будут указывать чеченскому народу как жить’ (‘Never again, nevermore, will either you or your fosterlings tell the Chechen people how to live’). Translated, his statement is truncated and becomes the graceless ‘[n]evermore, forever and ever, are you or your fosterlings will be pointing to the Chechen people how to be living their lives’ (EIII/00:32). Similarly, the short, rhythmic sentences of Liuzakov’s opening paragraph describing the chaos of the storming of the school are lengthened into clunky English: Storm. Stupid, head-on, at the most inappropriate time. Uncommonly idiotic tactics . . . Clearly, at that moment they were ready for anything. Clearly, they expected a dirty trick . . . Then explosions, a long two-hour battle, hundreds of children-hostages killed . . . This was more than at Dubrovka. This was more than at Budennovsk. This was children. (IV/4:34, my back translation) Russian special forces storm the school. Untalented head-on assault at the wrong time. The tactics was extremely idiotic: . . . It is clear that at that moment they were ready to do anything. Sure, they were waiting for some dirty trick to be pulled off . . . Then explosions occur and a long, two-hour long gun battle and hundreds of children (hostages) get killed. It’s more than the number of victims during the Moscow theater siege in October 2002. It’s more than the number of victims in Budennovsk  And they were children. (EV/00:34)

When the translation is inept or simply inaccurate, then the credibility of the narrators and the urgency of their narratives are undermined. One explicitation, for example, erroneously places Vnukovo airport in St

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Petersburg rather than Moscow. The idiom на детей наплевать, literally ‘to spit on the children’, is a strong expression of contempt, the power of which is weakened when in English it becomes, ‘they actually don’t give a darn about children!’ (EV/00:34). A significant element of Kavkazcenter’s framing narrative of Beslan is the storming of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow (see Chapter 3, pp. 115–18). This element is also found in the English narrative, where references to it in the commentaries are usually accompanied by some form of brief explicitation for the benefit of Anglophone readers. Thus, ‘Nord-Ost’ and ‘Dubrovka’ regularly become ‘the Moscow theatre siege in October 2002’ or simply ‘the Moscow theatre’. Although the reiteration of the Dubrovka storming is not as insistent in the English narrative text as it is in Kavkazcenter’s Russian narrative text, it remains present in the outraged references to it in four of the five commentaries. Yet, does it carry the same connotations and associations when situated within an English-language narrative, especially without the other elements such as the plea from the Dubrovka survivors and the editorial censures found in Kavkazcenter’s Russian text? Baker uses the term ‘historicity’ to refer to the way in which events from other times and places are incorporated into narratives, describing it as ‘a resource that narrators draw on in order to enhance identification with a current narrative and enrich it with implicit detail’ (2006: 57). When a narrative is relocated into another culture through translation or interpretation, Baker suggests (with particular reference to activist texts) that translators ‘will want to consider how this feature of historicity may be preserved or activated . . . in order to better serve their own and their author’s activist agenda’ (2006: 59). Of the five Kavkazcenter commentaries, all of which could be considered activist texts because of their strong stances against the Russian government, Boris Stomakhin’s piece draws the most on historical events and serves as a useful example of the way historicity functions in translated texts. Unconvinced by official explanations for the recent violence in Russia, including the attack in Beslan, Stomakhin is reminded of Stalinist times when, every accident at the factory due to the negligence of the workers and every train derailment was declared ‘sabotage’ and ‘wrecking’, after which the quickly arrested ‘Trotskyite-Bukharinist spies and saboteurs’ from the ranks of engineers and sloggers were sprayed with bullets. (my back translation)

The paragraph is steeped in language of the time and uses it to express the absurdity of the charges and the irrationality of the political climate

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then. The word вредительство (‘wrecking’), originally referring to the action of ‘an insect or other animal causing harm to agriculture’, came to be used in Soviet propaganda ‘to berate those whom the party hierarchy made scapegoats for the disastrous consequences of Soviet economic policy’, from where it passed into the juridical system and eventually into the Russian Soviet criminal code (Rossi 1989: 61–2). (Leon) Trotsky and (Nikolai) Bukharin were Bolshevik revolutionaries, who both fell out of favour with Stalin in the 1920s. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party, exiled from the Soviet Union and eventually assassinated on Stalin’s orders in 1940. Bukharin was arrested in 1937 and executed the following year. Repression in the Soviet Union was marked by periodic campaigns of mass arrests targeting various groups, either following the publication of a decree supplementing the criminal code (and intensifying the punishment) or, more usually, pre-empting the decree which was published subsequently. ‘Trotskyites’ (троцкисты) were ‘individuals convicted of Trotskyite activities, real or imagined, for real or imagined links with Trotskyites’ (Rossi 1989: 453). They first began to be arrested in 1925 after Trotsky’s removal from power but were also targeted in 1927– 28, 1934–35 and in the purges of 1936–39. ‘Counterrevolutionary Trotskyite activity’ (контрреволюционная троцкистская деятельность) was an official charge in the 1930s and ‘significantly exacerbated a convict’s situation’ (Rossi 1989: 34). What happens to the effects of these historical references when the article is translated into English? While the use of inverted commas is preserved to express the scepticism, even ridicule, of the original, the depth of resonance is lost through the omission of ‘wrecking’ and ‘Trotskyite-Bukharinist’. The sense of brutal hysteria in the last sentence is also smoothed away: Stalin’s times are rather coming to mind: each accident at the workplace that happens because of the negligence of workers, and each derailment of a train are being presented as an ‘act of sabotage’, after which the engineers and workers get arrested as ‘spies and saboteurs’ and get executed by firing squads. (EIII/00:14)

Elsewhere in the article, there are indications that the translator has attempted to preserve the effects of the historical references, even though the translation could be said to be inaccurate. Stomakhin uses ‘NKVD–KGB–FSB’17 to refer to the present-day Russian security forces, linking the abbreviations together chronologically to imply that name changes do not change who they are and what they do. He also uses the term ‘Lubyanka’, a reference to the Moscow headquarters of Soviet and

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Russian state security since 1920 and including, over the years, a prison and basements equipped for torture and execution. Regardless of the fact that the KGB was officially renamed in 1991, both these terms are consistently translated as ‘KGB’, a moniker that remains widely recognised internationally through association with Cold War menace and Soviet brutality and frequently exploited by Hollywood and best-selling fiction. NKVD, FSB and Lubianka are less familiar internationally, yet are heavily loaded in Russian and ‘still make the blood of many Russians run cold’ (Ryazanova-Clarke and Wade 1999: 12). Arguably, it is this chilling, tangible experience of Soviet and Russian secret police that is ‘lost’ in the translation into English for a readership that perhaps cannot quite believe the extent of the terror and the murky links between Russian government, secret police brutality and criminality. In the same way, while, for an international readership, ‘Dubrovka’ evokes a chaotic, perhaps mishandled rescue attempt of a frightening, very dangerous attack, for those such as Stomakhin, whose mistrust of the Russian government and secret police runs deep, Dubrovka, Beslan – and Burepolom, the GULAG prison colony in which Stomakhin served out his full five-year prison sentence – are names and places that evoke the same fear and dread as Lubianka. Caucasian Knot While Caucasian Knot’s Russian narrative text includes just four of the international condemnations of the Beslan attack found in RIANovosti’s Russian narrative text, it also includes several statements and condemnations from Chechen-Ichkerian officials and NGOs (see Chapter 4, pp. 156–63). These human rights and non-governmental organisations act as temporary narrators for Caucasian Knot alone and it is they who most articulately elaborate Caucasian Knot’s distinctive framing narrative of non-violence. The only statement of this kind in the English narrative text is a statement ‘issued by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) and the Moscow Helsinki Group MHG’ (II/9160).18 Like the majority of the condemnations, the statement denounces ‘the recent outbreak of attacks against civilians in Russia’ and calls for the hostages’ immediate release. In consonance with the calls for an end to violence articulated in the Caucasian Knot Russian narrative, the statement also urges ‘the Russian authorities to address the climate of impunity in Chechnya’, which the authors consider to be directly ‘linked to the rise in violence in the North Caucasus’ and ‘nurtured by the gross inaction of the Russian investigative and judicial authorities’. While this link contradicts Russian official narratives that connect

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violence in the region with ‘international terrorism’, the argument is made only in the last two paragraphs of the statement, the remainder of which is made up of narrative accounts of the initial attack in Beslan, the explosion at the Rizhskaia metro station and the explosions of the two passenger airplanes. What is interesting about these is the subtle, yet repeated, identification of the perpetrators of these attacks as Chechen. They are referred to collectively as ‘individuals suspected of being linked to Chechen fighters’, the suspects for the destruction of the airplanes are two ‘ethnic Chechen women’ and the Beslan hostage-takers are ‘believed to be Chechen fighters’, a modifier not found in the IHF’s Russian version. Having established the collocation between ‘Chechen’ and ‘fighters’, the narrative account of the Beslan attack consistently refers to the hostagetakers as ‘fighters’, even when the Russian version uses захватчики (hostage-takers) or террористы (terrorists) in reference to the Nord-Ost hostage-taking. The события (events) of 21 June become, in English, a ‘fighter assault on Ingushetia’, further associating violence with Chechens. Thus, the counter-narrative of the IHF statement linking violence in the North Caucasus and Russia to ‘the climate of impunity enjoyed by Russian security forces in Chechnya’ is not only limited to a small proportion of the whole statement, but is undermined by the consistent, yet unfounded, connection between Chechens and terrorist attacks. It is blunt, persistent, yet almost invisible associations such as these that nurture the simplistic narratives of good and evil used to legitimise and excuse the very climate of impunity that the IHF decries. Embedded anachronic narrative texts: narratives from ‘before’ RIA-Novosti In RIA-Novosti’s Russian narrative text there are five external retroversions with a reach of between about twelve hours and ninety-nine years, all of which function as a means of characterising the hostage-taking in Beslan as yet another terrorist attack on the Russian Federation, a veteran in the ‘war on terror(ism)’ and still at the frontline. In the English primary narrative text, there are fifteen external retroversions with a shorter reach of between six months and twelve years, all of which clearly reinforce the characterisation of Russia as no stranger to terrorism. While the Russian text refers to only four recent terrorist attacks in Russia (the hostage-takings in Budennovsk, Kizliar and Moscow, and the explosion at the Rizhskaia metro station), the English text refers to an additional ten. Most of these are included in the second post of 1 September, ‘Reference: terrorist attacks in Moscow in 1999–2004’ (EI/12:13), a list of brief narratives that relate when and where

