The message of terrorism is itself a weapon. We must work to defuse it.

Did you buy a paper? I asked my daughter. No, she said with a grimace and shudder. "I couldn't face it, I didn't want to read about it."

The "it", of course, was Beslan, and hundreds of children like my daughter's children, like your children, lying in that charnel-house of a gym. The first day of school, the crisp new uniforms, the songs and clasped hands, then terrible fear and death. A universal nightmare seemingly beyond scripting or imagining. But now that we have seen it again and again on 24-hour news, now that the plumes of smoke and the naked kids running are images scarred on our brains, what does it mean?

The danger, the real danger for professional politicians, professional journalists, professional know-alls everywhere, is not sensing the difference. So Boris Yeltsin was wrong to invade Chechnya a decade ago, and Vladimir Putin was wrong to play the hardest of hard men, and his crack troops cracked up. Wiser international counsels had better prevail.

So, fine: but also, so what? Human revulsion slams the door on expertise and reason. These could have been our children. Perhaps, one malign day, they will be our children. And if there is such evil, then perhaps there is also something called an international terrorist conspiracy.

Scant evidence, in all rationality, still buttresses that belief. Arabs among the Beslan corpses? Maybe, but Putin would say that, wouldn't he? Join Mother Russia in its "full-scale" battle for democracy, truth and justice in the style and wake of Father Texas? Stroll on . . . but don't stroll through the smoking ruins of Grozny, don't open your history books too wide. There are no simplicities here except the ultimate simplicity of total horror. But that may be enough.

For the difficult, inescapable thing, watching those pictures, is an eery feeling of manipulation. Somebody planned this and reckoned the cameras would be there. Take a panning shot of Middle School No. 1, go in close on the gym, frame the fleeing children from handy rooftops and let's see plenty of greenery, let's make Beslan like downtown Smallville or Littlehampton. We seemed to look down on a leafy stage set for carnage; and someone knew we would be watching.

Perhaps, in another life, that someone might have found other uses for his talents: orchestrating US Republican conventions or the backdrops at election campaign launches. He could have been super spin doctor, feted and interviewed. But instead, in the service of Chechnya, he sat alone in a darkened room and thought hard.

What kind of outrage makes world news these days? Those early al-Qaeda bomb blasts in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi seem pretty outdated now to be honest, just big bangs with loads of dead, no pictures beyond more destruction. Who cares about blowing holes in ships or trains? The wonder of September 11 was the pictures, the twin towers toppling. Play it again, Sam. Osama had made No. 1.

How do you follow that? By seizing a Moscow theatre, maybe, by making a stage your stage. Putin couldn't pretend that wasn't happening; the curtain rose on his front doorstep. But the trouble was that the theatre doors were locked, that the cameras couldn't peer inside. You had to rely on imagination - on the thought that this could be Broadway or the West End - and it wasn't enough. You needed a brand-new wheeze.

Politicians and their intelligence advisers, of course, are always wittering on about WMD. They read Tom Clancy and multiply the threat because that's their particular obsession. It is what seems real to them. But why bother hitting Wall Street with high-tech trappings when there are so many easier pickings on offer?

Beslan, North Ossetia. What kind of dateline is that? An obscure town near the Chechen border. A suitable target for infiltration, no nuclear scientists required. Just take a school hostage and see what happens.

Hostage-taking on a grand scale means time, among other things: time for the camera teams to arrive, time for the crisis and pressure to build. Will Putin give in? He can't. It would be the end of him. So it will all come to slaughter and bitter tears. But he'll have to let CNN, BBC and the rest see what happens if he wants to make this terrorism international. And then the world will, too, see what we Chechens can do.

Someone, that someone, wrote the script. Someone with despair in his heart calculated how it would work out - and break from behind the borders of control that stop us seeing what happens inside Chechnya. Someone wanted to put his case on the international map. Mission accomplished.

And for his next trick? An old peoples' home, a nursery, a hospital? There is no limit to the targets that may be chosen by terrorists who expect to die but know that they will make a splash in the process. There is no limit to the soft touches that cannot be anticipated or defended. Frontiers are meaningless, because pictures have no frontier. Fear needs no visa.

