Limonov vs. Putin Read online

  Thinking over the president’s speech I come to the conclusion that it is all lies. Movsar Basayev and his group of 50 militants: 18 women and 33 men were all Chechens and not international terrorists. And they demanded to stop the war in Chechnya and did not ask anything else. The terrorists did have a future at the moment when the president gave his speech and this was proved by the subsequent terrorist acts in Chechnya, such as the murder of Akhmad Kadirov and the terrorist acts on Russia’s territory, including Moscow. And the terrorists will have a future until Chechnya’s fate is resolved politically.

  What concerns the gratefulness to the commandos of the special units, I am sure that it stuck in their craws. The FSB special forces’ commandos were used to kill the hostages. I have no doubt that many of those who took part in this killing make nightmares and will make them until the end of their days. “Who did not hesitate to risk their lives and fought for saving the people”, said the presidnet. In reality there was ridiculosuly little risk. And the main proof of that is the fact that nobody from the commandos died, while 174 histages did, this is the number, on which insists today the Nord-Ost Victims Committee. As for other proofs, well, here they are. Let us return to the testimonies of the witnesses. October 23rd 2003, Kommersant, the title is “Overdose”. The subtitle: “The FSB carried out an experiment on the hostages”. “ Practicly all of the hostages were killed by the gas used by the speical forces, as Moscow’s health Committee aknowledged yesterday. This gas was not normally used as a weapon by the Alpha unit. It can’t be excluded that the dead hostages were the victims of an experiment carried out in the frames of the worldwide fight with terrorism.”

  The following picture appears from reading the entire text of the “Overdose” article. Two hours before the raid Movsar Barayev was called on his cellphone by politicians, generals and even the criminal authority Lechi Islamov (The Beard) from Krasnopresen Prison. (You recall that at 5:40 the operational headquarters affirmed that they resumed the talks “in the form of telephone contacts”.) This was made in order to distract Barayev and relax the vigilance of the terrorists. While Movsar Barayev was talking, commandos of the Alpha special unit were already at work in the Theater Center on Dubrovka. Before this they were already consulting the Center’s technical employees for two days. “The agents brought out a plan of the building, one of the technicians told Kommersant, and asked me where are located the ventilation boxes and shafts: on the night before the raid one of the special units got to the first floor of the building where the technical rooms were. They have large windows, the size of a person. And the terrorists, fearing snipers, did not go down there. The commandos made small openings in the walls and the partitions. With their help they managed to get access to the ventilation and also to fix the video system that allowed controlling all the events happening in the hall. Thus the commandos found out that the male terrorists armed with automatic guns are located on the stage and on the second floor of the captured building. The hall is mainly controlled by the female suicide bombers. When gunfire was heard in the hall, continues the technical employee of the Center on Dubrovka, we were in a storeroom on the first floor with the commandos. They immediately started to contact someone on their walki-talkies and judging by their conversation got the ‘ok’ for the raid. Actually the group that was with us did not fight. The commandos went near the openings in the walls leading to the ventilation. Some of them took their backpacks and got out cylinders that reminded those of the scuba divers, only smaller and made of plastic and not of metal. I don’t know what happened next. Before releasing the gas they led the civilians out of the building and the cordon.”

  I am sure that the people working in Alpha are courageous. However it is disgusting to imagine special forces officers with cylinders, in masks, ready to kill 174 peacful viewers together with the militants. They look like Drs Mengele and not special forces’ officers. Kommersant cites the remarks of the hostages’ relatives present in the yard of the 13th Hospital on October 23rd 2003, looking for their loved corpses: “They killed the people, they killed their own people”, “we were exterminated like cockroaches”. In fact, like cockroaches because only two hostages died from bullets, nobody died from the nonexisting explosions, but all because of the gas. This deserved the special gratefulness of the president to the commandos, sent to this terrible, inhuman task under the protection of gas masks and a layer of lies. The claim that the raid was a consequence of the hostages’ executions that began in the hall is a total lie, a plain lie, a 360є lie. We remember that the militants were waiting for someone from the government at 11 o’clock. The same Kommersant cites “a boy named Yegor who left the 13th Hospital”. On the journalist’s question: “Were you shot at?” Yegor answers: “No, nobody was shot at.” “So there were no executions before the raid?” “There weren’t.” “Then why did they say that the terrorists started to execute the hostages?” a naпve German journalist asks Yegor. “I haven’t slept that day,” answers Yegor. “The terrorists were calm and when the gas was released they did not understand at first. I saw how they were running, scared. And then they started to fall and to fall asleep. I lost consciousness too.”

  On the same day, Valery, whose daughter was a hostage answered the question of a Spanish journalist (as told by Kommersant): “Do you think this was terrorism?” “Yes, it was. It’s always terrorism when people are taken as hostages. But the people died from their own. My daughter called me; she said it was all quiet there. They treated the kids normally. She told me that only one woman was killed in the very beginning. Do you understand?”