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explosions occurred in the capital, and the number of people killed and wounded. The first five of these, occurring from 1999 to 2001, are all related without including any human agency. Explosions ‘went off’, were ‘activated’, ‘ripped through’ and ‘razed’ apartments. The attacks are listed as inexplicable, tragic events, in the same category as the loss of the Kursk nuclear submarine ‘wrecked in the Barents Sea’ and the ‘conflagration in the Ostankino television tower’, both later cited along with the ‘blast [which] hit a congested underground passage in Pushkin Square in Moscow’s heart’ as reasons for scaling down the Moscow City Day celebrations in September 2000 (EII/22:14). The emphasis on terrorist attacks in Moscow underscores the official Russian narrative expounded by President Putin in his televised address to the nation, that the attack in Beslan was ‘a challenge against Russia and our nation as a whole’ (EIV/19:55). That so many terrorist attacks are capable of reaching the ‘heart’ of Moscow, the heart of Russia, is explained by characterising them as both Chechen and international, which, in the official Russian narrative, amount to the same thing. The sixth in the chronological list of terrorist attacks in Moscow in 1999–2004 is a brief narrative of the Dubrovka hostage-taking in 2002. For the first time in the post, both an agent and some sort of motivation for the attack are given: ‘a terrorist attachment headed by Movsar Barayev took hostage .  .  . over 800 people [and] demanded that federal troops be withdrawn from the Chechen republic’. While motives are not given for the remaining five retroversions included in the post, agents are given for four of them. The attacks are now described as suicide-bombers activating explosive devices, including ‘Zarema Muzhikhoyeva, a Chechen native’. No agency is given for the eleventh retroversion, but it is alluded to by including the information that ‘a piece of fabric resembling the flag of the Chechen republic of Ichkeria’ was found at the site of the blast. In a later post (EI/17:48), a translation from the Russian post relating three previous major hostage-takings on Russian soil (I/11:30), extra information on the fates of the terrorist commanders is added to the English text: Basaev (who led the attack in Budennovsk) is now ‘internationally wanted’ and Raduev (who led the attack in Kizliar) ‘was later captured, tried and . . . died in prison’ – thus reinforcing both the extent of the threat and the competency of the Russian government in responding to it. Kavkazcenter and Caucasian Knot Both Kavkazcenter and Caucasian Knot include brief narratives of the 31 August explosion outside the Rizhskaia metro station in Moscow

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and the destruction of the airplanes the week before. In both cases, these narratives are lifted from other sources rather than translated from the Russian primary narrative texts, yet, where they diverge from the overall narrative position of each website, only Kavkazcenter asserts its own narrative of these events. In Kavkazcenter’s single English report lifted from ‘IslamOnline. net and News Agencies’, an anachronic narrative of the Rizhskaia bombing commands almost half of the entire post. The narrative’s main protagonist is ‘a female bomber’, who ‘blew herself up outside a busy Moscow subway station’, who was ‘spotted before the blast . . . walking towards the subway’ but when she saw ‘police checking the papers of passers-by .  .  . changed course and the explosion occurred immediately afterwards’. She was ‘among the dead’ and ‘[h]er body was more severely damaged than the other victims’ (EII/4:26). According to Caucasian Knot, the explosions on the two airplanes ‘were blamed on Chechen fighters’ – or ‘two ethnic Chechen women’ (EII/9160), and the Islambouli Brigades, who apparently claimed responsibility for both attacks, described the Rizhskaia bombing ‘as a “heroic operation in support of Chechen Muslims”’ although ‘the website claims could not be verified’ (EII/04:26). While the Caucasian Knot version of the Rizhskaia narrative includes far fewer details, the perpetrator remains ‘a lone female bomber’. This is all considered risible by Stomakhin (published in translation by Kavkazcenter (EIII/00:14)), who re-characterises the ‘female suicide bomber’ as merely an element in ‘the entire propagandistic set compiled by the yellow press’ and ‘the KGB’. Both accounts include initial reports of a car bomb (rather than a ‘suicide-bomber’) as the cause of the explosion, but while Kavkazcenter’s ‘borrowed’ narrative gives no reason for the shift in explanation, Stomakhin attributes it to ridiculous KGB propaganda that even claims the Rizhskaia bomber ‘was a sister of one of the “airplane bombers”’. Stomakhin concludes that the bombs were ‘organised’ by the ‘KGB, or by the Putin regime’ or were simply accidents, ‘considering that each and every thing in Russia is totally technologically obsolete’ or because ‘the pilots were probably boozing together before the flights’. Caucasian Knot’s English narrative text contains no other account of these anachronic narratives, and the assumptions and associations that accompany them (see pp. 203–4 above) are left uncontested. The final part of Kavkazcenter’s only English reportage on the Beslan attack contains a brief narrative of war in Chechnya. Chechnya is characterised as a ‘small mountainous republic . . . ravaged by conflict since 1994, with just three years of relative peace’. The cause of the conflict

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and the deaths of ‘[a]t least 100,000 civilians’ is attributed solely to the ‘Russian invasion of the region’ in 1994 and again in 1999. ‘Russian soldiers’ are accused by human rights groups ‘of committing aggressions and abuses’, and ‘[i]nternational human rights watchdogs’ have stated that ‘rape, torture and extrajudicial executions by Russian troops have become everyday occurrences in Chechnya’. Although lifted from another source, the precise, undisputed allocation of innocence and blame in this narrative allows it to fit comfortably with Kavkazcenter’s simplistic framing narrative of the attack in Beslan that emphasises Russian military aggression and genocide against the Chechen people. Embedded synchronal narrative texts located in or near Beslan School No. 1 From actors to characters: who are the hostage-takers? The most frequently used words in RIA-Novosti’s English primary narrative text to refer to the hostage-takers are ‘militants’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandits’. Boeviki is almost always translated as ‘militants’ but also as ‘gunmen’, ‘terrorists’, ‘bandits’, ‘insurgents’, ‘rebels’ and even ‘paramilitary chiefs’, and these words are used even when alternatives are available in the original Russian. Thus, for example, бандиты (bandits), нападавшие (attackers) and преступники (criminals) are all translated as either ‘bandits’ or ‘terrorists’, and захватчики (hostage-takers) is translated as ‘militants’. These terms are also the most common lexical choices even when they do not, because of the use of the passive voice for example, appear in the original Russian. Thus, the English narrative describes the attackers as ‘a group of Chechen militants’, ‘Chechen rebels’, ‘big [and] notorious Chechen warlords’, ‘bandits’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘captors’ even when there are no such descriptions in the original. Shakhidki is translated as ‘shakhids’, a word largely absent from the English-language press. All of these are used in Anglophone media to describe the perpetrators of non-state-sanctioned or paramilitary violence. Their use here places the hostage-takers and, by implication, their cause and motivations, firmly outside any legally recognised conflict or warfare. Instead, they are the ‘other’, the outlawed and illegal terrorist enemy in ‘the war on terror(ism)’. Kavkazcenter’s Russian primary narrative text pointedly avoids these words (see Chapter 3, pp. 132–6), and they are also rare in Kavkazcenter’s only English post describing the initial attack (EII/4:26), which refers to the hostage-takers as ‘attackers’, ‘armed attackers’, ‘kidnappers’, ‘gunmen’ and ‘hostage takers’. The only real departure from Kavkazcenter’s Russian text, which tends to downplay the pres-

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ence of the women among the hostage-takers and says nothing of their explosives, is the inclusion of ‘women wearing belts laden with explosives’, and the description of the hostage-takers, both men and women ‘wearing explosive belts’. While Caucasian Knot’s Russian narrative text attempts to draw no firm conclusions regarding the identity of the hostage-takers by reporting a range of claims and speculations, its extensive and interchangeable use of boeviki and ‘terrorists’ allows it to be easily co-opted into official narratives, such as that elaborated by RIA-Novosti (see Chapter 4, pp. 171–2). The same can be said of Caucasian Knot’s English narrative text, where the hostage-takers are referred to as ‘terrorists’ or ‘rebels’, a translation of boeviki. By using the word ‘rebel’ to refer to the hostagetakers in Beslan and also to Basaev, Maskhadov and the 21–22 June attack on Ingushetia, Caucasian Knot makes no distinction between them, just as the statement from the IHF implies associations between terrorists and Chechens (see pp. 202–3 above), which are readily coopted into official narratives that do exactly the same thing. Personal narratives: eyewitness accounts None of the personal narratives that so distinguished Caucasian Knot’s Russian narrative are translated into English, and neither are any of the three personal narratives from Kavkazcenter’s Russian narrative found in the site’s English text. The only English primary narrative text to include any personal narratives is that published by RIA-Novosti, quite a departure from RIA-Novosti’s Russian narrative text, which is notable for its comparable lack of personal narratives. The first personal narrative in RIA-Novosti’s English narrative comes from Zalina Dzandarova. She also acts as a temporary narrator in both the Kavkazcenter and Caucasian Knot Russian narratives (see Chapters 3, pp. 137–9 and 4, pp. 175–7), and is the only temporary narrator to narrate for all three agencies. RIA-Novosti posts her story on 3 September, just under an hour after the explosions that triggered the end of the siege (EIII/14:05). The timing of the post, just after the first reports of hostages and children fleeing the school, suggests that Dzandarova is one of these, and, apart from describing her as ‘[a] released hostage’, there is nothing in the post to indicate that she is actually one of the twenty-six hostages released the day before through Ruslan Aushev’s negotiations. The narrative is attributed to Kommersant and can be traced back to the same interview that serves as the source for the Kavkazcenter and Caucasian Knot versions. Yet it is not part of RIA-Novosti’s Russian narrative text, nor does there appear to be a Kommersant English

