On October 23, 2002, in the middle of the second war in Chechnya between Russian federal forces and separatists, 912 people who came to see the show “Nord-Ost” found themselves in the hands of a kamikaze commando.
The hostage-taking is followed live by millions of television viewers for two days and three nights, until the attack by Russian special forces who manage to defuse the explosives and save most of the hostages.
But the gas used by the Russian forces during the operation, whose composition is still unknown, led to the death of 125 people, including ten children. Five other hostages are executed by the terrorists.
For 20 years, Svetlana Goubareva, 65, cannot stop thinking about that evening, when she took her 13-year-old daughter Sacha and her American fiancé Sandy to the theater.
That day, Svetlana and Sandy Alan Booker, a 49-year-old engineer from Oklahoma whom she met on a dating site, want to celebrate the filing of her visa application at the American Embassy in Moscow.
They buy the last three tickets for this musical show.
– 57 hours of siege –
At the beginning of the second act, the audience expects the scene of the “landing” of an airplane, which all Moscow was talking about then, but instead masked men in camouflage uniforms come out on the proscenium. and shoot in the air.
Three years after Vladimir Putin launched the second Chechen war, the threat of terrorist acts is very present in Russia, but Svetlana then still believes that it is an “artistic decision”.
“It’s Sandy who understands what’s going on better than me and forces us to put ourselves on the ground between the rows,” she told AFP.
Finally, the Chechen commando – about twenty men and as many women – announces its demand: the withdrawal of Russian troops from the independence republic.
This is followed by 57 hours of a siege that Svetlana constantly lives and relives: a thousand hostages frozen in their armchairs, female suicide bombers wearing explosive belts that line the passages, an orchestra pit transformed into a stinking toilet. .
Citizens of Kazakhstan, Svetlana and her daughter, are part with Sandy of the group of foreign nationals that the commando promises to free after the intervention of their embassies.
On the last night of the siege, the three of them fall asleep thinking of their promised release at 8:00 a.m. But in the early morning, a substance blown through the ventilation system neutralizes everyone without distinction, paving the way for the intervention of Russian special forces.
– “Correct your mistakes” –
A few hours later, awakened in a hospital room, Svetlana learns on the radio that her daughter and her fiancé are among those killed. “For me, it was all over,” she sums up, in a flat voice.
Twenty years after the tragedy, the families of the hostages are still wondering: Why so many victims? Why did doctors run out of antidotes? Why were ambulances stuck in traffic jams? How could the terrorists place so many explosives in the theater?
So many questions about which the Russian state has never been held accountable. And the complaints filed by the families of the hostages have always been rejected by Russian justice, while the European Court of Human Rights condemned Russia in 2011 for not having established those responsible for the lack of coordination of the operation. .
“We cannot avoid future attacks without investigating those that have already taken place”, pleads with AFP Dmitri Milovidov, 59, head of the association “Nord-Ost” bringing together the relatives of the victims, and who lost her 14-year-old daughter to gas suffocation.
Two years after Dubrovka, a new attack by a Chechen commando took place in Beslan, in North Ossetia, with the taking of a thousand people hostage in a school. The tragedy leaves 330 dead, including 186 children, and Russian forces are criticized for their disorderly assault on the building.
“By forgetting our mistakes, we make them again,” laments AFP Irina Khramtsova, a 39-year-old entrepreneur, who lost her father, a trumpet player, at the Dubrovka theater.
“Until the state learns to correct its mistakes, these attacks will happen again, and that is my biggest nightmare,” she admits.
“We know the pain of loss and we have learned a lot from it,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.
