Danger

After two Chechen women blew themselves up at the underpass by Tushino metro and took twenty Russians with them I begin to fear a little for my family and myself. I begin to consider how best we might avoid crowded places, and living by Kursky Vokzal (Kursk train station) we couldn’t’t really be in a worse place.

For it is not going to stop. No matter how many times Putin tells us that the war in Chechnya is over, what happened at Tushino or at the Pokrovka theatre tells us a different and undeniably truer story. A war is over when both sides stop fighting; at present neither side has even begun to stop. And, until they do Russians will continue to be ripped to shreds in this and other cities.

Then we have the men who are supposed to be protecting us from this coming terror; fat corrupt militia men, secretive and half fascistic secret services and an administration that wouldn’t’t know how to begin telling the truth if their lives depended on it

Talking to Russians and reading their papers in the light of the Beslan tragedy, I begin to see part of the problem they have with the west’s attitude to the Chechnya conflict. I read in Expert magazine a writer who points out that the BBC and others never once called the hostage takers Terrorists or Bandits, as the Russians do. There is a confusion between the western media and the western authorities. Reuters doesn’t even call Bin Laden a terrorist and the BBC is as skeptical of Blair’s words on terror as it is of Putin.

The truth seems to me to be that Blair and Bush have given Putin all the support he could ask for on this one; in other words they have said nothing.