After Violence by Debra Javeline;

Author:Debra Javeline;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Elusiveness of Blame

Some aggrieved individuals, including victims of violence, fight a losing battle in their struggle to assign blame. They face obstacles from blame-avoiding institutions that cloud responsibility by diffusing authority between many agencies, branches, and levels of government (Javeline 2003a:86–94). They also face obstacles from blame-avoiding politicians who employ strategies such as pointing fingers at others, claiming powerlessness in decision-making, empathizing publicly with victims, taking ambiguous policy positions, rotating leaders in relevant political offices, and accommodating some of the aggrieved group with partial concessions (Weaver 1986; Javeline 2003a:76–85, 2003b). In Beslan, the task of blame attribution was thwarted at every turn by the complexity of events and abundance of actors who used blame-avoiding techniques. Many Beslan victims were thus left uncertain about who to blame.

In terms of finger pointing, for example, the Torshin Commission played the blame game and pointed fingers at regional and local authorities for the hostage crisis. It noted that the Russian minister of Internal Affairs, Rashid Nurgaliyev, sent telegrams to regional authorities warning about the need for tightened security at all educational establishments, only to have those warnings ignored, as evidenced by the fact that only a single unarmed policewoman was stationed outside School No. 1 right before the siege, and she too was taken hostage. Specifically, the Torshin Commission pointed fingers at North Ossetia’s FSB director Valery Andreyev for poor coordination among the many security services and military units at the scene and at former president of Chechnya Aslan Maskhadov and even Abu-Dzeyt, an Arab who Torshin claimed played an important role in the siege, among others (Finn 2005a).

Rival officials joined the blame game and pointed fingers right back. They accused the Torshin Commission of whitewashing mistakes by high-level members of the federal government. According to Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent member of Parliament, the report was “an attempt to put the blame on regional and local law enforcers and not on the leaders of federal ministries, who in my view bear responsibility for what happened. They didn’t take preventive measures. They didn’t check how their orders were being carried out” (Finn 2005a). North Ossetian president Dzasokhov also contradicted Torshin when testifying at the Kulayev trial in January 2006. Dzasokhov said that he never received warning of a possible school attack, only unspecific warnings of possible attacks in North Ossetia. “There was no information that would indicate that a school would be seized” (Voitova 2006a).

The sheer number of inquiries and reports, official and unofficial, also served to facilitate finger pointing and confound blame, because the reports arrived at different conclusions. For example, while the federal prosecutors absolved law enforcement, the North Ossetian regional parliament blamed law enforcement. The latter’s report questioned whether North Ossetian FSB head Valery Andreyev had authority over two FSB deputy directors, Vladimir Pronichev and Vladimir Anisimov, who were in Beslan during the hostage taking. During the Kulayev trial, Andreyev’s testimony suggested that the senior FSB officers overruled him and that he himself had not ordered the use of flamethrowers and tanks in storming the school.

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