There will be another Beslan

In asymmetrical war, the most vulnerable will always be on the frontline

by Isabel Hilton

It descended into blood, panic, violence and tragedy. None of the children, parents and teachers killed and wounded in Beslan deserved this barbarism. The children who set off for the first day of school on Wednesday, wearing their new clothes and holding their balloons, could not have been a more innocent target, the anguish of their teachers and parents more undeserved.

Beslan is an extreme example of what is rightly seen as a depraved military tactic. But the equally unpalatable truth is that hostage taking is also a rational tactic in the desperate context of asymmetrical warfare. Despite the likelihood of a bloody end to most hostage situations, they are likely to grow more, rather than less, frequent.

At first sight the appeal of hostage taking is questionable: the hostage takers rarely achieve their stated objectives and often die in the attempt. There is nothing in Putin’s record or in that of his security services to suggest that a peaceful solution in Beslan was likely - or that respect for the lives of the hostages would predominate over the political need to end the crisis quickly. Preserving lives takes time. Putin’s interest, as it has been in Chechnya, is to create an impression of overwhelming force to pacify domestic anxiety. The hostage takers knew from the outset that they were likely to die.

Hostage taking has not always been so unrewarding. In November 1986, an American hostage was released by an Iranian group that had held him captive for more than 17 months. His release had been bought by the Reagan administration with the transfer of military spare parts for Iran. Despite official denials, governments from Washington and Bogota to Paris have sometimes found it convenient to negotiate the quiet release of prisoners. In doing so they created a double bind. Negotiating improved both the life chances of the hostages and the leader’s image: a return in triumph was better than a tragic outcome. But rewarding hostage-taking also raised the incentives: as long as something could be gained, the practice was risky, but in some sense profitable.

Today’s hostage-taking, though, from Iraq to Ossetia, is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly. His tactical success has always been in surprise and in picking his target. If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets - the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved - become targets because they are available. If the hostage-takers in Beslan knew they were likely to die, they also knew they would die with the world’s attention upon them. Had they died in a regular firefight with Russian forces, we would neither have known nor cared.

In asymmetrical warfare everyone is involved and anyone is a potential victim. To promise that security in such conflicts will result from the deployment of large military machines is a sham. To fight asymmetrical war with tanks makes as much sense as trying to shoot mosquitoes with a machine gun. The result is counter-productive.

As the drama of Beslan was entering its final hours, George Bush was bidding for re-election on the promise of security to the American people, a security premised on the willingness to use overwhelming military force. It was the same promise that Putin gave to the Russians and Ariel Sharon to the people of Israel. All three have used violence freely in pursuit of electoral reward: Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple of the Mount that triggered the second intifada, Putin’s reckless adventurism in re-launching the Chechen war in 1999, and the Bush invasion of Iraq. None has produced the peace or security that was their justification; all have generated more violence and widened the circle of killing far beyond the formal engagement of armed men on both sides. Now the most likely victims are the poor and the helpless, as collateral damage, bombing casualties or hostages.

In Iraq last week, the resources of the French state were, rightly, mobilised to try to save the lives of two French journalists who are now as familiar to everyone in France as Terry Waite was in Britain during his ordeal in Lebanon. But the names of the 12 Nepalese workers gruesomely murdered last Tuesday have not even been published in most of our newspapers. In hostage-taking, too, there is a hierarchy of importance.

The Nepalis were victims twice over. They came from one of the world’s poorest countries, which suffers the legacy of a rapacious aristocracy who built lavish palaces while denying even basic education to the majority. Today a tiny elite still dominates business and commerce while the mass of the people suffer the familiar catalogue of deprivation. To add to the country’s misery, Nepal is in the grip of its own "war on terror". An increasingly successful Maoist rebellion now operates in 73 out of 75 districts in Nepal in an insurgency that has cost 10,000 lives in eight years. When the Maoists declared Kathmandu under siege, nothing moved. When they order foreign businesses to leave, they obey in increasing numbers.

The government has responded with force, but there is no military solution in this war on terror, any more than in Iraq, Chechnya or Palestine. An outright victory by either side in Nepal could only come at appalling cost and would presage further suffering. If Nepal is to have a future, it must be a negotiated one - and one which addresses the Nepal’s extremes of social injustice.

For now, for Nepal’s poor, the best chance of escape from this misery and violence is to find work abroad, legally or illegally. Women are trafficked into the sex trade, men recruited into international labour gangs that service the lifestyles of the well-off. The 12 victims of last week’s atrocity were poor: cooks and cleaners, recruited by an agency in Kathmandu that told them they were going to Jordan. Once there, they were ordered to Iraq.

The Nepalese government has no troops in Iraq and has banned its own citizens from going there. But the ban is gesture politics. The realities of Nepal are what counts. According to recent reports up to 15,000 Nepalis have gone to Iraq, some recruited by agencies in Kathmandu, others through Indian operators in Mumbai. In the final video, one of the men, a US flag pinned to his chest, read out a statement that accused the US of using deception to recruit them. "We ask anyone who wants to come to Iraq not to be cheated by these high salary (sic) because they are false and America is lying," he said.

Nepal has no troops in Iraq and the Nepalese government was given no chance to negotiate. The US was at one end of the long chain of lies that brought the men to Iraq, their miserable conditions at home at the other. The men who murdered them picked them not for their connection to the US, but because they were unprotected and their deaths would be a warning to others to stay away. In Nepal, it will probably work. For the hostage-takers, that is enough.

isabel.hilton@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1296959,00.html