9/11 'twinned' with Beslan horror

As the world marked the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the United States, Russian commentators drew parallels with the Beslan school atrocity.

"The names New York and Beslan are suddenly together as one," said a commentary in the popular daily Moskovskiy Komsomolets.

"Fate has unexpectedly linked them with an invisible rainbow bridge of two colours - red for blood and black for grief. New York and Beslan are unwillingly twinned by two tragic events, on 11 September 2001 and 1 September this year."

Vulnerability

According to the Novyye Izvestiya, in the past three years "the people of New York and Beslan, of Madrid and Moscow, have realized their everyday vulnerability in the same sudden and irrevocable way. Sorrow has brought us closer."

For the broadsheet Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the Russian people "need an answer to the question of what to do with terrorism and how to fight it", but the paper was cautious about whether the American experience in the wake of 9/11 pointed the way forward.

President Bush is still answering for the weakness of the security agencies... our leaders, as always, answer for nothing Novoye Vremya

"Nothing held back the US from the most serious response to the challenge," it said.

"Not the threat of violating the constitutional rights of its citizens. Not the threat of violating international law when the US unilaterally invaded Iraq... Yet there is still no sense of a decisive US victory over terrorism."

Local roots

Writing in the liberal weekly Novoye Vremya, another commentator highlighted what he saw as the most significant difference between the two attacks.

While the US attacks were "completely unconnected with domestic politics", in Beslan the causes were closer to home.

"In the US it was 100% international terrorism... The terrorists flew in from another country as if from another planet... Here in Beslan, lies the shadow of Bin Laden's al-Qaeda, but only the shadow. The root of what happened is local."

Moreover, he writes, "three years on from 9/11, President Bush is still answering for the weakness of the security agencies", while in Russia, "our leaders, as always, answer for nothing".

Leading daily Izvestiya gave prominence to an interview with American terrorism expert Karen Larson, in which she urged Russia's state institutions to adopt greater openness in their dealings with citizens in the wake of Beslan.

"You have too long a history of confrontation between the people and the authorities. You can only beat the terrorists by dropping the old stereotypes," Ms Larson says in the interview.

"If President Putin were to order an independent inquiry into the Beslan tragedy, that would increase confidence in the authorities," she asserts.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.