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Beslan: Three Days in September (2006)
benjamin has a point, 8 August 2006
8/10
(This review was deleted by IMDb based on an abuse report filed by another user)

We can all agree that the deliberate injury, endangerment or terrorization of innocents -- especially of innocent children -- is inexcusable. No cause, no ideal, no belief can justify such behavior.

But Manichean 'statesmen' who assert that terrorists terrorize because they are evil people who hate freedom, democracy and all things good merely exacerbate the tensions in which terrorism grows. The Russo-Chechnyan conflict has a history. Some of the darkest roles were played by Putin's predecessor, the bumpkin Boris Yeltsin, and by Putin himself.

More children died in the ruins of the Chechen capital Grozhny than in the Beslan school. Russian authorities have stomped opponents in a hamfisted manner since the days of Ivan the Terrible*, usually without great concern for bystanders. The hundred or more hostages who died in the Moscow theater were killed by the gas the police pumped in, not by the hostage takers. I suspect (though I cannot prove) that most of the Beslan children who died from bullet wounds were killed by the army, not by the rebels (who would have been shooting out, not in). The Beslan parents seem to have had a similar view; when Putin showed up they gave him a cold reception.

*Ivan 'Grozhny'. Ironically the word grozhny means 'terrible'.

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