Life after the Beslan School Siege

Life after the Beslan School Siege

In the Russian republic of North Ossetia, the only man to go on trial for the Beslan school siege, has been giving evidence in court. Nurpashi Kulayev has pleaded not guilty to charges including murder, terrorism and banditry.

More than three hundred people -- mostly children -- died in the siege last September.

Chloe Arnold has been meeting some of the survivors in Beslan and those trying to help them.

Valera Murtazov can't sleep at night any more. When he closes his eyes, all he can see are the faces of the hundreds of children, trapped in the gym at Beslan's school number 1, where they were held for three days without food and water.

"I try to block it out," he says. "I try to think about other things, like how lucky I am that my own three children survived. But their cries just keep coming to me, and I'm plagued with guilt that I couldn't save more of them."

We are sitting in Valera's kitchen, drinking tea and eating slices of salty white cheese. Next door, his mother is dusting photographs of her three grandchildren, who were among the hundreds of parents, teachers and children herded into the gym by gunmen that fateful day.

Valera's children aren't in Beslan any more. They've travelled to Moscow with their mother, to receive psychiatric treatment. The twins are five years old, and their elder sister is eight. All still have nightmares about what went on inside the school last September.

"Our twins weren't even supposed to be there," Valera says, shaking his head. “But they'd begged their parents to take them to the school on September 1st, the first day of the new school year. They wore their best clothes on what is traditionally a day of celebration in Russia, and the girls had ribbons in their hair.”

“There was an air of festivity as they approached the playground, which was hung with bunting and balloons. But moments later,” Valera remembers, “a group of masked men appeared, shouting and waving guns and ordering everyone into the gym.”

For the next 52 hours, the hostages were forced to sit on the ground, denied food, water and even the right to speak to each other. Valera recalls many of the parents begging their children to urinate into their shoes and then drink it, for fear they pass out in the stifling hall.

With television crews covering the siege 24 hours a day, the world watched the events unfold in shock and disbelief. Since then, humanitarian aid has poured into this sleepy little town -- bicycles from Italy, clothes and shoes from the United States, toys from western Europe. The Bulgarian government has offered children who survived the siege holidays in its Black Sea resorts.

But what's really needed is psychological help for the surviving hostages and for the families of those who were killed. There's been a good response to the local Red Cross's recent appeal for volunteers to train as counsellors. Nurses and teachers in Beslan, desperate to help in any way they could, are now visiting some of the hundreds of families who lost their sons and daughters.

But it's a small project and many of the survivors are still struggling to cope without any help. Also, for the most part the volunteers have been women. Alexander Jika is the only male counsellor with the Red Cross. In this traditional culture, Alexander tells me, men find it very difficult to talk about their problems with women.

"To begin with, so few men survived the attack," he says. We're sitting in his rickety car, which he drives between the three or four families he visits every day. Of the 30 or so men held hostage, the majority were taken away and shot on the first day. "Men from the south, from the Caucasus region, are macho, strong. Alexander says, “We're protectors by nature, we know we must defend our wives and our children at whatever cost."

So for Valera, forced to lie face down in the rubble as children screamed and died all around him, the guilt and the rage he now feels are all-consuming. In some ways, it's been easier for the mothers because they've supported each other in their grief, Alexander says. But for the handful of men who witnessed the horrors that went on inside School number 1, it's been almost too much to bear.

I ask Valera about the man standing trial, the only hostage-taker the Russian authorities say survived the siege. Valera shakes his head. His eyes dart about the room -- he can't concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. "I wouldn't trust myself to go down to the court," he says. "I know his face, I looked at it for more than three days. If I saw him again I probably end up killing him with my bare hands for what he did, for what they all did to those children."