War predicted after siege deaths

On the streets: The girl in the red dress stood with her mother waiting for a bus on Lenin Street, a mud spattered highway in…

On the streets: The girl in the red dress stood with her mother waiting for a bus on Lenin Street, a mud spattered highway in the drab North Ossetian village of Chernem writes Chris Stephen.

Many are predicting war between the Muslim and Christian communities of this southern Russian region in the wake of the Beslan school shooting and if war happens it will probably happen here first - in a village almost equally divided between Christian Ossetians and Muslim Ingushetians.

The Beslan victims were all Christian and their attackers were Muslim, a fact that may inflame tensions across the region.

"I really hope there will not be a war, there is no need," says the girl in the red dress, an Ingushetian, with long brown hair and dark brown eyes.

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"Our two communities live normally together," chimes her mother. "But things are bad now. Tensions have increased with this killing. We are against banditry, it is not possible that those terrorists came from Ingushetia."

"Well, we don't know for sure," cautions her daughter.

Just then a big rusting Volga car pulls off the road and out get three policemen, two in uniform. The youngest, Yuri, wearing a combat uniform of grey and white tiger stripes, asks for my papers.

As he does so a Christian woman in black dress with her hair in a big grey beehive comes over. "I heard what you said," she barks at the Ingush women. "How can you say things are normal after such an attack? Maybe they are normal for you, but for us it is terrible."

"I didn't mean that the attack was normal," says the Ingush woman. "What I meant was that conditions are normal between our communities."

"Normal? How can you say that when the whole world is crying for our children?"

The plain clothes policeman, a tubby middle-aged man with a grey moustache, smiles, holds out his hands and says "Spakoyno" to the woman in black, best translated as "calm down".

Fate then intervenes, in the shape of a mud spattered minibus that lurches to a stop beside us. The Ingush women, who have been waiting for it, trot gratefully away, not wanting to give their names, and clamber quickly inside. As the bus drives away, Yuri returns my press card. "There was a war here before, in 1992, and people don't forget so quickly," he says.

"People here don't want war, but there are provocateurs on both sides. We should not let it happen again."

In the nearby mayor's office, the village prefect, named Gregoryeva, showed me a souvenir of the 1992 war when several hundred people were killed in inter- ethnic clashes: It is a hole made by a bullet that passed through the double glazed front window of her office and embedded itself in the wall by her chair. The hole is covered with a green ribbon rosette, of the kind you might pin on a horse. "It's a trophy," she says. "A souvenir of the war." She insists both communities have learned their lesson from that conflict. "There will not be another war. President Putin is working to make sure that we will live in harmony."

Other villagers are not so sure. Chermen has its Christian community in the centre with the Ingush living around the outside. "The Beslan killing was a provocation to get us to attack," says Eduard, a 21-year-old Christian. "We cannot live together with the Ingush. I know my history. I know we have had conflict with them for 200 years."

His friend, Artor, clad in a blue track suit, nods enthusiastically. "You cannot trust the Ingush. When they invite you to their home it is only so they can stab you in the back."

Outside the nearby bread shop, 50-year-old Mina, also a Christian, agrees. "What kind of life can we have with the Ingush after this killing? It's as if they took one of our eyes and one of our arms, we cannot live together after that."

In the village post office, there is an equally negative assessment, courtesy of Zareta, the postal clerk. "There will be a war for sure, how can there not be after what has happened?"

The problem for North Ossetia is that the school massacre is like a boulder dropped into an already turbulent pond. Five years ago Russia launched its war in Chechnya, and the conflict has spread tension across the region. The impression in much of the outside world is that the Chechnyan fighting is contained, albeit with periodic terrorist outrages. In fact, the effect of this war has been to polarise Muslims and Christians across the region.

This polarisation may well be an aim of the rebels. Last June Chechnyan rebels made an attack into neighbouring Ingushetia, killing more than 70 soldiers and Moscow-appointed officials. Now they have struck at the region's main Christian enclave.

Outside the post office I want to find some Ingushetians in the village but my car is stopped by an army patrol. The officer nervous that we may inflame the situation tells my driver to take me straight back to Beslan with no stopping to talk to local Ingush or anybody else.