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translation of the original interview. There is no by-line, no indication of the circumstances in which the story was told or translated, and it is filed from Moscow rather than Beslan. With no indication of direct quotes, the published narrative appears to be a summary or gloss of what Dzandarova said, and the narrator seems to be very much in control of Dzandarova’s story. What is interesting about this personal narrative is not only its early temporal location within the overall narrative (in comparison with the late temporal locations of the personal narratives included in RIA-Novosti’s Russian narrative text), but the number of departures from the official version of events. The complete chaos and brutality of the initial attack are clearly described, as is the much higher estimate of ‘about 1,500 hostages’ that contradicts official estimates of three hundred and fifty-four or more people (EIII/13:05). The terrible conditions inside the school are also described, in stark contradiction to official reassurances that very morning that the children ‘are in good health’ and that ‘nothing threatens the life of even one single child’ (EIII/9:32). Insight into how the RIA-Novosti narrator controls Dzandarova’s personal narrative can be gained through a comparison between this translation and the original Russian Kommersant interview.19 While RIA-Novosti’s English version of Dzandarova’s narrative is the most complete of all three versions discussed in this book, there are still omissions: eight in total. In the interview, Dzandarova includes the panic in which people ran and hid in different parts of the school only to be followed and rounded up by the terrorists, details that make the initial attack appear even more chaotic and terrifying but which are omitted by RIA-Novosti. The causal link between the hostage-takers denying the hostages water and the failure of the authorities to turn up and negotiate is also excluded. This is also one of several instances in Dzandarova’s story, removed by the RIA-Novosti narrator, where the hostage-takers are described as talking to the hostages. In contrast to the numerous official statements that the terrorists were refusing to negotiate, make contact or express specific demands, Dzandarova describes them as quite readily communicating what they wanted and why. The RIA-Novosti English version of Dzandarova’s story ends with the terrorists’ demand that Russian troops be withdrawn from Chechnya, which is otherwise given little emphasis by the agency. It fails, however, to include her final sentences from the Kommersant interview: Again they told us, that the Russians had killed their children and they had nothing to lose. I asked one of them how they could so endanger the lives of our children. He answered that when his children were being killed nobody had asked him about anything.

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The RIA-Novosti narrator has excised this particular (personal) narrative from inside the school and, with it, traces of a narrative identity that does not conform to the characterisation of the terrorists as inherently evil. It also, in conformity with official narratives and in direct contrast to Kavkazcenter, avoids any connection with narratives of Russian military aggression, Chechen suffering and genocide. The second personal narrative in RIA-Novosti’s English narrative is a translation of Alina’s story, originally posted by RIA-Novosti just before midnight on 4 September, and posted in English in the afternoon of 5 September (EV/14:41). The act of translation from one language into another can be conceptualised as an additional level of representation that fi ts easily into Riessman’s (1993) model of fi ve minimum levels of representation of primary experience. This translation of Alina’s per-sonal narrative is an example of how each level ‘involves an expansion but also a reduction’ (1993: 15): just as features are selected from the ‘whole’ of the previous level, interpretive elements are added. Several details, all direct quotations from Alina, have been removed and are missing from the English version of her story. They include Alina’s remarks on how the terrorists wanted to show the hostages that they were not joking, how Alina tried to comfort her child, how ‘it was very diffi cult for everyone’ (всем было очень плохо), the readiness of ‘our’ government to distribute food, her description of the wires being taped to the explosive devices, and how she made her way barefoot across broken glass to the window to escape with her daughter. The longest omission is a paragraph in which Alina describes how, on the morning of 3 September, the boeviki and the situation seemed to have calmed down. Whether these omissions were made intentionally on the part of editor(s) and/or translator(s) is debatable and difficult to ascertain, but their effect is to further diminish the voice of one of only two eyewitnesses to the events inside School No. 1 included in the RIA-Novosti primary narrative English text. Furthermore, basic inaccuracies such as the inclusion of ‘not’ with regards to the terrorists’ demands being met and the erroneous use of ‘he’ to refer to Alina’s daughter, Ilona – the Russian word for ‘child’ is masculine – confuse the story, effectively obscuring Alina’s narrative even more. Already marginalised in the Russian primary narrative text by its place at the very end, where it can be co-opted into supporting official stories already elaborated in the narrative, in translation Alina’s personal narrative is even more distant, posted fifteen hours after the original and a full two days after the ending of the siege and the events she describes.

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Online publication and presentation of translated texts The analysis in this chapter shows that not everything is translated, nor are English texts always translations of (parts of) the Russian text, differences which are obscured by several common conventions operating widely in online media. Translations are rarely indicated as such, and translators rarely attributed; in fact, they are not attributed once in the case of the three sites of this study. Translation is (partly) taking place, but it is an unseen, unacknowledged activity and, rather than becoming ‘hermeneutically alert’ (Bruner 1991: 10) to translation’s effects, readers can both readily forget about it and assume it has no impact on the text. The very layout and presentation of online publications contribute to this ‘form of “mindlessness”’ (ibid.). The hyperlink, enabling readers to simply click between Russian and English homepages, creates the illusion, and nurtures the assumptions (for surely readers have no reason to assume otherwise) that the two are the same. The hyperlink operates as a ‘link of faith’, even as it obscures the actual correlations and variances between language versions. Yet this hyperlink of faith might well be challenged by using it to underscore rather than obscure these differences. Comparable to DVDs that include not just the feature film but also interviews, outtakes and ‘the director’s cut’, hyperlinks from translations (or ‘trans-editions’) to originals, to particular words and/or phrases, to translator and/or editorial comments, to (further links to) background information for foreign readers, are all means by which a ‘thick translation’20 could be constructed to resist the lure of the hyperlink. Homepages could be merged, with headlines and links in both or more languages if translations have been made. If not, then the absence of a link can alert the foreign reader to material they cannot access as well as the sources of the material they can, resulting in a far more accurate picture of the discrepancies between primary narrative texts found in the analysis of this chapter than an English-language homepage which appears to allow access to everything. We do not and cannot know everything and what we can begin to know can only be through ‘patient engagement and interpretive, contextualising negotiation’ (Hermans 2003: 386). While it might be argued that such paratextual features are just the cyber equivalent of the footnote and the translator’s preface, the nature of the hyperlink would enable readers to negotiate quickly and easily between paratextual layers, choosing their level of information while constantly aware of the alternatives and the processes that contributed to the construction of the text in front of them (Bruno 2007). Translation, which by its very nature of relocating narratives into different societal,

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political and cultural narratives, and on account of the ambiguities, particularities and uncertainties that are evoked in the negotiations and processes of that relocation, is well placed for constructing innovative stories. Rather than conforming to stock representations and formulaic stories prevalent in the target culture, translated texts might introduce new, seemingly contradictory and inconsistent information into news reporting. The goals of independent media sites to challenge the dominant, simplistic and reductionist narratives in the mainstream media may well be impeded if a story is repackaged by (well meaning) translators into a form that reflects, rather than counters and disputes, the standard journalistic language and conventions of the target culture. Conclusions Translation is vital to the stated goals of all three websites, which all explicitly aim to reach a readership wider than that limited to Russian speakers. Each website publishes in English as well as Russian, and RIANovosti and Kavkazcenter also publish in several other languages. While RIA-Novosti acknowledges translation as part of the agency’s activities, and Kavkazcenter’s English, Turkish and Arabic homepages all appeal (in red at the top of the page) for volunteer translators, none of these translators are ever acknowledged in any of the translated texts, nor are translated texts indicated as such. Each homepage offers hyperlinks to other available languages, each one leading readers to a new homepage in the chosen language, from where readers can navigate to individual articles and other sections of the website. There is nothing to suggest that these foreign-language pages publish material that differs from the Russian pages. Yet, as the analysis in this chapter shows, not everything is translated, English texts are not always translations of the Russian text, and translations are commonly edited and ‘cut and pasted’. It is no exaggeration to say that very little of each Russian-language primary text is translated into English at all. RIA-Novosti translates into English less than a third of its primary text, Kavkazcenter less than a quarter and Caucasian Knot just three per cent of its Russian-language primary text. RIA-Novosti and Caucasian Knot use a cut and paste technique whereby selections from each site’s Russian posts are translated, amalgamated and published together under a single headline. All three sites also include in their English-language primary texts material lifted or adapted from other media sources that does not correspond to any part of the site’s Russian primary texts, but are additions to the Russianlanguage material. While these other media sources are always acknowledged in these posts, there are no direct links to the ‘originals’ and there

