Whew! That sticky three-day standoff with the Chechen Rebels is finally over. It's a good thing, too, since many people could have died. Oh wait — they did. In the Russian Special Forces raid, all 750 of the hostages were recovered. Unfortunately, 117 of them are now bound for the long sleep, compliments of the super-secret gas agent introduced to the theater through the ventilation shaft.
The gas was supposed to immobilize the rebels, particularly the 20 Chechen women strapped with explosives, presumably ready to set them off if negotiations didn't go their way. The rebels made demands that the Russian military forces pull out of Chechnya within seven days. The women never got the chance to martyr themselves since they were likely unconscious by the time Special Forces troops placed a single bullet in each of their heads.
The gas's specs have yet to be released and likely won't be, based on Moscow's chief physician specifying it as the reason for 116 of the 117 dead. Supposedly, the gas is meant to immobilize, not kill. So it was being used to keep the death toll from climbing too high — and doing a bang-up job from the looks of it.
Luckily, here in the United States, we would never see such slapdash raids, nor show such disregard for human life. Of course, turning back the clock to Attica Correctional Facility, Sept. 9, 1971, maybe we have.
When 1,200 inmates made demands, holding the lives of 50 prison guards as hostages, the 200 New York City policemen of the raid did the right thing. After dropping chemical agents to immobilize the inmates, they stormed in a hail of bullets killing 32 inmates and 10 of their own prison guards. Something tells me poison gas and gunslingers are not concurrent with keeping death tolls in the green.
The whole idea, the secret Russian gas in particular, needs to go back to formula. Immobilization in order to pacify a volatile situation, as we saw in Moscow, is a fantastic idea, if only the next move wasn't performing execution on the petrified rebels and if the byproduct was not losing more than one hostage in seven.
I suppose the Russian's impatience was somewhat understandable: the Chechens released seven hostages the previous morning with 30 children scheduled for release and the promise of release for the 75 foreigners soon after. That's too slow when Russia's pride is on the line, obviously. The Russian government, after all, must be sick of this fight. What happened to the good old days when a greater military power could seize a smaller country and exploit its resources?
In case the resources in question escaped anyone's attention, they're the fat oil reserves and the hefty supply of sturgeon on the Chechen shore. Gasoline and caviar, in this case, cost both sides 30,000 lives.
And so, this fraction of the conflict has ended and a few hundred hostages went to the hospital, and some of them didn't make it back out. Had Russia waited a bit longer, perhaps the hostages from several other countries (such as America, Great Britain and Germany) would have been released, and there resolution would not have turned so many heads.
No country likes to lose its citizens without a good reason, but perhaps the light at the end of this tunnel will be a broader understanding of what's going on over there, and consideration of how neutralizing a political hostage incident should not warrant the death of so many.
Darren Todd is an English literature senior. Reach him at lawrence.todd@asu.edu.
