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Posted on 11-10-2004
Russia Absorbs All Attacks
Stoicism and a traditional love of dark humour are steering Muscovites
through the increasing spread of terrorism, says Nick Paton Walsh of UK
Guardian, October 8, 2004
Moscow does not feel like a city slowly being consumed by fear after its
own September 11.
In recent weeks, suicide bombers have brought down two airliners and
attacked a metro station. The capital watched, frozen in front of its TV
screens, as 32 militants held 1,347 children, parents and teachers hostage
in Beslan, fearing that the brutality would eventually spread north.
Such bloodshed would have most westerners stocking up with tinned food and
buying heavy duty torches. But in Moscow, the horror seems to have already
passed, and indifference has again set in.
"Terrorism is part of life", moaned a headline in the state newspaper,
Rossiskaya Gazeta, the day after the plane crashes.
After two years of suicide bombings in the capital and no end in sight to
the urban violence, it could not be truer. After the Ryizhskaya metro
blast last month, the emergency services showed how adept they had become
by quickly clearing away the blast's debris. Within around an hour, the
street was clear, as though the incident had been as mundane as a bad car
crash.
It's not that the government hasn't reacted and tried to change daily
life. There are tougher laws and security at airports, ID cards for
schoolchildren, and no more newspaper kiosks on the metro.
It is now illegal to place a food or goods kiosk within 25 metres of a
metro station. As one newspaper seller, Lena, who works outside the north
central Belorusskaya metro station, joked: "I have no idea how my moving
10 metres down the road is going to help the fight against terrorism."
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Muscovites - and ordinary Russians - do not believe any of these measures
will work. Figures show 93% of them think another significant terror
attack is likely - up from 38% in January - and 76% think the government
cannot protect them.
Faced with the certainty of future bloodshed, people in the capital are
rediscovering their traditional love of dark humour.
The media revels in exposing how desperately corrupt and incompetent the
police are. This Tuesday, the top-selling daily Komsomolskaya Pravda
printed, on its front page, an official document it had bought from a
corrupt policeman in the name of Maslan Naskhadov. Aslan Maskhadov is the
Chechen separatist leader, and Russia's most wanted man, a $10m (£5.5m)
bounty on his head for his alleged organisation of the Beslan school
siege.
The document, which permitted him to live in a flat in Moscow, also bore
Mr Maskhadov's picture.
The press also giggled when police discovered that 600 people from the
North Caucasus were registered as living at the same tiny flat. Outside
the capital, in the southern town of Krasnodar, a journalist tried to test
airport security by dressing in the traditional black of a suicide bomber
and attempting to carry a false explosive device onto a plane. She was
arrested when police failed to get the joke.
Now and again, there are flashes of fear - jolts of panic when a mined car
is found. But still the daily violence continues - in the last week alone,
another businessman was shot dead in a contract killing, and a senior
policemen targeted by a bomb blast.
It's nothing, given the city's history. It endured the assaults of Hitler
and Napoleon. It is used to enduring intense suffering and loss because
its politicians fail it.
At a cocktail party held to welcome the new British ambassador, I met a
Russian media critic, known for his toadyish apologies for the Kremlin. He
sweated a bit from the forehead - more from the whisky than the heat - as
he explained how Russia would beat terrorists, a wry grin underscoring
that he was only partly joking.
"We will shock them with our incompetence and our disregard for human
life", he said. "And eventually they will just give up, seeing the attacks
are pointless and change nothing."
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