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is no way for readers to know the degree to which the originals have been edited or, in the case of posts lifted from foreign media, at what point(s) in the editorial chain translation has taken place. The effect of these hidden processes on the construction of the Englishlanguage narratives published by each website varies. The distinguishing characteristics of RIA-Novosti’s Russian primary text can also be found in the site’s English narrative: both are dominated by official temporary narrators, both clearly frame the local Beslan narrative with ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative, and both enlist temporary narrators, including those from other media outlets, that endorse these official stories. Kavkazcenter remains virulently opposed to Russian official narratives, yet loses its running critique of them, while in the case of Caucasian Knot the distinguishing characteristics of the site’s Russian primary text are entirely absent from the English version, leaving a narrative that is a weak alternative and easily co-opted into official narratives of the Beslan attack. Where the Russian primary texts relate narratives dominated by, or repeatedly co-opted into, simplistic framing narratives, such as RIANovosti’s ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative, or Kavkazcenter’s narrative of Russian military aggression and genocide against the Chechen people, then it is these larger, reductionist narratives that can also be found in the English narrative texts. Thus, although RIA-Novosti’s English text includes far fewer of the international statements and condemnations that so strongly reiterate ‘the war on terror(ism)’ metanarrative in the site’s Russian-language narrative text, those that are included still use the binary, abstract language of the meta-narrative which is reinforced by the fifteen external retroversions included in the English narrative, and reiterated by the six ‘experts’ and three commentators that act as temporary narrators in RIA-Novosti’s English primary text. President Putin’s televised address, which constantly frames the local narrative of the Beslan attack with ‘the war on terror(ism)’ metanarrative, is published twice, first in an abridged version and later in full. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that lexical choices, editorial changes and the selection of additional material are all made to deliberately reinforce particular aspects of this narrative for foreign audiences. The extra retroversions that narrate numerous terrorist attacks in Moscow, and the reiterations by (expert) Nikonov and (commentators) Romanov and Simonov that Russia has recently experienced more terrorist attacks than any other country, could be perceived negatively by a domestic audience who might panic and conclude that their government is unable to protect them, but serve to reinforce for foreign

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readers the characterisation of Russia as a country ‘on the frontline of the war on terror’ and hence legitimise and justify its ‘counter-terrorist operations’ in Chechnya. This particular narrative also makes it clear that Chechens, with international links to Arabs and al-Qaeda, are the undisputed enemy, and along with the inherent ethnic hostilities of the North Caucasus, are a particularly Russian enemy, which only Russia truly understands. It thus looks for, and expects, foreign support for its policies and is offended by criticism. Kavkazcenter’s framing narrative of Russian military aggression and genocide against the Chechen people is reiterated most forcefully in its five commentaries, the only elements of the site’s Russian primary narrative text to be translated into English, and probably selected to convey Kavkazcenter’s core message to foreign readers. Yet these are translated into awkward, often incorrect, English that both increases the abrasive tone and removes the persuasive rhetoric of the commentaries, while arguably undermining the credibility of the authors and hence the validity of their narratives, effects which collectively reinforce the crudeness of Kavkazcenter’s framing narrative. Allusions to events from Russia’s Soviet and post-Soviet past, particularly those involving the ruthlessness of the secret police, lose their impact on a non-Russian readership for whom the elements of such narratives can be configured only with great difficulty into narratives that resemble those constructed by people with direct experience of the machinations of the Soviet/Russian state. Without these historical resonances, Kavkazcenter’s persistent characterisation of the Russian state as ‘enemy’, a core component of the site’s framing narrative of Beslan, risks becoming caricature. Notes 1 ‘Об агенство’, http://rian.ru/docs/about/index.html [accessed 22 July 2011]. 2 ‘The Russian News & Information Agency RIA Novosti’, http://en.rian.ru/ docs/about/novosti.html [accessed 22 July 2011]. Interestingly, an earlier accessed version of this page (5 November 2008) refers to ‘over 90 highly qualified translators’, but these are now missing from the description. 3 ‘About Kavkazcenter’, www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/about [accessed 22 July 2011]. 4 ‘О Нас’, www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/AboutCaucasianKnot [accessed 22 July 2011]. 5 Of course, this book is a seventh story of the siege and I am the fourth narrator, for as Cerwyn Moore points out (drawing on Ricoeur), ‘interpretation is itself a construction of meaning [and] [t]hus the analyst, who is also a narrator of a kind, has no objective position’ (2010: 3). 6 Nezavisimya Gazeta, Vremia Novostei, Rossiiskaia Gazeta and Kommersant.

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7 This is ‘Gunmen Take 400 People Hostage at Russian School’, www. islamonline.net/English/News/2004-09/01/article01.shtml [accessed 27 March 2008]. The site also published a brief Arabic version of this article, ‫ ﺯﺍﺝﺕﺡﺍ‬400 ‫ﺍﻱﺕﻱﺱﻭﺃﺏ ﺓﺱﺭﺩﻡ ﻱﻑ ﺓﻥﻱﻩﺭ‬.., www.islamonline.net/Arabic/ alhdth/2004/09/01/article14.shtml [accessed 27 March 2008], with correlations to only two sentences in the English version that report the seizure of the school, the taking of more than four hundred people hostage and the threat to blow up the building if it is stormed. Unlike the English, the Arabic version also mentions the hostage-takers’ demand for the 21–22 June prisoners to be released and comments that the authorities usually blame Chechens for such attacks, although in this case Aslan Maskhadov has denied any responsibility or involvement. IslamOnline.net describes itself as an Islamic news, religious and cultural website based in Qatar and Egypt. 8 I/220, I/223, I/235, I/241 and I/249. 9 III/9620, III/9761, III/9702 and III/9720. 10 Francesca Mereu, ‘Coming in From the Cold’, St Petersburg Times, 29 August 2008, www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=26991 [accessed 22 July 2011]. 11 Markov is also paraphrased as suggesting that ‘the unemployment problem in the North Caucasus should be urgently addressed, as it breeds militants’, an indication that local and societal narratives might be recognised as useful in understanding and reducing regional violence. This alternative, however, remains framed by a ‘war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative and is neither weighted nor deemed significant. 12 PACE; the Coordination Centre of North Caucasian Muslims; Chechnya; the ‘Russian Muftiyyate’; the United Nations Security Council; the European Parliament; Jordan; Germany; Turkey; Spain; Britain; Japan; South Ossetia; and Egypt. In the English narrative, an additional sentence sketches a brief ‘narrative identity’ for Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s first deputy prime minister, relating that ‘[h]is father, Chechen President, died in a terrorist act last spring’. This addition lends credibility to Kadyrov, both politically and personally, as a victim of a terrorist attack, and reinforces the narrative of Russia at the frontline of ‘the war on terror(ism)’. 13 These phrases appear to be translations from RIA-Novosti’s Russian reports, which would be translations of the original statements, although, in the typically obscure way in which translation operates in the media, there is no indication of the original languages in which these were expressed or at what point translation occurred. 14 http://rian.ru/authors/romanov/about_author.html. Romanov’s blog can be found at http://promanov.livejournal.com [both accessed 22 July 2011]. 15 http://rian.ru/authors/simonov/about_author.html [accessed 22 July 2011]. 16 A reference to an explosion at a bus stop on Kashirskoe Highway (Шоссе) in Moscow on 23 August 2004 that injured four people. 17 NKVD – народный комиссариат внутренних дел (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) 1917–30, 1934–46; KGB – комитет государственной

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безопастности (Committee of State Security) 1954–91; FSB – Федеральная служба безопастности (Federal Security Service) 1995–present. 18 Published in English and Russian on the IHF’s website, www.ihf-hr.org/documents/doc_summary.php?sec_id=58&d_id=3959 [accessed 6 December 2008]. 19 ‘Две шахидки подорвали себя прямо в коридоре’, Kommersant, 3 September 2004, www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=502659 [accessed 22 July 2011]. 20 Kwame Appiah’s term (1993) drawn from Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’ (1973) (drawn in turn from Gilbert Ryle (1971), see Hermans (2003)).

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Conclusions, reflections and conflict dissolution

This book, motivated by both the events in Beslan and the ideas of narrative theory, asks to what extent a narrative theory combining sociological and narratological approaches lends itself to elaborating a model of analysis for the study of media reporting (and translation) on violent conflict in general and the Beslan hostage disaster in particular. Narrative theory was adopted not only as the conceptual framework with which to approach the material, but also, prompted by its recent application in translation studies (Baker 2006), in order to investigate the theory itself, to test its usefulness and robustness when used as a tool for intellectual inquiry. Baker emphasises the centrality of both translation and narrative to issues of violent conflict and power; media representations of violent conflict involving the interplay of narrative, translation, power and conflict seemed to me a crucial arena that would lend itself particularly well to this kind of exploration. Beslan was a politically violent event connected temporally and spatially to other acts of political violence, and thus provides a nexus, the study of which can contribute to an understanding of the complex network of factors and events, indeed, of narratives, that intersected and continue to intersect there. Although significant enough to trigger changes in the strategies and policies of the Russian government and the Chechen armed resistance, the Beslan hostage disaster, ‘the most terrible event in the post-war history of Russia’ as the state’s Channel 1 newsreader Petr Tolstoi called it,1 remains a marginalised, uncomfortable episode in Russian society. With its absorption into official commemorations marking the national ‘Day of solidarity in the struggle against terrorism’ – observed annually since 3 September 2005 – the particulars of the siege and the specific grievances of its victims are largely forgotten, and Putin and Medvedev have yet to visit the site of School No. 1. The core question – can (and how can) socio-narrative theory be used to analyse media reportage and translation of violent conflict? – assumes several other questions. With regard to an investigation of narrative

