VLADIKAVKAZ and BESLAN, Russia — In these sleepy towns in the Russian republic of North Ossetia, it's no surprise that fury against the Islamist militants who plague the North Caucasus runs deep. Beslan is, of course, the infamous site of the most savage and terrifying militia attack in recent memory, the raid on School Number One that left hundreds of people dead on the third day of the fall semester in 2004. Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, has seen a series of suicide attacks in its crowded city center.
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But when you ask people here who they really blame for these tragedies, you hear something unexpected: Instead of viewing the war as one fought between guerrillas and security forces, with civilians as collateral damage, the Ossetians see it through the prism of a festering ethnic conflict. The real enemy, they say, lives just across the nearby border, not a 20 minute drive away, in the republic of Ingushetia.
This conviction derives partly from history and partly from a series of fatally misguided decisions from Moscow on how best to fight the violence that's plagued its southern border for decades.
The Ossetians are a largely Orthodox Christian nation at the center of the Greater Caucasus mountain range. Vladikavkaz is just 15 miles from Nazran, the largest settlement in Ingushetia, which is predominantly Muslim.
Tension between the two nations goes back for hundreds of years. During the 19th century, the Ossetians were Russia's key regional allies in its battle to conquer the surrounding Muslim highlanders, including the Ingush, Chechens, and Circassians.
Then at the end of World War II, Joseph Stalin deported several North Caucasus nations en masse to Kazakhstan and Siberia for allegedly siding with the invading Germans (in fact, only a minority did so). Among them were 92,000 Ingush. When the Ingush were rehabilitated and allowed home in 1957, they returned to find that a chunk of their territory, the Prigorodny district, had been handed to North Ossetia.
Through the late Soviet period the Ingush lobbied for Prigorodny to be reattached to their joint republic with Chechnya. Then, after the USSR crumbled in 1991, the lid was off. A year later, fighting broke out in Prigorodny. The Russian army sided with the Ossetians. At least 600 people died in the hostilities, and between 30,000 and 60,000 Ingush fled their homes.
The conflict officially ended with Boris Yeltsin decreeing that the district should remain a part of North Ossetia. But the pain and anger associated with that mini-war almost two decades ago -- and the absence of any concerted Kremlin effort to resolve its consequences -- continue to poison ties between North Ossetia and Ingushetia.
More recent events have only made matters worse. In the minds of many here, the critical moment in the modern history of Ossetian-Ingush relations was in September 2004, when a team of Islamist gunmen stormed School Number One at Beslan, a town close to North Ossetia's airport famous for its vodka factory.
The men took 1,100 pupils, parents, and teachers hostage as they celebrated the beginning of the school year, issuing a demand for Russia to withdraw its troops from Chechnya. Fifty-two hours of unimaginable horror ensued. The captives were herded into the school sports hall, which the guerrillas wired with explosives. Several hostages were summarily executed. At least 370 died after two blasts, a fire, and a gun battle ended the siege. According to Russian authorities, 19 of the 33 attackers were residents of Ingushetia (which borders Chechnya to the east and whose people share strong cultural and language links with the Chechens).
Beslan left many observers thinking that armed conflict would reignite between the Ossetians and Ingush. I was there as a reporter, and I remember standing at the freshly dug graves on the edge of the town as scores of victims were buried after the siege. Three Ossetian men next to me were cursing under their breath.
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