Two bleak things follow. One is that - whether or not it exists on any organised level - we shall gradually come to identify a force called international terrorism, a force defined not by the co-ordination of its strikes or creeds but by the orchestration of its inhuman propaganda. I manipulate, therefore I exist.

The other thing is self-knowledge for media-makers and media-watchers. If the malignant message is itself a device, a weapon of mass hysteria, how do we defuse it? By a suppression that undermines free society, that gives terror its victory? Or by the realisation that we are not puppets, that we must see and explain for ourselves. That we have a duty of understanding.

September 8, 2004

We will never overcome terrorism if we ignore the context of even the most horrendous terrorist acts, writes Gwynne Dyer.

What would we do without Richard Perle, everybody's favourite American neo-conservative? It was he who came up some years ago with the notion that we must "decontextualise terrorism": that is, we must stop trying to understand the reasons that some groups turn to terrorism, and simply condemn and kill them. No grievance, no injury, no cause is great enough to justify the use of terrorism.

This would be an excellent principle if only we could apply it to all uses of violence for political ends - including the violence carried out by legal governments using far more lethal weapons than terrorists have access to, causing far more deaths.

I'd be quite happy, for instance, to "decontextualise" nuclear weapons, agreeing that there are no circumstances that could possibly justify their use, and if you want to start decontextualising things such as cluster bombs and napalm, that would be all right with me, too. But that was not what Perle meant at all.

Perle was speaking specifically about Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel, and the point of "decontextualising" them was to make it unacceptable for people to point out that there is a connection between Palestinian terrorism and the fact that the Palestinians have lived under Israeli military occupation for the past 37 years and lost much of their land to Jewish settlements.

Since the Palestinians have no regular armed forces, if we all agree that any resort by them to irregular violence is completely unpardonable and without justification, then there is absolutely nothing they can legitimately do to oppose overwhelming Israeli military force.

"Decontextualising terrorism" would neatly solve Israel's problem with the Palestinians - and it would also solve Russia's problem with the Chechen resistance, which is why Russian President Vladimir Putin was so quick to describe the rash of terrorist attacks in recent weeks, and above all the school massacre in Beslan last Friday, as "a direct intervention against Russia by international terrorism".

Not by Chechen terrorism, because that would focus attention on Russian behaviour in Chechnya, where Russia's main human rights organisation, Memorial, estimates that 3000 innocent people have been "disappeared" by the Russian occupation forces since 1999. No, this was an act of international terrorism (by crazy, fanatical Muslims who just hate everybody else), and nothing to do with Russian policies in Chechnya.

Indeed, the Russian security services quickly let it be known that 10 of the 20 militants killed in the school siege in Beslan were "citizens of the Arab world" and that the attack was the work of al-Qaeda.

And how did they know this, since it's unlikely that the dead attackers were carrying genuine identity documents on them? It turns out Russian security "experts" surmised it from the "facial structure" of the dead terrorists. (You know, that unique facial structure that always lets you pick out the Arabs in a crowd.) But that was where Putin wanted the finger to point.

Ever since September 11, countries such as Russia and Israel that face serious challenges from Muslims living under their rule have been trying to rebrand their local struggles as part of the "global war on terrorism". For those that succeed, the rewards can be great: a flood of money and weapons from Washington, plus an end to Western criticism over the methods they use to suppress their Muslim rebels.

Without September 11, Israel would never have got away with building its "security fence" so deep inside Palestinian territory, and Russia would face constant Western criticism over the atrocities committed by its troops in Chechnya.

Chechnya was a thorn in Russia's side - and the Russians were an almost unlimited curse for the Chechens - long before anybody had heard of Osama bin Laden.

The Chechens, less than a million strong even today, were the last of the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus to be conquered by the Russian empire in the 19th century, holding out for an entire generation.

When German troops neared the Caucasus in 1943, Stalin deported the entire Chechen population to camps in Central Asia, fearing they would collaborate with the invaders - and half the Chechens died there before they were allowed to return home after the war. When the old Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Chechnya immediately declared independence, and successfully fought off a Russian attempt to reconquer it in 1994-96, although the fighting left tens of thousands dead and Grozny, the capital, in ruins.

