Twenty years after the Beslan School Siege, many of its victims continue to seek accountability from Russia’s leaders, who appear determined to ignore their calls.
Until 2004, few outside of North Ossetia knew of the existence of Beslan, a town of just 35,000 people a stone’s throw from the regional capital, Vladikavkaz. That changed on 1 September 2004, when more than 30 armed men stormed a local school during a ceremony to mark the beginning of the school year.
During a three-day siege, they held over a thousand people hostage, including schoolchildren, parents, and teachers. Their demand was the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya.
On 3 September, security forces stormed the school, killing the attackers. At least 334 people died in the days of the siege and the first weeks after the tragedy, with many others later succumbing to their injuries. The incident was the deadliest act of terrorism in Russia’s history.
And it has had wider repercussions.
For 20 years, many of those affected by the attack have sought justice, and for the authorities to be held to account for their failures. But such accountability has failed to materialise, with some arguing that the attack even ended up providing the Russian government with some of the tools it now uses to suppress dissent.
‘No-one has been punished’
Shalva Khanikayev still has terrible dreams. On 1 September 2004, he was in the ninth grade. He says he was looking forward to the end of summer to see his classmates, but for some reason did not want to go to school that morning. He recalls his sister came to his room, tried to pull his blanket off him, and poured water on him before Shalva finally got up.
Shalva is one of the lucky ones: he, his sister, and his parents all survived the attack. Shalva’s father died two years ago at the age of 68, which Shalva is certain is related to long-lasting trauma.
Like almost all of the hostages, Shalva notes his dissatisfaction with the investigation into the attack, and the lack of punishment for those responsible.
The criminal case relating to the attack remains open to this day, while the morgue in Rostov-on-Don still holds the unburied bodies of four militants, whose identities have not yet been established. Only one man, Nurpasha Kulaev, has been sentenced to life in prison.
[Listen to The Caucasus Digest: Podcast | The Beslan siege: 20 years on]
In 2007, a group of hostages injured at Beslan appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. After several years of consideration, the court ruled in 2017 that the authorities had not adequately investigated the tragedy, ordering Russia to pay €3 million ($3.4 million) to the victims’ relatives.
‘I think the state did nothing to prevent what happened,’ says Shalva.
Alina Naldikoyeva, who was also among the hostages at Beslan, agrees. ‘Of those who allowed this tragedy to happen, no one has been punished at all,’ she says. ‘Those who allowed this tragedy to happen, if you look into it, all of them are still in their positions. Perhaps not [exactly the same roles], but still in place.’
‘The fact that we were held for three days is too long. Some children died even before the storming began’, she says, with some known to have died due to lack of access to medication.
Zalina Bogazova, another survivor, echoes the sentiment.
‘In Ossetia, only one person who had a conscience — Interior Minister [Kazbek] Dzantiyev resigned’, she says. ‘The rest were reassigned somewhere, changed their position, and that was it … There were no consequences for anyone at the level of heads of federal agencies of the Russian Federation.’
On 1 September 2004, Zalina was starting the 11th grade, and went to school with her mother and little sister. As the students lined up in their classes outside, Zalina heard panic, shouting, and gunshots, and she immediately ran. Once outside the gates, she called to others who had not understood what was happening to follow her.
Many nearby heard her calls and were saved. Unfortunately, her mother and sister were not amongst them, spending three days at the school before being killed during the storming of the school.
Zalina says that while the state clearly failed in both preventing and handling the attack, they could at least have handled the investigation into the attack ‘professionally’, but appeared determined not to do so.
‘I believe it was the state that did nothing to ensure that there was an investigation’, she says. ‘All independent investigations, though not discredited, were not accepted.’
She adds that while she was intensively questioned on the first day, as one of the few people who had seen the terrorists and how the seizure had taken place, her statements appeared to have been dismissed.
Zalina also recalls stating on record that there were approximately 900 students in the school. However, until the school was stormed, officials consistently repeated that there were just 354 people being held inside. Journalists also repeated the official figure, she says, even cutting sections of Zalina’s interviews in which she challenged those numbers.
‘They made a decision not to do their job, but to work as PR people’, she says.
Zalina is also angry that not enough was done to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the crisis.
‘When we talk about saving people, you can negotiate with terrorists’, says Zalina. ‘I am not sure that their demands could have been met in this way, but negotiations are negotiations to come to some satisfactory consensus and to save as many people as possible.’
‘It was a situation in which [the authorities] made decisions, and should be held responsible for them.’
An iron fist
Many of the survivors pinpoint the failure of the authorities to not only respond, but engage at all, while political observers suggest that the tragedy ended up playing a political function for the Russian government.
The ‘Mothers of Beslan’ movement was founded shortly after the attack with the aim of achieving an effective investigation. The group has repeatedly noted that President Putin had never once visited the school or visited the cemetery where the attack’s victims were buried.
‘It’s a great tragedy and he didn’t want to be associated with it’, says Zalina. ‘Perhaps that’s why he has never come before. He doesn’t want to accept responsibility for the terrorist attack that took place.’
But on 20 August 2024, Putin visited Beslan for the first time since 2008, finally visiting the school and cemetery, and meeting with the Mothers of Beslan.
‘We told him that the investigation had not been completed, which he was very surprised by’, said Aneta Gadieva, the co-chair of the Mothers of Beslan after the meeting. ‘He said he would instruct the head of the Investigative Committee … to look into the situation.’
Those words did not appear in videos published by pro-government media.