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theory itself, it raises the questions of what perspective(s) this revised version of narrative theory can provide on the linguistic mediation of violent conflict and, more specifically, what analytical tools it offers for the analysis of different narratives constructed out of a common set of reported events (such as those) connected with the hostage-taking in Beslan. A detailed discussion and exploration of socio-narrative theory can be found in Chapter 1, in which a number of original contributions of the study were elaborated in answer to these questions. Working from the position that narrative is the unit of analysis provides a framework for the integration of micro and macro analyses; the researcher is able to place the analysis of smaller units, such as elements, actors and linguistic aspects of the text, into a larger whole, using the analysis of the parts to account for the whole, which can then be understood in terms of the functions of its parts. First, I offer a revised typology of narratives, which distinguishes between personal and shared or collective narratives. This distinction, not emphasised in the original typology found in Baker (2006), who draws on Somers and Gibson (1994), helps to draw attention to the differences between ways in which narratives are constructed by individuals and by groups, and ways in which these narratives interact with each other. ‘Shared’ or ‘collective narratives’ is used as an umbrella term that encompasses the remaining types of narrative, the names and definitions of which are discussed in order to clarify certain ambiguities in the literature. Thus, I use the term ‘societal’ for those narratives circulating and operating in the units and institutions of society, freeing the term ‘public’ to refer to any narrative available in the public domain and circulating in the public sphere, that is, beyond the confines of individual units and institutions. ‘Theoretical’ is used to refer to narratives of theory, moving the category beyond the confines of academia and focusing on the act of theorising (generalising and abstracting) involved in elaborating these narratives. The abstraction, as opposed to the concreteness and particularity, of elements that constitute meta-narratives is seen as one of the key characteristics of meta-narratives, allowing them to easily frame or appropriate other narratives, while at the same time rendering the meta-narratives themselves ambiguous. Narrators may share the abstract, ambiguous language of the meta-narrative and appear to be speaking in concord, yet on closer analysis may be found to be elaborating a completely different narrative. To these three types of shared narratives, I add a fourth, namely local narratives, a term used to refer to temporally and spatially confined narratives relating particular events in particular places at particular times. These may be regarded as the ‘raw material’ of all the other subsequent types of narratives, which

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can now be placed along a continuum running from the particular (local narratives) to the general (meta-narratives). While categorising narratives into types highlights the differences between them, these differences are not fixed or stable, and the idea of the continuum is intended to indicate both the interconnectedness between the types of narrative as well as the clear differences between those at either end. A second original contribution of this study is the intentional combination of narratological and sociological approaches. Because the data selected for analysis are sets of finite texts, it seemed appropriate to turn to the textual work of narratologists. Several narratological terms and concepts useful for discussing textually bound narratives, such as fabula, elements, events, actors, story, anachronies, retroversions and characters, could also be used to describe and analyse non-textually bound ontological (‘reality constructing’) narratives. Conversely, bringing sociological assumptions of narrative to the close analysis of narrative text imbues the analysis with a sense of social and political import. The text is no longer a representational narrative, but an element in the configuration of ontological narratives that have direct impact, and sometimes devastating effect, on people and the worlds in which we live. A third original contribution of this study elaborated in the first chapter is the intratextual model devised to analyse the large amount of material that makes up the data and which was used to structure the analytical chapters. This model proved to be a very useful means of comparing and contrasting the primary narrative texts, and quickly revealed several areas of interest for investigation, such as the surprisingly small proportion of RIA-Novosti’s narrative texts devoted to the ‘core narrative’, and the relatively large amount of non-narrative comment. This model, or adaptations of it, could readily be applied to other comparable sets of data, such as reportage (both ‘original’ and ‘translated’) of the Nord-Ost hostage-taking or the Israeli military campaign codenamed Operation Cast Lead launched against Gaza in December 2008. Of the large amounts of newspaper column space and radio airtime devoted to the fighting during the campaign, for example, how much related events occurring within Gaza, and how much related events occurring beyond Gaza (and what was the spatial location of those events), what external retroversions were included, how much of the material was commentary and analysis (non-narrative material) and what societal, theoretical or meta-narratives were used to frame the events unfolding in Gaza? Finally, the theoretical discussion of this book makes an original contribution by emphasising the importance of narrators and temporary narrators. While these concepts are central to narratology, where they are discussed in terms of linguistic indications of focalisation (or

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perspective), they are all but absent in the literature on socio-narrative theory. This study introduces into the theory the idea that narrators are significant factors. Asking questions about who may and who may not narrate and examining ways in which narrators control and re-narrate their temporary narrators raises pertinent questions about power, dominance, resistance and subversion. With regard to an investigation of media reporting on violent conflict in general and the Beslan hostage disaster in particular, the core question of this book asked simply what narratives the three Russian (language) news agencies construct from the reported events in Beslan, and how these narratives are constructed. A qualitative and quantitive analysis of each primary narrative text (Stories 1, 2 and 3) found that each had a similar composition, made up of brief bulletins, commentaries and various types of non-narrative material. RIA-Novosti published the longest text, which is unsurprising given the frequency with which reports were posted and the resources the agency has at its disposal. In comparison, Kavkazcenter published only about a quarter of the length of RIA-Novosti’s primary narrative text, and Caucasian Knot about a third. RIA-Novosti establishes itself as an official, credible and knowledgeable narrator with direct access to, and entrusted with, a range of official and highly placed sources of information. While Kavkazcenter makes no effort to establish its own credibility and authority, the narrator’s voice is clearly manifested in the text through several critical editorial comments and wry headlines. In contrast, Caucasian Knot draws little attention to itself and narrates without comment or critique. Spokespersons from various levels of government overwhelmingly make up the majority of RIA-Novosti’s temporary narrators, and through their sheer numbers, the frequent repetition of their statements and the respect which RIA-Novosti accords them, they are instrumental in the construction of the site’s narrative of Beslan. What emerges from this host of official sources, including the four ‘experts’ who narrate for the agency, is a simplified, uniform narrative of events: the quickly mobilised authorities work tirelessly to enter into negotiations with the terrorists, who refuse to participate and fail to communicate any clear demands. When medical personnel approach the school building to evacuate several dead bodies, the terrorists detonate explosives, causing the school roof to collapse and the hostages to flee. The terrorists shoot hostages as they run away, while Russian special forces return fire to cover the hostages as they escape. Although fighting continues sporadically into the night, the operation to release the hostages is successful, with all of the terrorists destroyed and hostages quickly transported to

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hospitals locally and further afield where they are cared for and treated by teams of medical personnel who lack for nothing. Those hostages who did not survive were, tragically, either killed by the terrorists or died in the fire ignited by the terrorists’ detonation of the explosives. While RIA-Novosti correspondents do not always reiterate this official narrative, their narratives, like those of (the very few) selected eyewitnesses and surviving hostages, are easily co-opted into it; they are temporally located late in the primary narrative text where they can make little impact on established, official narratives, and when their narratives include potentially awkward elements, these are ignored and alternatives to the official version are not considered. In stark contrast, far fewer official sources act as temporary narrators for Kavkazcenter, and Russian sources are commonly depersonalised, homogenised and curtly disparaged. The site includes official temporary narrators excluded from the RIA-Novosti narrative text, especially representatives of the Chechen-Ichkerian government, who, along with several ‘experts’ and commentators, are highly critical of Russian official responses to the hostage-taking. Unlike RIA-Novosti, Kavkazcenter relies heavily on information from other media sources, both Russian and foreign. Yet, sceptical of Russian media and highly selective in its appropriation of material from foreign sources, Kavkazcenter’s own narrative position remains unchallenged by their inclusion. In this narrative of events, an unidentified, armed group seize the school, making it clear that, if their demands, including the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, are met, the hostages will all be released. Russian responses to the attack are constantly criticised, viewed as both incompetent and deeply suspect. When the siege comes to an end, events are so chaotic that it is difficult to say what happened, and Russian official efforts to both clearly account for the chaos and prevent civilians from contributing their accounts continue to be scorned by Kavkazcenter. Yet like RIA-Novosti, very few eyewitnesses act as temporary narrators and most of these are both anonymous and indirectly reported. The elements they add to the narrative commonly contradict official versions and so support Kavkazcenter’s highly critical position. Of the three sites, Caucasian Knot enlists the widest selection of officials from across the political spectrum and also includes temporary narrators not found in either of the other two narrative texts, suggesting that as a local agency it is indeed able to offer alternative sources of information. It is also distinguished by its inclusion of the greatest number of eyewitness temporary narrators, several of whom are named and quoted directly, and, in contrast to those selected by RIA-Novosti and Kavkazcenter, are temporally located much earlier in the narrative

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text. By naming more hostages and local residents than any of the other narrators, Caucasian Knot keeps the focus of its narrative on ordinary people in a particular situation rather than on any international ‘war on terror(ism)’ or genocide against an entire nation. Together with elements of the local narrative of Beslan that are missing from the other sites, these many voices construct a narrative that is more complex and contradictory, and arguably more complete than these other streamlined stories. A significant proportion of RIA-Novosti’s primary narrative text includes condemnations of the attack made from numerous international leaders, government representatives, international organisations and Russian officials. It is here that the local narrative of Beslan is most consistently framed by the meta-narrative of ‘the war on terror(ism)’, elaborated in binarisms, abstract language and stereotypical characterisations. Thus, the hostage-takers in Beslan are dehumanised and conflated with ‘international terrorism’, an all-powerful, ever-present danger against which the Russian government (capable, resourceful, experienced, benevolent, and working effectively and efficiently to protect its innocent citizens from this barbaric evil) and the international community (united against a common enemy) are engaged in a protracted, yet ultimately victorious war. As a political means of legitimising its power, policies and practices, the meta-narrative is then particularised by the Russian government, with echoes of Soviet societal narratives such as calls for vigilance against outside enemies and increased power for state security forces. References to the great victories against Fascist Germany and other historical foreign invaders frame the regrettable demise of the Soviet Union (torn apart by outside foes) as only a temporary setback in Russia’s greatness. Again in contrast, these international statements are missing from Kavkazcenter’s primary narrative text whose non-narrative material contains quite a different collection of embedded texts, including a plea addressed to President Putin from survivors of the 2002 Moscow theatre siege, who, fearing for the lives of the children inside, beg him not to storm the school in Beslan. This link to a narrative of Dubrovka that relates a disastrous storming of the theatre by Russian special forces resulting in the deaths of hundreds of hostages is made repeatedly in the Kavkazcenter primary narrative text, and the storming of the school in Beslan is seen as an inevitable outcome of the siege. Russian official attempts to disconnect these two narratives fail to convince Kavkazcenter, and the site’s accusations of evil duplicity against the Russian government are finally confirmed when the siege comes to a bloody end.

