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331 White Balloons and a Tree of Mourning
By Francesca Mereu Staff Writer
BESLAN, North Ossetia -- Inside the gym, next to a carpet of fresh carnations, roses and lilies, the black-clad women wept, their faces showing exhaustion from three tearful days of keeping vigil at the place where their children died.
Their anguished sobs were the only sounds to pierce the silence that engulfed Beslan and all of North Ossetia at 1:05 p.m. on Saturday. Exactly a year before, the first explosion rang out from the gym, beginning the bloody conclusion to the attack on the school.
After the minute of silence, a bell tolled and children released 331 white balloons, one for each of the dead, into the gray sky. Later, at the cemetery on the outskirts of town, officials unveiled a 9-meter-high bronze sculpture titled "The Tree of Mourning," depicting children with angels' wings above grieving mothers, and released 331 doves into the air.
A group of Cossacks, wearing light blue uniforms and fur hats, attended the ceremonies at the school and the cemetery. Feofan, Patriarch of Vladikavkaz and Stavropol, prayed for the souls of the dead.
>From early morning, tens of thousands of people had
filled the school's yard and the cemetery as the small
town of 30,000 commemorated a final day of public
grieving.
More than 5,000 people, all of them in black, waited patiently in line, many for nearly an hour, to enter the crowded gym. There they placed flowers, toys, candy and bottles of water.
"Why did they kill you? Why?" screamed Irina Dzhibilova, looking at portraits of her daughter-in-law Emma, 440, and her grandchildren Boris, 9, and Alana, 12, who died in the attack. "What did you do to deserve this?"
"They were my family. I brought them up," she said, as she wiped away her tears and took a sedative from the hands of a Red Cross nurse.
On the other side of the gym, a woman leaning on a young man and a young woman was calling out to her dead husband, Sergei, who was shot by the terrorists on the first day of the school seizure.
Several women collapsed and were given first aid at a mobile medical unit near the school.
A group of more than 20 mothers held a three-day vigil in the gym, spending the nights covered only by light blankets. Their children also spent two terrible nights there in the hands of the terrorists, they said.
During the minute of silence, people in School No. 1 could not stop weeping.
"Who's responsible for this tragedy? Why has no one been punished? Look what those bastards managed to do," said one man, pointing to a school wall near the gym that was half-destroyed in the fighting.
"We'll never get justice. Nobody in this country cares about our children," said an old woman, wiping her eyes.
No speeches or statements were made during the ceremony in the schoolyard.
Around 2 p.m., thousands of people left the school for the cemetery at the edge of town. More than 12,000 people came to the cemetery, where the gravestones were carved out of red granite that the Kazakh government donated.
The names of all the victims were read out in a recorded announcement that lasted 20 minutes. No one talked, and people switched off their cell phones. Besides the voice of the man reading out the names, only weeping and the squawking of crows could be heard.
Then officials pulled a white cloth off a monument titled "The Tree of Mourning," showing grieving mothers with outstretched arms forming the trunk of the tree, supporting children with angels' wings in the branches. Beslan residents selected the design used for the monument, which was made by artist Zaur Dzanagov and sculptor Alan Kornayev.
The 331 doves, released into the air to symbolize the souls of the dead, were brought from Moscow, said Murat Yezeyev, a spokesman for the Vladikavkaz mayor's office.
A sea of flowers, candles, toys and bottles of water soon covered the area around the base of the monument.
After the ceremony, a woman wept inconsolably as she hugged the graves of her children. Their names were etched into the stone: Stella Khuziyeva, 8, and Georgy Khuziyev, 9. "How am I going to live without you? Why did I survive? I was unable to protect you, I can't forgive myself for that," she said.
The woman survived the school seizure but lost her left eye, said a neighbor who was taking care of her.
Some people placed small tables between the graves and ate rice and drank vodka in a traditional gesture.
Nadezhda Melnik wept at the grave of her son-in-law, Sergei Dryukov, 29. She put a small stuffed bunny on his grave and took away a small threadbare teddy bear.
"He loved toys so much, my daughter even called him zayats," or hare, she said.
Many families in Beslan held memorial gatherings with relatives, neighbors and friends on Saturday and Sunday. More memorials will be held in Beslan throughout the month.
"Each family will mark the anniversary of their relative's death the weekend after the day they found his or her body," Melnik said, adding that her family would hold theirs next weekend.
According to Ossetian tradition, each relative or neighbor who attends a memorial gives the family of the dead at least 100 rubles to cover the cost of the food and drink.
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/09/05/002.html
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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