Enemies of all humankind

From the Los Angeles Times (registration required):

Beslan, Russia - Zalina Dzandarova cradles her son Alan as he sleeps with his small face buried against her stomach. He is the child Dzandarova was able to save. The child she chose to save, really.

It is the other one, little Alana, her 6-year-old daughter, whose image torments her: Alana clutching her hand, Alana crying and calling after her. Alana's sobs disappearing into the distance as Dzandarova walked out of Middle School No. 1 here Thursday, clutching 2-year-old Alan in her arms.

Guerrillas armed with automatic rifles and explosive belts who are holding hundreds of hostages at the small provincial school in southern Russia allowed 26 women and children to leave. About a dozen mothers, like Dzandarova, were allowed to take only one child, forced to leave another behind.

"I didn't want to make this choice," a stunned-looking Dzandarova, 27, said in the reception room of her father-in-law's house a few miles from the school. "People say they are happy that my son and I are saved. But how can I be happy if my daughter's still inside there?"
.....
[S]he learned that she would have to choose between taking her son or her daughter.

Dzandarova had both Alan and Alana with her and made a snap decision to pass Alana to her 16-year-old sister-in-law. But the guerrillas saw through the ruse and refused to allow her to take the older child.

"Alana was clinging to me and holding my hand firmly. But they separated us, and said: 'You go with the boy. Your sister can stay here with her.' I cried. I begged them. Alana cried. The women around us wept. One of the Chechens said: 'If you don't go now, you don't go at all. You stay here with your children... and we will shoot all of you.' "

She couldn't save both of them. She could only die with both of them - or save one of them and herself.

"I didn't have time to think what I was doing," she said. "I pressed Alan even stronger to myself, and I went out, and I heard all the time how my daughter was crying and calling for me behind my back. I thought my heart would break into pieces there and then."

Comparisons with Nazi barbarism are much misused, but those responsible for this horror are, for once, true and authentic heirs:

Standing near the dugout half-filled with bodies, the child said: "Mother, why are we waiting, let us run!" Some of the people who attempted to escape were caught immediately and shot on the spot. The mother stood there facing the grave. A German walked up to the woman and asked: "Whom shall I shoot first?" When she did not answer, he tore her daughter from her hands. The child cried out and was killed.

(Also this.) Another detail from Beslan:

[I]nside the sports hall... hundreds of women and children lay captive. They had stripped off their clothes in the sauna[-]like heat, and deprived of water by their captors, some began to drink their own urine.

These people, incidentally - the captors - the Guardian is still content to call militants. One wonders what level of depravity has to be passed before this voice of British liberalism calls them and others of their type by a more appropriate name: terrorists, fanatics, killers.

In the tradition out of which the concept of crimes against humanity emerged - and the deliberate targeting of children is an especially heartless crime - they are enemies of all humankind. (See 'CAH 4' - old normblog site, August 20 2003.)