At the meeting, Putin also focused on the idea that the attackers had received support from abroad, echoing rhetoric about Russia’s ‘enemies’ conspiring against the country that he has frequently repeated since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
‘Putin has hardly ever been anywhere in the Russian regions. He didn’t care about Russian regions at all’, says Dmitry Dubrovsky, a lecturer in Russian history, politics, and human rights at Charles University in Prague. ‘It’s not even about Beslan, it’s just a negligent attitude towards any region, including those that are experiencing such a tragedy.’
‘This may have something to do with Beslan as such, but more likely with the fact that Putin is afraid to move around in the street at all, he has been behaving like Stalin for a very long time. He mainly moves around Moscow and his dachas’, adds Dubrovsky.
Dubrovsky says that while Beslan demonstrated Putin’s willingness to sacrifice ‘anyone and anything’, its main outcome for Russia’s security and politics was the development of anti-terrorist legislation, initially modelled on similar American legislation.
‘Numerous additions to it allowed, on the one hand, to really slightly relieve the tension associated with right-wing radicalism in Russia’, says Dubrovsky. ‘But it has simultaneously turned out to be an extremely convenient tool for dealing with dissenters. And in the end, it is now the very thing that makes it possible to actually equate any opposition to the Russian official regime with extremism and in some cases with terrorism.’
[Read more: Russia bans North Caucasian national movements]
Such legislation has been used against North Caucasian national movements and ‘the international LGBT movement’, but has also returned directly to Beslan. A 2005 appeal for a fair investigation by the ‘Voice of Beslan’ organisation, which split off from the Mothers of Beslan, led to charges of extremism against several members.
The emergence of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee and the use of security concerns as a justification has also had more insidious effects, seeding legislation that directly reshaped Russia’s political as well as security landscape. For example, direct election of governors was abolished in September 2004, reportedly due to the need to improve internal security and strengthen state structures.
Dubrovsky also criticised the official investigation, suggesting that the government could be trying to hide its own role in the tragedy.
‘I think it was Putin who ordered the storming’, he says. ‘And it was because the storming was generally unsuccessful and a lot of people died that Putin forbade [any] normal investigation of this case, at least publicly.’
He similarly highlights the lack of negotiations, suggesting that it reflected Putin’s attitude towards insurgency.
Dubrovsky suggests that the state considered the conclusion of the 1995 Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis, in which the state conceded to the demands of Chechen insurgents, to be a defeat.
‘But they considered a war to the end with any number of casualties acceptable. And in this sense nothing has changed to this day. Whoever they fight with, they will fight to the last of their own soldiers. And a child’, says Dubrovsky.
‘It was with Chechnya that Putin came to power, and that is exactly why nothing could threaten his image as a macho defeater of terrorists. As we saw in the Moscow terrorist attacks, at [the 2002 Moscow theatre hostage crisis], as we saw in Beslan, he didn’t give a damn about any hostages, any sacrifices, just so that he could once again parade around as the victor over terrorists, as a man who solves problems.’
A scar on Beslan
Aside from accountability, former hostages and others affected by the siege have sought consistent support from the authorities, and received little.
Zalina says that while some assistance was provided after the attack, it was never systematic. She adds that the mental health impacts were unsurprisingly severe and widespread, but that ‘no work was done with people’, with only a few volunteers coming to help those affected.
‘As far as I know, representatives of the Serbsky Institute came and talked to the victims. But there was a feeling that they came not to help people, but to write dissertations’, she says. ‘People were left with what had happened to them on their own.’
She says that while she was able to get therapy years later, once she was working, ‘hundreds of people don’t have this opportunity, and nobody gives it to them’.
One-off initiatives to assist former hostages with accessing education, or providing them all with flats in Vladikavkaz, were positive steps, but didn’t address the longer-running issues they faced.
‘If there was some kind of motivation programme for specialists to come and help, if some kind of centre had been created!’, says Zalina. ‘[Instead] we are building a patriotic education centre in Beslan, but not psychological rehabilitation centres.’
‘There is no need to teach people in Beslan how to be patriotic or how to resist terrorism. There are no problems with this here. People in Beslan need to be helped psychologically.’
A museum dedicated to the victims of the tragedy, billed as a ‘patriotic education centre’, is indeed being built in the former school building in Beslan. Other plans to rehabilitate the city were shelved soon after their proposal in 2004, and only revived in 2023.
Slavik Ailyarov was a tenth grader in 2004, and founded the Children of Beslan organisation in 2022. He says that while some reconstruction of the town was done, it remains under the shadow of its tragedy, and neglected by the state.
‘I wouldn’t say that Beslan is thriving now’, says Slavik. ‘There is silence in Beslan as early as six or seven o’clock, even though it is the second most populous city in the republic. Even some villages are busier. That’s the atmosphere even after 20 years.’
Shalva Khanikayev shares a similar sentiment.
‘I think nothing will change, because too much time has passed. But those three days left a huge scar on Beslan. Because even when you pass by, you immediately remember as if you were just sitting there yesterday, in that school.’
On 1 September, mourning events will be held as is customary in Beslan; since 2004, the school year has never begun on the first day of September.
President Vladimir Putin will, of course, not be in attendance — he left the republic immediately after his visit.
And it appears that he has turned one of the greatest failures under his presidency into a success. On his visit, the Mothers of Beslan, who had been waiting to address Putin for 20 years, asked no hard-hitting questions and shared little of their anger. Thus, one bouquet of flowers appeared to solve 20 years of discontent.