  There were gunshots before the raid. They were heard. But not a single hostage confirms what the operational headquarters’ representative, Pavel Kudryavtsev, declared at 5:40AM. They affirm the contrary, that there were no executions before the raid. The terrorists did not execute the hostages early in the morning of October 26th. Otherwise the female terrorists sleeping in peaceful poses among the hostages would not have been killed. So what did happen? Here is what. “The gas attack, Kommersant writes, was preceded by a light-and-noise cover. The commandos fired on the Nord-Ost publicity banner, which blocks the windows of the second floor. The terrorists thought that the commandos got inside and threw grenades at them from the balcony and started to shoot over there, distracting from the hostages, a participant of the raid told Kommersant, but the shooting stopped in a moment because the gas started to work.”

  Notice that the latter was said by a participant of the raid and not a hostage. What he said was a lie. Because when the raid started, every human being in the hall either slept or was already dead two hours ago. Let us recall that Nikolay Stepchenkov, an ambulance doctor testified that at 6:50 there were already dozens of inanimate bodies on the entrance. … Some already dead. And they were dead since a long time – two-three hours ago.” If it is two hours, then they released the gas at 4:50 and if it is three hours then it was at 3:50. In any case Stepchenkov is precise: their skin was cold. After all, he is a doctor, he knows.

  So what did happen? Barayev was distracted with phone calls from generals and criminal authorities. They released the gas in the hall. Then the commandos opened fire on the Nord-Ost banner as planned, really carrying out a light-and-noise cover. However this cover was not intended for the militants but for the media, for the Russian society. They had to create a false “execution of hostages”. In real fact the commandos who burst into the hall had nobody to shoot at: all the militants in the hall were either sleeping, or like a part of the hostages, already dead. Otherwise there would have been casualties among the commandos. There were only some male militants left on the second floor. It was them who shouted “Allah akbar!” and tried to organize a resistance. But most of the terrorists were shot by the commandos in their sleep, apparently after the hostages in a creepy slumber (a few breaths per minute, you remember!) were brought out of the hall.

  After that they cleaned the hall. They left the killed Chechens and corrected the reality acco
rding to how they wanted to present it to the society. And they invited a few trusted journalists, while the FSB operators filmed the hall on camera. The FSB video aired by the television channels show powerful bombs thoroughly put in evidence and cables leading to them and disappearing somewhere in the ceiling. Not a single independent journalist saw the hall of the Theater Center on Dubrovka before it was cleaned by the commandos. The video shows a frame-up.

  Later, the NTV channel, still disobedient at that time, demonstrated another video filmed by a hostage and also photos secretly made by another hostage (an Ukrainian). On these video documents we can see that there is no bomb on the place of the largest land mine. There is a bag (two times smaller than the bomb on the FSB video) and there are no cables attached to it. The FSB agents cleaned the hall and fixed the bomb and the cables in order to justify their wrongdoing against innocent Russian hostages. There was no risk that the building might explode! The risk of an explosion is brought by the authorities as the most important argument to justify the raid. “We couldn’t save everybody”, the president said. You killed them, Mr. President. You and your employees of the special forces who spent the morning covering up the bodies. Without hesitation, without risking their lives.

  MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS

  (THE VICTIMS OF BESLAN)

  The National-Bolsheviks have declared Putin responsible for Beslan’s victims. This is how German journalists from Spiegel, authors of the book “01.09. Beslan’s File” saw the very beginning of the Beslan tragedy. I will cite the very beginning of the foreword. “Early in the morning of September 1st 2004 a group of thirty-one men and two women came out of a wood on Sunjen Ridge and went their way. Armed with grenade-throwers, guns, hand grenades, sniper rifles and automatic guns they went to seize School Number One in Beslan, a town in the neighboring North Ossetia. … During several days the terrorists molested, according to official data, 1120 hostages, 331 of whom died, including 186 children, from babies to first grade students. 783 were wounded and among them there is also a lot of children. Beslan, until then an idyllic town on the background of the Caucasus Ridge became the embodiment of grief, a town condemned to live with an everlasting pain.

  If a corresponding crime had happened in some German town or a French village or an American province, its cruel inhumanity would have become the subject of the media for months to come. And under the pressure of the public the authorities would have been forced to thoroughly investigate the crime and report about its results as soon as possible.

  But not in Russia. But not on the Caucasus. Silencing and hushing up for generations have become part of the lifestyle here. They must protect the foreign sovereigns from claims and pretensions. Therefore it is extremely difficult here to carry out an investigation among those who were touched by this event.

