Nothing can ever excuse the horrors of the Beslan massacre or the guilt of the revolting butchers who carried it out, but we will, doubtless, be hearing a lot from some sources about how the Russians at least partly brought this massacre on their own heads by their terrible mistreatment of the Chechens over the years.

It is, of course, certainly true that imperial Russian and, far more so, Soviet treatment of the Chechens was disgusting and, during the 1940s, frankly genocidal. Adding to the misery, the brutality of the wars waged by Yeltsin and Putin against their Chechen opposition has, at times, been staggering. Nevertheless, we should be careful about the extent to which Moscow can be blamed for the current nightmare. Russia did offer Chechnya independence in all but name in the mid-1990s. The result was the creation of a slum statelet that combined religious bigotry, military adventurism and aggressive banditry in roughly equal measures.

It’s also worth noting that the guerillas now in the vanguard of the resistance to Moscow want far more than independence for their own country. As this piece from the Sunday Telegraph explains, the objectives of their leader, Shamil Basayev, now include the establishment of an Islamic emirate across a wide swathe of the northern Caucasus.

And is there evidence that these guerillas gets at least some funding from sources linked to the cesspit ‘kingdom’ now known as Saudi Arabia?

Well, what do you think?