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Amid crisis, Russia calls UN meeting

Russian soldiers wait aboard APCs in position near the school where a group of gunmen wearing belts laden with explosives are holding some 240 people hostage in the northern Ossetian village of Beslan, Wednesday. PHOTO: AFP

Russian on Wednesday called an emergency session of the UN security council to address the four "terrorist attacks" on its territory in the past eight days.

Andrei Denisov, the Russian ambassador to the UN, requested the evening meeting to secure formal condemnation from the international community following the atrocities committed by suspected Chechen militants.

Yesterday's attack on a school in southern Russia followed a suicide bombing outside a Moscow metro station the previous day and last week's double bombing of two passenger aircraft. More than 100 people have been killed.

Analysts said the UN move was aimed at shoring up international support for any military action Russia might take against militant attacks.

Russia is unlikely to approach the UN for logistical support in any military action, given its proud assertion that the Russian military can deal with the Chechen problem. Yet a UN security council resolution backing Russia's right to take military action to secure its population from the terrorist threat would silence critics of its continuing military actions in Chechnya.

It could place any future military activity on a par with Washington's decision to invade Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, with which last week's double plane crash has been compared.

Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told the Interfax news agency after the announcement, "such phenomena as terrorism can not be fought by holding forums. Rather it is necessary to combine the efforts of all countries and step up interaction among their special services."

The Kremlin had remained silent for hours after news of the attack on the Beslan school, struggling to square its fiery rhetoric about vanquishing terrorists with the potential public outrage at a bloody outcome to its second major hostage crisis at the hands of militants in two years.

Just before news broke of the Beslan crisis, President Vladimir Putin and his defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, reiterated that Russia will not negotiate with terrorists. Reacting to the suicide bombing in Moscow, President Putin said he was prepared to talk to anyone in Chechnya, bar separatists and terrorists.

"There can be no dialogue with those who wanted to fight and who made war a way of earning money," he said.

"We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them."

Ivanov, the commander in chief of Russia's armed forces, said: "In essence, war has been declared on us, where the enemy is unseen and there is no front. This is regrettably not the first and I fear not the last terrorist act."

Putin's top two law enforcement ministers, security service head Nikolai Patrushev and interior minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, were sent to the Beslan school to take command of the rescue operation.
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