Russia: Enraged Ossetians seeking vengeance could create an ethnic bloodbath in the North Caucasus writes Daniel McLaughlin
When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a "ring of steel" to be thrown up around North Ossetia this week, it seemed like a belated effort to stop insurgents from neighbouring Chechnya entering the region.
Then, as grief turned to fury among relatives of the hundreds of victims of the school siege in Beslan, the Kremlin's intention became clear: stop enraged Ossetians seeking vigilante vengeance that could create an ethnic bloodbath in the North Caucasus.
Russian security officials said the hostage-takers in Beslan were led by guerrillas from Chechnya and Ingushetia, Muslim republics which have a history of enmity with the mostly Christian Ossetians.
A 1992 war between the Ingush and North Ossetians shattered an uneasy peace in the region, and the tens of thousands of Ingush who were forced to flee, leaving homes and possessions behind, will not be slow to exploit an opportunity to settle scores.
The fate of Ingushetia itself has become increasingly intertwined with that of Chechnya, as a former security service colleague of Mr Putin's has imposed a hardline policy that human rights groups say includes kidnapping, torture and murder of critics and anyone suspected of supporting Chechnya's rebels.
Dozens of police and soldiers were killed in June when gunmen seized the Ingush capital for a night and tried to release prisoners from jail; one of the demands made by the militants in Beslan was freedom for fighters captured after that audacious attack.
"The aim of those who sent the bandits to carry out this horrific crime was to divide our people, to frighten the Russian citizens, to unleash a fratricidal bloodbath in the North Caucasus," Mr Putin told the nation in a televised address last week.
He promised a range of measures to improve the co-ordination of the various, often mutually hostile, security agencies at work in the region, and to tighten up borders through which heavily armed guerrillas are able to move easily, often by simply bribing their way past checkpoints manned by poorly treated and demoralised conscripts.
In a region awash with cheap and plentiful firearms - as evinced by the sight of dozens of civilians firing at the Beslan school as the security forces stormed in - Moscow cannot afford to lose its grip for a moment.
The region of Dagestan, wedged between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea, is increasingly tense as leaders in the two biggest towns vie for influence.
And as a largely lawless region and home to around 30 nationalities - each with its own language and customs - internecine rivalry is never far from the surface. South Ossetia, bordering North Ossetia but officially part of Georgia, won de facto independence from Tbilisi in a war that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and now it wants to become part of Russia.
More than a dozen Georgian troops were killed in a week of sporadic fighting with South Ossetian irregulars last month, prompting Tbilisi to accuse Russia of supporting the separatists and trying to destabilise the region.
Some analysts believe that the sight of Russia and Georgia trading threats over the fate of South Ossetia may have inspired Chechnya-based guerrillas to attack North Ossetia last week, in the hope of igniting a conflict that would not only engulf the North Caucasus but set Moscow and Tbilisi at each other's throats.
"Given the deterioration of the situation in South Ossetia, this whole region may rapidly degenerate into a kind of Russian Bosnia - with an ethnic and religious conflict between Christian Ossetians and Muslim Ingush in the north, and an ethnic and territorial conflict between Georgians and Ossetians in the south," wrote the newspaper Vremya Novostei.
And if Georgia were to try and retake South Ossetia, it would provoke a furious response from Abkhazia, another region that drove out Tbilisi's troops in a vicious post-Soviet civil war. For all the inherent dangers, firebrand Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has pledged to bring both South Ossetia and Abkhazia back into line.
"If, God forbid, we see dead kids after a while, a big Caucasian war will become unavoidable," Mr Alexei Malashenko, an expert in the Islamic world at Moscow's Carnegie Centre, said before the gruesome denouement of the hostage crisis.
"The whole of Ossetia, both North and South, will fight against Ingushetia. Dagestan will not stay away. And it will grow like a snowball.
"Those who perpetrated this terrorist act, professional and monstrously cruel, calculated this," he said.
"Russia is in a dead end. To let the militants go back to Chechnya . . . would mean that Russia recognises its defeat, with all the ensuing consequences.
"To sacrifice the children would mean unleashing a war for which Russia has neither the capabilities nor money, and which will go on for a hundred years."