  Everything is interlinked on the North Caucasus. Everybody is linked with one another by either a deep friendship or a deep animosity. And the distances here are modest too. There is only one hundred km from Beslan in the Christian North Ossetia to Grozny in the Muslim Chechnya. And between them is squeezed the small and also Muslim Ingushetia. The countries are all dwarfish, surrounding Moscow like a necklace on a distance of 130 km from it. Here, near Caucasus’ Northern spurs, the former Soviet empire has broken to little pieces, which today’s Russia doesn’t have the forces to put back together. In the contrary: the war in Chechnya is shattering the region and allows the separatist movements here and there to gain strength. In the mountains and forests of Chechnya and Ingushetia Allah’s Muslim warriors are getting ready. And the terrorist attack on Beslan was an attempt to draw North Ossetia, a Christian republic, for centuries faithful to Moscow, into war.

  The Russian official bodies are slowing down as they can the flow of information about the reasons and the analysis of the events. The art of disinformation has flourished again since the Soviet times. For instance the information that the Prosecutor General, the special services, the army and police officials share with the public are first of all reflecting their desire to hide their own neglect and miscalculations.

  This neglect and mistakes are astounding. The destroyed building of School Number 1 was never investigated as the spot when the crime was committed like it was supposed to be according to the rules of criminalistics. Even the process of hostage taking itself was not sufficiently clarified by the officials; at least the public did not get such information. A lot is unclear with the tragic end itself, which was contributed to by the lack of professionalism of those who acted from the name of the State.”

  In order to understand the Beslan tragedy, it is necessary to have at least the chronology of these first three days of September in Beslan. Here it is.

  September 1st 2003. 9:08AM. The holiday in the yard of Beslan’s School Number 1 on Komintern Street began at nine o’clock. The school is big; it has 890 students and 57 teachers. This is a complex of buildings forming the letter E on the city map. And suddenly people in camouflage run in the schoolyard through the gates on Komintern Street. Most of them wear camouflage ski masks. Those without masks have beards. They gather the people through the gates to the gymnasium shooting in the air from their guns. In the gymnasium they order the hostages to sit on the floor and not to move. At the same time the people in camouflage start to mine the gymnasium.

  10:17AM, same day. The first three motorcycle divisions start to move to Beslan from Ossetia’s capital Vladikavkaz. From 11:30 the school is surrounded by divisions of the 58th army.

  11:05AM The militants pass a message through the hostage Larisa Mamitova, a doctor, in which they express their intention to negotiate only with the president of North Ossetia Dzasokhov, Ingushetia’s president Ziazikov and Dr. Roshal. (Later, one of the witnesses on the trial of Nurpashi Kulayev, the only surviving militant, will tell that the militants wanted to see Rushailo, executive secretary of the RF and not Roshal.) The terrorists gave their phone number 8-928-728-33-74, however the number did not respond. The terrorists did not write the last two numbers right. Mamitova gives the message and tells the Ossetian fighter who put his gun on the grass and took her message that there are 1300 hostages in the school. She returns inside.

  At 4:05PM a hostage came out of the school again with a new message. The message contains the last name of a person, with which the militants would like to talk: the presidential adviser A. Aslakhanov. A phone number for contacts was written again: 8-928-728-33-47. With this number the negotiator, a lieutenant colonel of North Ossetia’s FSB managed to get in contact with the militants in the school. The militant called himself a suicide bomber and said that he blew up twenty hostages in one of the classes. The reason is that the terrorists were upset that they heard the first lie on television and radio: there are supposedly only 354 hostages. At the same time six hostages managed to escape during the second half of the day on September 1st. They were questioned about the situation in the school. It turned out that the hostages were distributed by groups and located in different parts of the school. Most of the people were in the gymnasium. In other parts of the school there were groups of one hundred people and above. The report of the Beslan police chief at 4:20PM of that day indicates: the number of hostages is over 700; the lists are being verified. According to the North Ossetian parliamentary commission (the text is cited in Novaya Gazeta, issue 64, 2005): “The next two days the official representatives of the headquarters, including its nominal leader, general V. A. Andreyev, told the media about 354 hostages. This deliberate lie, according to the numerous testimonies of the hostages, led to the growing aggression of the terrorists. And also became the cause of the execution of some male hostages, whose bodies were thrown out of the window of the literature office, from the second floor. (The suicide-bomber was talking about them when he said that he “blew up twenty hostages”. And it is to take them that four agents of the Ministry of Emergencies will arrive at 1 o’clock on September 3rd and the raid will begin.)

  2:00PM. Beslan. Anti-crisis headquarters.
In Beslan’s city hall. Actually, there are two headquarters in the same building. Or even several. One gets the impression that already the first day, in the first hours, all efforts were made to scatter responsibility and cover those who really gave the orders in Beslan. On the first day several structures from the FSB, the 58th army, and the ministry of Interior, the functionaries and North Ossetia executive power are formed. It is supposedly president Dzasokhov who manages all. But neither the site of dislocation is defined nor the actions are coordinated. On the second day of the terrorist act the general Andreyev, head of North Ossetia’s FSB, becomes the leader of the counter-terrorist operation (according to Torshin’s report, Putin personally appointed general Andreyev). About one day and a half was spent for the appointment of this “pointsman”.