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RIA-Novosti’s framing narrative of ‘the war on terror(ism)’ is also missing. Instead, Kavkazcenter elaborates a framing narrative of Russian military aggression and genocide against (its own) and the Chechen people. This narrative attempts to explain the Beslan hostagetaking as a consequence of Russian brutality in Chechnya and elsewhere, and focuses solely on the evil, duplicitous, calculated and callous aggression of the Russian (and Soviet) regime, in outraged and desperate attempts to draw attention to the plight of Chechen children which has constantly failed to attract the attention of Western governments and the United Nations in the way that the children of Beslan have so dramatically. Thus, far from competent and benevolent, the Russian government is, at best, incompetent and, at worst, actively involved not only in the deaths of the hostages in Beslan, but in the deaths of its own civilians in a range of other incidents, from the Dubrovka storming, the 1999 apartment building explosions and the bungled operation at Budennovsk to the ruthlessness of the secret police in war-time and during the Stalinist terror. While Western European commentaries stop short of these full-blown accusations, their criticisms of the Putin regime and its policies and practices in Chechnya are included in the Kavkazcenter narrative text as a means of shoring up the accuracy and credibility of its own narrative position, which is expressed most heatedly in the commentaries written by Kavkazcenter authors. Yet, evidence that Kavkazcenter is uncomfortable with the violence of the hostage-takers and seeks to discredit any assumptions that they are Chechens betrays the paradox at the heart of this narrative with which Kavkazcenter fails to engage: that it can champion the cause but not the actions of the hostage-takers. Instead, like RIA-Novosti, Kavkazcenter reverts to a reductionist narrative of good and evil that glosses over and neglects the difficult and complex factors that might contribute to an understanding and ultimately a way out of situations (and cycles) of political violence. These are, instead, recognised by Caucasian Knot, whose framing narrative, also elaborated most clearly in the embedded non-narrative texts of the primary narrative and made up largely of statements from NGOs and Chechen-Ichkerian officials, narrates Beslan as a hostagecrisis urgently requiring an apolitical, non-violent response if people’s lives are to be preserved. Rather than a reductionist, dichotomous narrative that characterises actors in broad generalisations of inherently good or evil, the site deplores any violence against civilians. While including Maskhadov’s narrative of legitimate violent resistance bound by the rule of law, it also includes the Chechen-Ichkerian readiness to negotiate with Russia and, by considering grievances and offences on all sides,

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eloquently argues for political rather than violent responses to violent conflict. Yet Caucasian Knot’s narrative position is also at risk of being co-opted into more reductionist narratives, particularly when quoting without critique from mainstream sources such as RIA-Novosti. Circumspection with regard to the identity of the hostage-takers is easily co-opted into official characterisations of them as Chechen and international terrorists; increasing editorial interferences with the personal narratives of eyewitnesses remove some of the more awkward and emotional elements that cast doubt on official narratives, and seem to suggest a lack of awareness of the potential for eyewitnesses to contribute valuably to a narrative of a complicated situation that is only partly known and little understood. The third question inherent in the core question of this book turns to issues of translation, namely what happens to these Russian-language narratives when they are reconfigured in English? If it is the case that not everything is translated, how do the two texts, Russian and English, differ? What are the ethical implications of these differences for both readers and narrators (translators or editors)? While translation is essential to the stated aims of all three websites to reach a wide readership, very little (between about three and thirty per cent) of each Russian primary narrative text is translated into English. All three sites also include material in their English primary narrative texts (Stories 4, 5 and 6) that does not correspond to any part of their Russian primary texts, but are in addition to, and different from, the Russian-language material. Neither the translations nor the additional material are indicated as such and there is no way for Anglophone readers to establish whether, or in what ways, the English primary text differs from the Russian. Nevertheless, the distinguishing characteristics of RIA-Novosti’s Russian primary text, including its framing narrative, can also be found in its English text. Kavkazcenter’s framing narrative is also clearly elaborated in the English text, although the narrative loses some of the characteristics of its narrator and the framing narrative is rendered more crudely than in Russian. The distinguishing characteristics of Caucasian Knot’s Russian narrative text, which marked it as a genuine alternative to the other two sites and their dualistic framing narratives, are effaced completely in English, leaving a framing narrative that is greatly weakened and very easily co-opted into official narratives and framing narratives of the attack. The effect of translation on each Russian primary narrative is to emphasise and reinforce simplistic, reductionist framing narratives and to weaken or even eliminate complex and multivalent narratives.

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Sites such as these, that aim to reconfigure and challenge the dominant narratives of mainstream media and powerful narrators (such as RIANovosti and the Russian government), might consider how their limited resources are best spent translating their texts for foreign audiences. Recognising and selecting (first) for translation the elements of their narratives that present genuine alternatives, such as Maskhadov’s argument for lawful armed resistance or Caucasian Forum’s articulate advocacy for political, rather than violent, solutions, could be one means of doing this. Other efforts, such as forging and maintaining links with student and volunteer translators, international NGOs, investigative journalists and Western media outlets, might also be means of assisting the Russian narrative text reach the targeted wider audience. Interestingly, in direct response to the ongoing ‘deterioration’ of the ‘security situation in the North Caucasus’ five years after Beslan, Caucasian Knot teamed up with the BBC Russian Service and launched a shared forum for bloggers from Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and North Ossetia. ‘The North Caucasus Through the Eyes of Bloggers’2 is intended to ‘add a human dimension to the events’ of the region, which, as Zoya Trunova, editor of bbcrussian. com says in the press release for the launch of the project, ‘increasingly resembles reports from battlegrounds. How do people live their lives in this unstable region? [This project] offers our audiences a rare opportunity to engage with the region directly, first-hand.’3 Caucasian Knot posts ‘selective translations’ from these posts but the selection is small and it is doubtful whether these writers reach much of an international audience. The case study nature of this book means that it is limited by pragmatic yet essentially arbitrary boundaries, such as the inclusion of material published only within a specific time frame. Its conclusions could be tested by extending it to include other materials, not only reportage published by the three selected sites in the weeks following the siege, but other texts generated since the event, such as the transcripts from the Kulaev court case and that of three policemen from the Beslan Pravoberezhnyi Department of Internal Affairs,4 various investigative and official reports,5 fictional texts and films, and public and personal commemorations of the victims and survivors of the siege (see Harding 2011). The study is also limited to comparisons between Russian and English primary narrative texts but, again, other patterns may emerge if it were extended to include comparisons between other languages. The model of investigation could also be readily applied to the reportage and translation of other violent events in either contemporary or historical arenas of violent conflict. Chechnya and the North Caucasus remain one such arena. Official narratives of stability, reconstruction, normalisation

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and peace in Chechnya since the appointment of Ramzan Kadyrov as president of the republic in March 2007 are constructed in stark contrast to boeviki narratives of persistent and successful operations against the occupiers and their puppet government officials, which contrast again with NGO narratives of human rights abuses sustained against civilians through continued disappearances, kidnappings, torture, extrajudicial killings, terrorist attacks and political repression. Several aspects of socio-narrative theory suggest other directions of investigation that could further develop it and its usefulness as a conceptual and analytical tool. Much of the language and assumptions of narrative theory overlap, or resonate, with those used in complexity theory, suggesting that it might be fruitful to combine elements of the two. Complexity theory, arising out of mathematical theories of chaos, has increasingly become applied to non-mathematical areas of research, particularly in the social sciences.6 David Byrne’s argument for applying complexity theory to sociology ‘is founded around this idea of resonance, of hearing echoes of the chaos/complexity account in accounts of social reality which were written without explicit reference to it’ (1998:  10). Apart from the use of terms common to both complexity and narrative, such as frames and framing, elements, actors, agency, meta-narrative, causation, networks, connections and relationships, some of the resonances that can be heard between a chaos/complexity perspective and narrative theory are: •

•

•

•

•

the idea that ‘the observer and the observed cannot be detached from one another, rendering observation and knowing an ontological event’ (Chesters and Welsh 2006: 8); a holistic approach that looks at systems and sets of systems with ‘the view that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ (Byrne 1998: 3); the fractal/self-similarity of systems, nested systems (that interact with each other) and open systems that interact with their environment; non-linear relations, changes and rich interactions, particularly the idea that very small changes (either external or internal to the system) can effect great changes of ‘enormous amplitude’ (Chesters and Welsh 2006: 9); and the importance of time and space and the idea that ‘the crucial dimension along which changes occur is time’ (Byrne 1998: 14), or that ‘complex systems have histories’ (Cilliers 1998: 122).

This by no means exhaustive list suggests that engaging with complexity theory might expand and hone the vocabulary of narrative theory

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in order to facilitate discussion on how narratives connect and interact with each other and with the social and political worlds in which they are elaborated.7 It might help explain how over time some narratives come to enjoy greater currency and dominance over others. It might provide insight into what changes to which elements of a narrative might effect the greatest change to an overall narrative, offering insight into ways to change some of the most firmly entrenched and often destructive narratives of our societies, insight that has profound implications for activists such as Caucasian Knot and marginalised groups such as Kavkazcenter that feel they must resort to violence to enact change. Byrne argues that ‘the profoundly optimistic implication of the possibility of the understanding of the domain of complexity [is that] . . . [w]e can come to see what makes the difference. And if we can see what makes the difference, then we can make the difference’ (1998: 41–2).8 Another theoretical approach with resonances in narrative theory is Bourdieu’s sociology, already attracting the attention of some Translation and Interpreting Studies scholars.9 Hanna’s (2006) development of Bourdieu’s sociology as a methodology for translation studies discusses several terms and concepts from Bourdieu’s work that are highly resonant with concepts and assumptions found in socio-narrative theory, suggesting that an engagement with Bourdieu from a narrative perspective, and vice versa, could provide rich avenues of investigation with the aim of strengthening both theories. Bourdieu’s key concept of field, for example, understood to be a complex, dynamic network of relations that include both institutions and human agents, resonates with the narrative feature of relationality. The dynamics and complexities of cultural production and conflicts within a field might be explained in terms of struggles between competing narratives and narrators. The behaviour of social groups in a fi eld – the setting of boundaries, naming and consecration – might be regarded as coinciding with the construction of shared or collective narratives, just as the dialectical relation between habitus and field might be regarded as comparable with the interaction between personal and shared or collective narratives. Bourdieu’s definition of orthodoxy as the ‘system of euphemisms, of acceptable ways of thinking and speaking the natural and social world, which rejects heretical remarks as blasphemies’ (1977: 169) suggests another way of describing Russian official narratives of the attack in Beslan and the responses of the Russian government to Bernard Bot’s questioning of the official ‘orthodoxy’. Bourdieu’s concepts of position and position-takings might be understood as examples of narrative location and narrative position, and the structural logic of cultural and social capital might well be explained in terms of narrative construction.

