Survivors face struggle to overcome trauma

Russian woman cries as she lays flowers in front of the representative office of North Ossetia in Moscow yesterday. Flags flew at half mast across Russia while residents in the small town of Beslan wept over dozens of coffins yesterday as the country mourned the death of hundreds of Beslan school hostages and braced itself for future attacks. PHOTO: AFP

In a state of acute shock, he will need long-term therapy.

It was supposed to have been a great day for Robert, his first at school. Five days later he is here, a bullet wound in the stomach, his life saved by his dead mother.

Relatives surround his bed, unable to hold back their tears each time he calls out for his mum, who they say saved him when she let him out of the window of the school where militants were holding 1,000 people hostage.

They are joined by pediatric psychologists Zara Arbieva and Dina Guluieva, doing the rounds at the children's hospital in this southern Russian city, where most of the young victims of the three-day siege have been brought.

"So many of these children have lost their mother. This will make their recovery longer and more difficult," says Arbieva.

For outsiders, what the children in this hospital have been through is unimaginable. Held by armed militants for three days without water and food, they were barely able to breathe in the crowded, stuffy school gymnasium that was their prison.

But the manner of their escape was even more traumatic. Rushing out of the collapsed building into a storm of gunfire, witnessing the bloody horror of severed limbs, exposed innards, mothers screaming for their children.

For Robert, whose mother was killed along with hundreds of others in the nightmarish conclusion to the siege, the days of psychological torment have only just begun.

After an initial state of great excitement, where doctors will need to give Robert sedatives to help relax him, the boy will enter a phase where his nervous system will be dangerously weak.

Arbieva says it is during this phase that he will be most at risk from neurosis and he will have to be in therapy for at least a year. Yet neither his intellectual abilities nor his memory should be affected.

In the long run, the psychological risk may be greater for those who seem calm, like Aslan, 14. Still attached to a drip, he does not move an inch and stares at the door of the hospital with a totally blank look.

Meanwhile, cold drizzle fell from leaden skies and an elderly woman wailed "God, why did you take him so young?". The once-peaceful town of Beslan was one large funeral site yesterday as it buried its children.

"You won't find a soul here who is not attending a funeral today," said a young man standing in the burnt ruins of the school gymnasium where 1,000 were held hostage before their three-day ordeal came to a fiery, bloody end.