Arab News

Nine million people use Moscow’s underground daily. Yesterday’s savage bomb blast which killed at least 39 people and injured more than a hundred will bring fear to them all. The Russian authorities were quick to blame Chechen separatists and claimed that the outrage was the work of a suicide bomber.

Though the Chechen rebel group led by Aslan Maskhadov immediately denied responsibility, past terror attacks which have been firmly laid at his door must leave doubt about the denial. There were also early suggestions that the blast could have come from a suitcase or a backpack, rather than from explosives wrapped around a bomber.

Either way this is a terrible outrage which has once again involved innocent people going about their legitimate daily business. What makes this tragedy even more incomprehensible is that if it was in fact launched by Chechen terrorists, it will have entirely the opposite effect to that intended. The Russians are not about to be cowered by such awful violence. The long history of Moscow’s involvement in the Caucasus is one of dogged and stubborn efforts to impose its rule, every bit as unbending as the opposition of the Chechens.

Moscow’s forces in Chechnya are still struggling to control the territory. That the fighting has dropped from the international news has as much to do with a softening of Washington’s attitude to the campaign, which President Putin himself launched to crush Chechen resistance to Russian rule. Whatever may be happening in Chechnya no longer engages the world’s attention or sympathy. On the other hand, what happened yesterday in Moscow certainly has. The slaughter of innocents will do nothing but harm the Chechen cause because it will play to the Russian position that it is confronted by a bloodthirsty and evil enemy.

There is also a further weakness to these terrorist outrages, from whichever source they come. These attacks which make the world recoil in revulsion do not in fact do much damage. For the unfortunates caught up in these blasts, the tragedy is real enough. But the fabric of the societies which are being attacked is hardly harmed at all. Life goes on. The emergency services clear up the gruesome scenes of the attack, the repairmen go in, the dead are buried and the state resumes it day-to-day business.

What the attacks in fact do achieve is the empowerment of the forces of reaction among the authorities. The massive loss of life on Sept. 11 shook America and the world but New York, the commercial capital of the world’s only superpower in reality hardly missed a beat. Life quickly resumed, while US hawks used the terrible crime to justify a new aggressive international policy which has raised many more demons. Therefore these terrorist attacks are never the victories the terrorists might fondly imagine, but in fact devastating moral defeats for their cause.