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Interestingly, there also appears to be some cross-over between Bourdieusian concepts and complexity theory, suggesting that, in fact, a three-way approach, perhaps with narrative theory as an intersection of the two, might be feasible and the most fruitful. The cumulative nature of habitus, for example, is comparable to the feedback system in complexity theory. The definition of habitus as an ‘open system of dispositions’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133) is resonant with the dynamic open systems of complexity theory. Buzelin (2005) has already taken a step towards a complementary approach of this sort with her discussion of how ‘Latour’s network theory could complement Bourdieusian analyses in translation studies’. While this study traced the construction and elaboration of larger societal narratives used by different political groups to frame the local narrative of the Beslan attack, further research could focus on the way these are used by other political elites to frame other events of violent conflict. In August 2008, for example, both Medvedev and Putin justified military action in South Ossetia and Georgia by claiming Russia was responding to ‘elements of a kind of genocide against the Ossetian people’.10 Nor is Russia’s exploitation of ‘the war on terror(ism)’ meta-narrative as a frame for a series of particular events, and ultimately as a means of justifying and legitimising its own narrative position and practices, an isolated example. When a series of ten coordinated terrorist attacks killed and injured hundreds of people in Mumbai in November 2008, before the carnage had ended, before the dead had been counted, before the injured had been rushed to hospitals, the 9/11 framework was in full swing on most Indian TV channels. Montage after montage of smokeencased buildings dubbed ‘Ground Zero’ were shown while wartime captions declared, ‘India at War’, ‘Another 9–11’.11

Consistent with the framing of the attacks in this way were the public calls for retaliatory violence, ‘for “tough action” [and] the need to teach the evil perpetrators “a lesson they will never forget”’, countered by other ‘voices of courage’ who called instead for public investigations into the attacks as well as a critical examination of previous terrorist attacks on Indian soil and the reasons behind them.12 Another example is Israel’s framing of the breaking of the ceasefire on 4 November 2008 and its extensive military action in December and January 2009. In a joint press conference with European Union representatives held in Jerusalem on 5 January 2009, Israeli Foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, made four explicit references to the meta-narrative of ‘the war on terror’ and twenty-six references to ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’

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and ‘terrorist’, constructing a dichotomy of good (Israel and the international community, who ‘are all part of the same coalition against terror’) and evil (‘Hamas, which is a designated terrorist organisation’, source of ‘terror and violence’ and ‘who cannot accept the idea of living in peace in this region’) to justify Israeli aims ‘to change the equation’ by means of ‘a very difficult military operation in the Gaza Strip’.13 Yet, also in January 2009, British Foreign secretary David Miliband made a speech (in Mumbai), in which he called the ‘the notion of a “war on terror”’ ‘misleading and mistaken’ because the more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common.14

In the wake of such a public change of rhetoric, it will be interesting to see whether, or perhaps in what guises, ‘the war on terror(ism)’ metanarrative survives. Finally, it is important to reflect on how a sustained textual analysis of the construction of narratives can inform our understanding of the ways in which violent political conflict is initiated, sustained and resolved/ dissolved. The textual analysis undertaken in this book supports the conclusion that violent political conflict can be understood in direct, if complex, relation to the simplistic, reductionist narratives repeatedly elaborated, and keenly subscribed to, by players in the arena. These narratives, powerful and attractive because of the way in which they depoliticise and negate the other while deeply politicising and exonerating the collective self, ossify players into intractable narrative positions – my violence is always justified while yours is never justified – thereby initiating and sustaining violent conflict, and serving to justify and legitimise the narrative practices of the opposing parties. Yet narrative need not be simplistic and reductionist. The ways in which narratives are constructed can also ‘introduce new information in terms of unfamiliar dilemmas, puzzles, and contradictions’ (Bennett and Edelman 1985: 64), creating stories ‘that open up the mind to creative possibilities developed in ways that provoke intellectual struggle, the resolution of contradictions, and the creation of a more workable human order’ (Bennett and Edelman 1985: 162). The analysis offered in this book suggests that it is in the detail of personal and local narratives that such narratives can be constructed: detail that particularises the general and the stereotypical; that broadens the range of elements included in the narrative, including awkward elements

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that present discrepancies and inconsistencies, that contradict and challenge the whole; detail that constructs a multi-perspective, multi-vocal, multivalent narrative, that is more useful and appropriate for making sense of the multi-perspective, multi-vocal, multivalent worlds in which we live together. Thus, rather than conflict resolution, which implies some kind of compromising reconfiguration of ossified, simplistic narratives into a new narrative that is acceptable to both, I would like to suggest that the conflict might be dissolved through a dissolution of the narratives that sustain it. To dissolve means to separate into parts or elements, to undo that which binds, to destroy the authority or force of something, to annul, to loosen or release. Perhaps powerful, petrified narratives can be loosened, undone, annulled by the constant interference of the unruly details of personal and local narratives. It is not easily done, for the narrators of powerful narratives are usually powerful themselves and, as this study shows, regularly restrict and re-narrate other narrators. Yet, at the very least, this conclusion suggests that for those who desire the dissolution of violent conflict, resistance to powerful reductionist narratives comes not from formulating another simplistic narrative to pitch against your opponent, but through the construction of complex, detailed narratives firmly grounded in the particular detail of personal and local narratives that might cumulatively unbind what was thought to be immutable. Notes 1 See ‘Два года назад случилась трагедия в Беслане’, 3 September 2006, www.1tv.ru/news/social/60227 [accessed 22 July 2011]. 2 www.bbc.co.uk/russian/indepth/north_caucasus_blogs.shtml [accessed 22 July 2011]. 3 ‘BBC Russian Website Special Brings Together Bloggers from Across North Caucasus’, 17 August 2009, www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/ stories/2009/08_august/17/bloggers.shtml [accessed 22 July 2011]. 4 Available from the ‘Truth of Beslan’ website, www.pravdabeslana.ru [accessed 22 July 2011]. 5 Such as those overseen by Iurii Savelev and Aleksandr Torshin, also available at www.pravdabeslana.ru. 6 See, for example, from the burgeoning literature Eve et al. (1997), Jervis (1997), Byrne (1998), Cilliers (1998), Urry (2003), Bertuglia and Vaio (2005), Chesters and Welsh (2006) and Delorme (2010). 7 See Cilliers (1998: 112–36) for a discussion of narrative, with reference to Lyotard (1984), as part of an argument for combining complexity and post-structuralism.

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8 Hence the application of complexity (and network) theory to activism and the globalisation movement (Chesters (2004), Chesters and Welsh (2005, 2006), Eriksson (2005), Maeckelbergh (2009). See also Boéri (2008, 2009) for an application of narrative theory to global activism. 9 See Gouanvic (1997, 2002, 2005), Simeoni (1998), Casanova (1999/2004, 2002/2010, 2005), Inghilleri (2003, 2005a, 2005b), Buzelin (2005), Claramonte (2005), Thoutenhoofd (2005), Hanna (2005, 2006) and Wolf and Fukari (2007). 10 ‘Beginning of Working Meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’, http:// archive.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2008/08/10/0343_type82913_205084. shtml and ‘Meeting with Chairman of the Russian Federation Prosecutor General’s Office Committee of Inquiry Alexander Bastrykin’, http://archive. kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2008/08/10/2007_type82912type82913_205092. shtml [both accessed 22 July 2011]. See also Levy (2009). 11 Ahmed Rahnuma, ‘Mumbai 2008, India’s 9/11?’, New Age, 8 December 2008, www.newagebd.com/2008/dec/08/edit.html [accessed 30 January 2009]. 12 Ibid. 13 Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Spe eches+by+Israeli+leaders/2009/Press_conference_FM_Livni_EU_reps_5Jan-2009.htm [accessed 22 January 2011]. 14 David Miliband, ‘“War on Terror” Was Wrong’, The Guardian, 15 January 2009, p. 29.