That should have been the end of it, but Vladimir Putin launched a second war against Chechnya in 1999, just after Boris Yeltsin chose him as his successor. (The deal was that Putin could be Russia's president if he promised to protect Yeltsin from corruption charges after his retirement.) But the practically unknown Putin still had to persuade the Russians to vote for him in a more or less honest election, so he restarted the war in Chechnya to build his image as a strong man with Russian voters.

Five years later, Chechnya is a war-torn landscape patrolled by about 100,000 Russian soldiers, many thousands are dead, and the Chechen resistance is carrying out terrorist attacks in Russians cities.

There may be a few foreign volunteers from other Muslim countries involved in the struggle, but this is not part of some international terrorist conspiracy. It is not even a Russian-Chechen war, really. It is Putin's war, and you can't "decontextualise" that.

We've been forced to witness the massacre of innocents. In New York, Madrid, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Bali, we have seen thousands of people destroyed while going about the daily activities of life.

We've been forced to endure the massacre of children. Whether it's teenagers outside an Israeli disco or students in Beslan, Russia, we've seen kids singled out as special targets.

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare: "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenceless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, which trains kindergarten children to become bombs, which fetishises death, which sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the US out of Iraq; they're forcing the US to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism - freedom even from human nature, which says, love children, and love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.

We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death."Three years after September 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible, targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch Foreign Minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.

Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated on the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.

Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers". Three years after September 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalise terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?

They're still victims of the delusion the American critic Paul Berman diagnosed after September 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.

September 9, 2004 - 4:29PM

A bomb blast outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta was a terrorist attack on Australia, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said.

A bomb exploded outside the embassy about 10.15am local time (1.15pm AEST).

"It is clearly a terrorist attack, it was outside the Australian embassy, you would have to conclude that it was directed towards Australia," Mr Downer told reporters in Adelaide.

Mr Downer said all Australian-based staff were safe, but six Indonesian nationals who worked at the embassy remained unaccounted for.

"All of the Australians based at the Australian embassy are safe, two of them I think suffered very minor injuries, scratches, but nothing serious," Mr Downer said.

"There are six locally engaged staff who haven't been accounted for, that is Indonesians employed by the Australian embassy.

"That's not to say that in any way we would conclude they've been caught up in the explosion.

"We think, though, that there is a certainty of casualties amongst the local security forces who are providing protection for the Australian embassy."

Mr Downer said he would travel to Jakarta, along with heads of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), ASIO and seven AFP officers.

Mr Downer said the specifics of the explosion remained unclear.

"At this stage we don't know who was responsible for the explosion, it could take a bit of time to establish that, as is often the case," Mr Downer said.

"Naturally enough our suspicions turn to Jemaah Islamiah (JI).

"We had some advice a few days ago of a possible terrorist attack in Jakarta focussing on western style hotels ... but we didn't have any information of a specific attack on the Australian embassy."

Mr Downer said the explosion occurred "very close" to the embassy, adding "it was a very large explosion".

"We assume it was a vehicle-borne explosion but whether it was a suicide bomb or whether the vehicle somehow was abandoned and then the bomb let off, we don't know the answer to that," he said.

"The perimeter wall of the embassy have been very severely damaged, windows of the building on the side where the explosion took place have been blown out."

Mr Downer said the Australian embassy had been evacuated, with workers congregating on an embassy tennis court immediately after the explosion.

He said it was "dangerous" to speculate on whether the attack was purposely timed for during the Australian election campaign.

"It's quite an important point I think that we had some information which came from the Americans at the end of last week that there could be a terrorist attack against western hotels," he said.

"Whether this (explosion) has got something to do with this information, we clearly don't know, but there was no suggestion that that particular piece of information ... had anything to do with the Australian election.

"There was just no reference to that in the intelligence and I haven't seen anything in the intelligence which suggests anybody is trying to intervene in the Australian election.

"But I can only say to you, I simply do not know.

"We have to find out a great deal more about this yet, as we will do."