THE BALANCE SHEET:

'I fear for the future of Chechnya' (Khassan Baiev, September 9, 2004, Boston Globe)

What made those scenes from Beslan so anguishing for me was that I had seen them all before. As a wartime surgeon in Chechnya I had treated the broken bodies of children -- the young girl whose parents were blown up by a bomb before her eyes, the little boy whose hair turned white overnight, small bodies pierced by hundreds of pieces of shrapnel. And everywhere blood.

I do not claim to understand the mentality of a terrorist willing to sacrifice children. However, as a Chechen and a doctor with firsthand experience of the war, I can offer some context into what turns ordinary people into extremists willing to commit such atrocities.

We have been fighting Russia on and off for 400 years. Our nation is small, the size of Connecticut, with a prewar population of 1 million. In the recent 10-year war with Russia, 250,000 people died, fully a quarter of the population. Of those deaths, an estimated 42,000 were children. And our children are still dying, from gunfire, from mines, from an unexplained illness resulting from the contaminated environment caused by the war.

History has taught us to fear Russia. The belief of most Chechens that the Kremlin would like to eliminate them is fueled by the deportations. In the 19th century the czarist government exiled us to Turkey, Jordan, and Syria. In the 20th century, in 1944, Stalin herded our whole population into cattle cars and shipped us to Siberia. A third of us perished on the journey or in the harsh conditions of exile.

We had hoped that with the breakup of the Soviet Union we might at long last attain independence from Russia. We are Muslims. We speak a different language. We have different traditions. However, our dream of self-rule evaporated when Boris Yeltsin invaded our country with a force of 300,000 Russian soldiers on Dec. 11, 2003 [?].

For the past 10 years Chechnya has been occupied by a foreign invader. Occupation breeds violence, which invites lawlessness on both sides. The abuses of civilians by Russian soldiers have been documented by various human rights organizations -- Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Russian human rights organization Memoriale. Young Russian soldiers are also dying unnecessarily.