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Index

actor(s) 21, 26, 34, 38, 42, 45, 49–50, 88, 132, 154, 171, 206, 217, 218, 225 agency human 2, 17, 21, 24, 54, 57n9, 138, 181n9, 204, 225 news 15, 52, 55, 62, 107, 148 airplanes explosions (August 2004) see explosions, airplane (August 2004) Akhmadov, Ilias 41, 148, 161, 162–3, 189, 197 Alpha Special Forces 76, 116–17 Al-Qaeda 58n30, 125, 134, 163, 172, 190, 191, 195, 196, 197, 213 anachrony (anachronies) 47–8, 51, 59n40, 152, 218 see also retroversion Andreev, Valerii 50, 63, 91, 92–3, 103n12, 169, 171 Arab 64, 65, 83, 91–2, 127, 133–4, 172, 195, 213 Arabic 61, 89, 104n20, 106, 113, 184, 211, 214n7 Aslakhanov, Aslambek 64, 91, 109, 176, 195 Aushev, Ruslan 52, 95, 108, 110, 115, 134, 137, 150, 155, 161, 177, 207 Babitskii, Andrei 6, 49, 108, 130–1, 136, 170 Basaev, Shamil 6–7, 82, 83, 91, 92, 144n24, 171, 172, 190, 195, 197, 204, 207 boevik (boeviki) 2, 83, 88–9, 90, 102, 132, 171, 172, 206, 207 Bourdieu, Pierre 226–7

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myth of globalisation 37, 39 Budennovsk (hostage-taking 1995) 82, 91, 118, 128, 135, 166, 167, 199, 203, 204, 222 Bush, George W. 9, 39, 71, 81, 125 administration of 37, 38, 40, 42, 78, 80 chaos theory see complexity theory character(s) 22, 27, 49–50, 88, 90, 130, 132, 154, 170, 171, 206, 218 Chechen War(s) 126, 134–5 First (1994–1996) 3, 83, 88, 89, 119, 121, 124, 149 Second (1999– ) 35, 46, 123, 144n24, 162 complexity theory 10, 225–6, 227, 229n7, 230n8 configuration 20, 24, 43, 54, 59n43, 118, 218, 229 conflict 13, 27, 32, 53, 160, 162, 180, 183n25, 206, 216–17, 219, 223, 224, 227, 228, 229 ethnic 5, 78, 89, 123, 125, 134, 165, 172, 191–2 Dubrovka see Moscow theatre siege (2002) Dzasokhov, Aleksandr 78, 83, 88, 103, 108, 110, 119, 161, 164, 168, 176 Dzutsev, Valerii 53, 151–2, 178–9, 181n7, 181n9 element 20–1, 22, 23, 45–6, 47, 48, 54, 81, 156, 217, 218, 225, 226, 229 ‘awkward’ 80–1, 156, 165, 169, 220, 223, 228–9

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Index

event 20, 21, 22, 39, 42, 43–4, 45, 47–8, 54, 56n7, 59n40, 59n43, 129, 152, 185, 200, 218 Evloev, Magomed ‘Magas’ 5, 91, 92, 127, 133, 171, 172 explosions airplane (August 2004) 70, 111, 127, 128, 165, 172, 190, 191, 194, 196, 203, 205 apartment buildings (1999) 4, 127, 129, 145n38, 204, 222 Moscow metro 7, 70, 75, 82, 111, 120, 127, 128–9, 165, 172, 190, 194, 196, 203, 204–5 eyewitness 27–9, 30, 53, 66 passim, 94 passim, 101, 114–15, 137 passim, 150 passim, 172 passim, 189, 190, 193, 207 passim, 220, 223 fabula 43–4, 45, 47, 48, 49, 55, 58n35, 185, 186, 218 focalisation 63, 94, 101, 218–19 framing 27, 56n9, 72, 82–3, 196, 225, 227 FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) 4, 28, 50, 83, 91, 103n12, 104n15, 106, 108, 110, 111, 127, 129, 130, 131, 136, 145n38, 156, 164, 170, 201–2, 215n18 see also Andreev, Valerii genocide 106, 118, 119, 121–2, 124, 126, 130, 135, 140, 141, 142n12, 143n19, 157, 158, 159–60, 198, 206, 209, 212, 213, 221, 222, 227 historicity 36, 200 hostage-takers demands of 49, 52, 71, 78, 97, 100, 108, 117, 118, 119, 121, 127, 137, 161, 162, 176, 187, 208, 214n7, 220 escape of 52, 91, 134, 169, 180 identity of 71, 72–3, 91–2, 102, 122, 127, 132–4, 136, 141, 167, 171–2, 175, 182n11, 187, 191, 203, 206–7

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negotiations with 64, 100, 108, 110, 112, 122, 125–6, 137, 150, 158, 161, 165, 166, 170, 176, 185 Human Rights Watch 157, 172, 183n25 hyperlink 185, 210, 211 Ingushetia 5, 16, 150, 168–9, 172, 191–2, 224 attack on (21–22 June 2004) 4, 91, 133, 134, 172, 203, 207 International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) 187, 202–3, 207 Kadyrov, Ramzan 70, 214n12, 225 Kesaev, Stanislav 109, 148 KGB 123, 127, 129, 136, 190, 201–2, 205, 215n18 Khanbiev, Umar 120–1, 124, 148, 159, 189 Kizliar/Pervomaiskoe (hostage-crisis 1996) 82, 166, 167, 203, 204 Kulaev, Nur-Pashi 10, 74, 224 Liuzakov, Pavel 113–14 Luzhkov, Iurii 77, 109 Maskhadov, Aslan 6, 92, 108, 110, 122, 143n18, 148, 149, 158–9, 160–2, 163, 171, 189, 190, 195, 207, 214n7, 222, 224 Medvedev, Dmitrii 8–9, 16, 216, 227 Memorial 15, 146–7, 154, 157, 158, 159 Moscow City Day 8, 77, 84, 130, 168, 204 Moscow metro explosions see explosions, Moscow metro Moscow theatre siege (2002) 4, 34, 49–50, 82, 103n7, 108, 109, 115–16, 117, 118, 123, 128, 141, 154, 157, 166, 172, 177, 182n21, 200, 221 narrative collective 25, 26, 29, 30, 217, 226 conceptual 20, 25, 35–6 core 51–2, 61, 218

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Index definition(s) of 20–1, 22, 43, 59n43 disciplinary 35 local 25, 26–7, 29–30, 31, 32, 33–4, 36, 40, 217–18, 228–9 meta– 20, 25, 26–7, 29, 36–42, 54, 57n22, 73, 212, 217–18, 221, 225, 227–8 ontological 25, 54, 56n7 personal 20, 24, 25–6, 27–30, 31, 33–4, 36, 40, 54, 55n6, 56n7, 179, 181n9, 189, 217, 223, 226, 228–9 professional 30 public 20, 25, 30, 31, 34–5, 39, 54, 57n22, 129, 217 shared see narrative, collective societal 25, 29, 30–5, 36, 37, 39, 40, 54, 57n22, 210–11, 214n11, 217 theoretical 25, 29, 35–6, 38, 54, 56n7, 57n22, 217 typology of 20, 25–7, 54, 56n6, 217 narrativity 12–13, 14, 20, 21–2, 24, 54, 56n7 narratology 12, 20–1, 43–4, 218–19 narrator 17, 20, 44–5, 48–9, 51–2, 52–4, 55, 61, 77–8, 100, 154, 179, 213n5, 217, 218–19, 223, 226, 229 temporary 20, 53, 59n44, 152 Nord Ost see Moscow theatre siege 2002 North Ossetia-Alania 1–2, 4–5, 7, 9 perspective see focalisation Pervomaiskoe see Kizliar/Pervomaiskoe (hostage-crisis 1996) place 24, 29, 49, 50, 128, 131–2, 178, 200, 202, 217 Politkovskaya, Anna 10, 49, 108, 130, 131, 136, 170 Putin, Vladimir 5, 7, 8, 9, 75, 76, 77, 83, 84, 87, 108, 111, 112–13, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124–6, 130, 136, 141, 144n24, 158, 159, 162, 163, 168, 177, 194, 195, 198, 216, 222, 227 address to the nation (4 September 2004) 40–1, 48, 76, 78–80, 102, 104n14, 123, 125, 133, 164, 192, 195, 204, 212

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247 visit to Beslan (4 September 2004) 9, 49, 68, 78, 88, 104n17, 163–4, 195

Raduev, Salman 82, 204 reality, construction of 13, 20 passim, 28, 47, 56n9, 218 relationality 20, 22, 24, 226 repetition 47, 48, 61–2, 101, 147–8, 219 retroversion 48–9, 51, 59n40, 82–3, 94, 128, 152, 166, 185, 186, 193, 203–4, 212, 218 Rizhskaia metro station see explosions, Moscow metro Roshal, Leonid 49–50, 63, 84, 86, 95, 117, 137, 170 Russian-Chechen Friendship Society 157, 159, 161, 182n21 shakhidka 89, 138, 165, 174, 176, 179, 206 see also suicide-bomber Soviet Union 41, 60, 74, 79, 89, 103n9, 103n13, 123, 146, 183n25, 192, 195, 201, 221 space 13, 22, 27, 32, 37, 46, 49, 131, 225 Stalin, Joseph 77, 79, 125, 201 Stalinist period 76–7, 129, 142n12, 200–1, 222 Stomakhin, Boris 113–14, 202 story 22, 24, 37, 43–5, 47–8, 49, 55, 58n35, 213n5, 218 suicide-bomber 58n30, 72, 111, 127, 128, 129, 164, 165, 171, 191, 197, 204, 205 see also shakhidka Taziev Ali (Musaevich) 5, 171 terrorism 38, 40, 70 passim, 80, 83, 90, 132, 159–60, 166–7, 194 passim, 203, 216, 221, 227–8 terrorist 74–5, 82, 89 passim, 102, 136, 171–2, 206–7, 228 see also hostage-takers text 43 passim, 58n34, 58n35, 218 non-narrative 50 primary narrative 16, 45, 48, 50, 51, 55

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Index

Torshin, Aleksandr 75 Torshin parliamentary report 33, 34–5, 169, 182n23, 229n5 translation 2, 13–14, 17, 23, 46, 88–9, 104n20, 111, 113, 114, 128, 129, 135, 141, 161, 165, 172, 184 passim, 214n13, 216, 223–4, 226–7 translator(s) 17, 28, 53, 124, 181n9, 182n15, 210, 211, 223 Truth of Beslan (Правда Беслана) 33, 34, 229n4

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United Nations Security Council 70, 72, 84, 130, 157, 159–60, 161–2, 163, 168, 214n12 voice 63, 94, 100, 101, 137, 140, 152, 154, 188–9, 206, 209, 219, 221 Voice of Beslan (Голос Беслана) 8, 33, 53 Yana Dlugy 130–1, 136, 170 Zakaev, Akhmed 41, 90–1, 110, 121, 122, 124, 133, 134, 148, 161–2, 171, 189

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