The Beslan School Massacre Kills 334 Including 186 Children, Hurricane Ivan Devastates Grenada and Iraq’s Interim Government Faces an Unrelenting Insurgency

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 October 2004 | Reporting Period: 3 July – 2 October 2004

Quarterly Briefing

• Chechen separatist militants seize School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetia on September 1; over 1,100 people — mostly children and their parents attending the first day of the school year — are held hostage for three days; the crisis ends in chaotic violence on September 3; 334 hostages are killed, of whom 186 are children; the attack is the deadliest terrorist incident on Russian soil and the most devastating school atrocity of modern times; Russian President Putin immediately responds by centralising federal power and eliminating the direct election of regional governors.
• Hurricane Ivan makes landfall on Grenada as a Category 3 storm on September 7, destroying or severely damaging approximately 90 per cent of the island’s buildings; the nutmeg crop that underpins Grenada’s agricultural economy is devastated; an estimated 39 people are killed across the Caribbean by Ivan’s passage through the region; Jamaica experiences significant damage from Ivan’s track; the storm continues into the Gulf of Mexico and strikes Alabama, causing widespread destruction before looping back across Florida.
• Iraq’s interim government, established when sovereignty was formally transferred from the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to the Iraqi Interim Government on June 28, faces an intensifying Sunni insurgency through the summer; the city of Fallujah remains outside government control and is a base of operations for insurgent networks; the interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi presents a confident face but the security situation continues to deteriorate across the Sunni triangle.
• The Athens Olympic Games proceed without incident from August 13 to 29, despite pre-Games security fears after the Madrid bombings in March; Caribbean athletes perform creditably; the Games are widely judged a success for Greece despite cost overruns and infrastructure delays that had produced sustained scepticism in the months beforehand.
• Sudan’s Darfur crisis deepens through the quarter; government-backed Janjaweed militias continue a campaign of systematic violence against non-Arab villages that UN officials describe as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis; an estimated one million people are displaced; the African Union deploys a small monitoring mission but lacks the mandate and resources to protect civilians; the United States Congress adopts a non-binding resolution describing the situation as genocide.
• Oil prices continue their upward trajectory through the quarter, exceeding $50 per barrel for the first time in history in late September; Caribbean economies reliant on imported fuel face mounting energy import bills; Jamaica’s oil-dependent electricity system and transport sector face significant cost pressures that are beginning to feed through into inflation.

Prologue: Violence Without Borders

Three months that began with the transfer of Iraqi sovereignty and ended with oil above $50 per barrel contained within them one of the most harrowing single episodes of the entire post-Cold War period: the Beslan school siege. The murder of 186 children in a Russian primary school by Chechen-linked militants on September 3 produced an immediate and visceral international reaction that transcended the usual political alignments of the war on terror. For the Caribbean, the quarter brought its own catastrophe in the form of Ivan’s passage, which confirmed what Caribbean governments had been arguing in climate forums for years: that small island states bore the greatest physical risk from extreme weather while contributing the least to the emissions that drove it.

Beslan and the Russian Response

The siege of Beslan’s School Number One was the culmination of a sustained Chechen militant campaign that had included the near-simultaneous bombing of two Russian airliners in late August, killing 89 people, and a suicide bombing at a Moscow metro station days before the school was seized. The Beslan attackers — a mixture of Chechen separatists, Ingush militants and Arab jihadists — held over a thousand people in the gymnasium for three days without adequate food or water in temperatures exceeding 35 degrees Celsius. The end, when it came on September 3, was chaotic: explosions inside the gymnasium triggered a mass breakout; Russian security forces and armed civilians fired into the crowds; the hostage-taking collapsed into a firefight that killed victims and hostage-takers alike.

Putin’s response was decisive and authoritarian. Within days he announced the abolition of direct elections for regional governors, who would henceforth be appointed by the Kremlin and confirmed by regional legislatures. He framed the change as a necessary security reform; critics called it an opportunistic centralisation of power using terror as a pretext. The Caribbean watched the Russian response with some of the same distance it brought to all post-Soviet affairs; the more immediate implication was oil. Russia’s internal instability, alongside continued Iraq disruptions, was a factor in the crude price surge that was pressing $50 per barrel — a level that, only two years earlier, would have seemed implausible.

Ivan, Grenada and Caribbean Vulnerability

For the Caribbean, Ivan was the story of the quarter. The storm’s track through the Lesser Antilles on September 7 struck Grenada with a force that left the island transformed: roofs stripped, walls collapsed, the Grand Anse beach hotel strip damaged, the historic spice industry in ruins. Jamaica, which Ivan crossed on September 11-12, sustained flooding and wind damage; roads and bridges were damaged; several parishes were declared disaster areas. The storm then intensified further in the Gulf of Mexico and struck the Alabama coast on September 16 before an unusual looping track brought it back across Florida. The total cost across the Caribbean and the US Gulf states was measured in the billions.

Grenada’s situation was uniquely severe. An island of 100,000 people, with a GDP of roughly $800 million, faced reconstruction costs estimated to exceed $900 million. The nutmeg crop, which took many years to regrow from damaged trees, would not recover within the decade. The reconstruction operation required sustained CARICOM support and bilateral assistance; donor pledges were being assembled as this edition is published. Jamaica’s diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States sent remittances to help affected families; regional solidarity was genuine if limited in scale.

Looking Ahead

The US presidential election on November 2 is the dominant political event of the coming quarter; the result will determine the course of the Iraq War, the war on terror and US Caribbean policy for the next four years. Afghanistan holds its presidential election on October 9; Hamid Karzai is the front-runner in what will be the country’s first direct presidential vote. Iraq’s insurgency shows no sign of abating; a major offensive to retake Fallujah is anticipated before the January 2005 elections. Oil at above $50 per barrel presents sustained pressure on Caribbean budgets and energy security; the Jamaica government is managing the pass-through carefully, but there is no obvious relief in sight.

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Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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