RUSSIAN ROULETTE

I have an image in my head that has been there last night and today. It is footage of a mother whose child is one of the hundreds being held hostage by terrorists in the gymnasium of that Russian school.

A gunshot or a rocket explosion goes off and she reacts as if she has been shot. And staggers away. That is why one quote I read is so telling and so poignant: A weeping mother said: “Every gunshot I hear is like a shot into my heart”.

Can you imagine it. The pain, the fear, the frustration, the nightmare. And parents can do nothing. Holding vigil day after day night after night outside the hostage school, they know very little and are told very little because the authorities also know very little.

They don’t know exactly how many gunmen and women are inside. Maybe seventeen. Maybe forty. They don’t know but assume some are wearing suicide bomb belts. They assume that the school is now booby-trapped with bombs.

They know, from one young boy who escaped, that the terrorists made a chilling pledge. A deadly equation. For every attacker killed they would kill fifty children. For every attacker wounded they would kill twenty.

They don’t even know what the hostage-takers demands are. They assume they are Chechens.

I talked on radio yesterday to Professor Alex Bobik who survived the deadly Moscow theatre siege two years ago in which 50 terrorists and more than 120 hostages died. Imagine the foetid and frightening scenario as that standoff went on and on.

At the school the terrorists have refused to allow food or water or medicine to be sent in. Can you even try to imagine the physical and mental condition of those young kids and their teachers and their parents. Grabbed on the first day of the new school year.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has always said that he will not negotiate with terrorists – even though his hostage experts are sporadically talking to them – but he must be under extreme pressure to solve this. How? Gunfire and rocket blasts are being heard occasionally from inside the school. At least sixteen people are dead. Bodies have been thrown from school windows.

On the news you look at the faces of parents and grand parents huddled in silent groups in the town square. Their grief and fear says it all. And you think: Sometimes this is a shit of a world.

Friday, September 3, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004