Rhune
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For one girl, escaping Beslan was nightmare's star
« on: May 21st, 2006, 10:37am » |
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For one girl, escaping Beslan was nightmare's start
Sunday, May 21, 2006; Posted: 7:34 a.m. EDT (11:34 GMT)
BESLAN, Russia (Reuters) -- Sveta Dzieva's instinct to run when she heard the first shots outside Beslan's school No. 1 may have saved her life, but it sunk her family into a hole it has yet to escape.
Struck down by the shock of what happened, and by the loss of 186 schoolmates when special forces stormed the school after a three-day siege in September 2004, she did not speak for a month.
"After the terrorist act, she was very ill. We were in Moscow for two and half months of treatment and while I was away I lost my job," said her mother, Albina.
"I couldn't keep paying the rent on my apartment, so that was rented to another family. So, now we are here," Albina Dzieva said, waving behind her at the shack that her family of four calls home in the village of Kosta outside Beslan.
Beslan is full of smart houses built with aid sent to families of the 331 victims of Russia's worst peacetime attack, when pro-Chechen gunmen seized a school and took hundreds of hostages, many of whom died in the firefight that followed.
But Kosta is full of crumbling houses, ambling cows and pigs asleep in the mud.
From an apartment in the center of town, 12-year-old Sveta, Albina and her two sons aged 20 and 14 now live in a 10 square meter (yard) room originally used as a market stall.
Its sides are metal lined with wood. It just holds two beds -- one pink for the girls, the other red for the boys -- a heater and a hot plate. A tangle of wiring reaches across the ceiling to a single light bulb.
Its shelves hold shampoo, soap, icons, a towel, a saucepan, clothes and schoolbooks.
"This winter was very hard, we were ill a lot. It was such a winter that I don't even want to talk about it," said Albina, while Sveta sat beside her on the bed, smiling shyly. Albina said Sveta received 25,000 rubles ($925) in compensation, but she was left out of the wave of aid that focused on former hostages and bereaved relatives.
Officials say the money -- 1.45 billion rubles in the first year after the attack -- has split many families in the poor North Ossetia region as they argue over how to share it. Albina said it had split the community as well. Those who received compensation had driven prices up, pushing those without compensation even further into poverty in a region where many already struggle to make ends meet.
"You can't even rent an apartment any more. The owners now ask for a year in advance, and the prices have gone up so I can't pay anyway," said Albina.
"People in Beslan have become very arrogant. You'd think it would have worked the other way, but it hasn't."
Copyright 2006 Reuters.
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