Genocide ‘carried out on tribal lines’
RUSSIA FAILED to adequately protect victims of a 2004 school siege in the city of Beslan that left more than 300 people dead, the European Court of Human Rights has said.
More than half the hostages killed were children.
In a ruling yesterday, the France-based court said that authorities did not take necessary preventive measures to save lives.
It said the security forces’ use of tank cannon, grenade launchers and flame-throwers contributed to casualties among the hostages. It noted failures to increase security before the attack despite imminent threats against schools in the area.
Armed radical Islamic assailants seized the school on the first day of class, prompting a long stand-off that ended in explosions and gunfire.
The court ordered that Russia pay nearly three million euro (£2.5m) in total compensation to the 409 Russians who brought the case to the ECHR; they include people who were taken hostage, or injured or are relatives of the hostages or those killed and injured.
The Russian Justice Ministry said it would appeal against the verdict. It contended that the judges failed to grasp the gravity of the situation during the siege and specifics of efforts taken to free the hostages.
Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, told reporters shortly after the ruling that “such hypothetical assessment is hardly acceptable”. “All the necessary legal action regarding this ruling will be taken,” he added.
The head of the Mothers of Beslan group, Aneta Gadieva, said the payment ordered was “meagre”.
“Somebody will get 5,000 euro, somebody will get 20,000 euro.
“That’s a small sum in compensation for moral damages,” she was quoted as telling state news agency Tass.
For more than ten years, survivors and relatives have been asking whether the siege could have been prevented and whether so many had to die in the operation.
They have said that officials, including President Vladimir Putin, mishandled the crisis.
He is also accused of ignoring intelligence indicating that a hostage-taking was being planned. An investigation by the Russians into the events stalled several years ago.
More than 400 seuvivors and relatives applied to the European Court of Human Rights, which is a pan-European human rights body of which Russia is a member.
Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for organising the school siege.
It came amid a particularly violent period in the Islamist insurgency that was connected with the fight between Russian forces and Chechen separatists.
A week before the seizure, suicide bombers downed two Russian airliners on the same night, killing a total of 90 people and a suicide bomber killed 10 people outside a Moscow subway station.
The violence in South Sudan is now genocide that is being perpetrated along tribal lines, International Development Secretary Priti Patel has said.
She said in an interview that there are “massacres taking place, people’s throats being slit”.
Ms Patel, who visited South Sudan this week, said there is a “scorched earth policy,” with villages being burned down, women being raped, and food being used as a weapon of war.
She described the situation in South Sudan as “absolutely abhorrent and inhumane”.