Fears of race war in wake of siege

As mourners gather for a third day of mass funerals in Beslan today fears are growing of an ethnic war between Christians and Muslims.

The authorities have already set up road blocks in the south Russian region with troops in armoured cars in an attempt to avoid further bloodshed.

The fear is the terror attack on the Beslan school may stoke up old hatreds among the peoples in the Caucasus, sparking a return to the Christian-against-Muslim violence which led to an ethnic war in 1992.

The Orthodox Christian community around Beslan was holding an organised protest today calling for the authorities to do more to protect them against what they say is provocation by Muslims in the neighbouring province of Ingusetia.

The hostage-taker who was taken alive and paraded on television at the weekend - now identified by a lawyer as Nur-Pashi Kulayev - said on both state-run channels that he and other members of the group were told the goal of the raid was "to unleash a war on the whole of the Caucasus". Now many in Beslan - part of the mostly Christian North Ossetia - are openly calling for revenge.

"When this is all over, you just wait, we'll get them - our neighbours, the Ingush," one mourner said yesterday during a wake as dozens of funerals were held in Beslan.

Relations between North Ossetia and Ingusetia have been tense ever since the war erupted in nearby Chechnya.

North Ossetia had been an island of calm in a region dominated by the fighting in Chechnya. But now there are fears that Chechen rebels are widening the war across the whole region following the school attack and an earlier terrorist attack which killed 70 people in Ingusetia in June.

Conflict between Ossetians and Ingush runs deep.

The Ingush are Muslims and have long sympathised with their close relatives the Chechens. Both ethnic groups were deported to Central Asia during the Second World War because Soviet leader Josef Stalin feared they would help the invading German army against their longtime Russian foes. Chechnya and Ingusetia were part of a single administrative district in the Soviet era.

The Ingush returned home starting in the 1950s and demanded the return of homes inhabited by Ossetians, who are mainly Orthodox Christian and friendly with Russians, having joined the Russian Empire voluntarily in 1774. But the Ingush have since suffered decades of discrimination, forced to buy back their homes and to live as second-class citizens.

Fighting broke out in 1992 when Ingush militants demanded control of Ingush land in North Ossetia. Hundreds of people were killed and at least 50,000 ethnic Ingush had to flee their homes in the province.

A friendship agreement between Ingusetia and North Ossetia was signed two years ago, but people are openly frightened once more.

"Where can we go? We have nowhere to go," said Marina, 30, an Ingush living in the town of Chermen whose father-in-law is the local mullah. She left Chermen for two years when the war broke out in 1992, and remembers living with only the clothes on her back and cowering under gunfire. "I hope to God it doesn't happen again," she said. "We've already known this before."