Disturbing new turn for hostage-takings

By Jim Heintz
The Associated Press

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MOSCOW — Hostage-takings and kidnappings have been a feared part of life in Chechnya and other parts of Russia's disorderly North Caucasus region for centuries.

But over the past decade, the actions have grown in size and severity and psychological shock — with the seizure of a school full of children crossing a disturbing new threshold.

Although the identity of the heavily armed and explosives-laden raiders who took hundreds of hostages Wednesday in North Ossetia hasn't been established, suspicion fell on rebels from neighboring Chechnya or other insurgents taking a cue from that republic's chaos and violence.

Leo Tolstoy, who wrote "War and Peace," vividly described Chechens' penchant for hostage-taking in his story "A Caucasus Hostage," based on his army service in Chechnya.

The story is about two Russian soldiers seized in the 1850s and held for ransom in a warlord's deep pit. Placing captives in holes in the ground is a practice that continues in the 21st century — Russian soldiers in Chechnya use it, also.

Abducting people for slave labor also persists, as Vladimir Yepishin found out in 1989 when he met two North Caucasus men in the western Russian city of Yaroslavl while drunk and agreed to go with them to Chechnya. He was beaten, sold from family to family four times, forced to work as a shepherd and released 13 years later only after a journalist ventured into his remote mountain village and learned of his plight.

Since the first of two post-Soviet wars broke out in Chechnya in 1994, however, regional raiders have shown an increasing willingness to move from small seizures with monetary roots to large, brazen actions with political or tactical demands and to target some of society's most vulnerable.

In 1995, Chechen rebels took some 2,000 hostages at a hospital near Chechnya, demanding that Russia end the war. About 100 people were killed in the raid and dozens more died when Russian troops unsuccessfully stormed the hospital.

The next year, a Chechen rebel band seized up to 3,000 hostages in a raid on another hospital in the neighboring region of Dagestan. At least 40 people were killed in the raid. With a promise of safe passage, the guerrillas released most hostages and headed for Chechnya with the rest in a convoy of buses. They were stopped by Russian forces at the town of Pervomayskaya, where they came under bombardment; 78 more people were killed.
 
In the midst of that crisis, Chechen sympathizers held 255 passengers on a Black Sea ferry for three days.

After Russian forces pulled out of Chechnya in late 1996, large seizures halted, but de-facto independent Chechnya plunged into lawlessness and became notorious for brutal ransom kidnappings that sometimes ended with videotaped beheadings or mutilations.

The war resumed in 1999 and hostage-takings grew again, including a bus hijacking in southern Russia by a Chechen seeking freedom for Chechens convicted in a 1994 hijacking.

Three years later came the astonishing raid by scores of militants, including bomb-strapped women, on a Moscow theater to demand a Russian pullout from Chechnya. The assault carried a heightened psychological intensity.

It brought the Chechnya tensions out of the faraway region into the heart of the capital and was further shocking because it targeted the audience of a colorful and cheerful musical show, an audience that included many children getting a treat from their parents.

The raiders' demands weren't met, and all were killed. But so were 129 hostages, who succumbed to the knockout gas pumped into the theater.

The hostage-takers in the school crisis of Beslan raised the shock value even further by seizing a group that was about half children.