"...one person at a time..."

/ caucasus / blood / bad /

Ossetia is boiling after the Beslan tragedy, and prearations for violent retribution are being made.

“There will be violence. It won’t be noisy. It will be quiet —- one person at a time,’’ Kuizev said as he wandered through the burned-out husk of the school, stepping over flowers and stuffed animals left in memory of the victims.

Although Kuizev’s 12-year-daughter was among the hostages, she survived. But that hasn’t softened his anger.

”They say, ’forgive, forgive.’ How do you forgive something like this? How do you explain this? Forgive? No way,’’ Kuizev said.

“It’s not a secret that we are waiting’’ for the end of the 40-day [mourning] period, said 67-year-old SergeiTandaleyev of the village of Sunja.

”We will demand that (the Ingush) leave. All of them,’’ he said. If they don’t, “there will be war.’’

Coming from a region of Greece where blood feuds still exist (Crete), this mentality doesn't seem too foreign - or improbable. Indeed it seems like a natural next step that would require a major policing operation to prevent. Yet the Ingush president is downplaying the threat, but he would, wouldn't he?

This falls in quite nicely with Gary Brecher's theory, over at the "exile", that Ossetia was chosen deliberately by the Beslan terrorists in order to ignite the Caucasus with a Christian vs. Muslim war:

Everybody's calling it "senseless," the Chechen raid on Beslan in North Ossetia. Well, the sad thing is, it wasn't senseless. Look at it coldly and it makes a horrible kind of strategic sense.

The thing to keep in mind is that the Chechens who organized this always knew it was going to end with lots of Ossetian kids dead. The Chechens were playing a game of dominoes, Caucasus-style. It's a nasty, twisted, gory game, and to understand it you have to get an idea of how the Caucasian homelands line up...

... [the fallout of the Beslan murders] turns their fight with Russia into a much bigger regional war, and better yet it turns the whole thing into a Muslim vs. Christian fight, with the two Christian tribes, Russian and Ossetian, attacking the Muslim Ingush and Chechens. It's a great way to recruit other Muslims, like the little tribes in Dagestan, or the Ingush, the Tatars in central Russia, and also suck in the big money from the Saudis and the Emirates.

It could be the big equalizer for the Chechens. Russia vs. Chechnya -- not good odds for the Chechens. But Orthodox Christians vs. Muslims -- that's very, very good odds. The Orthodox have been losing out for decades -- just look at the poor old Serbs -- and there's a huge Muslim birthrate popping out millions of surplus believers who don't have a hope in Hell of getting a job and don't know anything but the Quran and how to disassemble an AK-47. Once you've turned the whole of the Caucasus into a bonfire, the light will bring those guys running to help