31.10.2002 By YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

Well, at last, and for the worst of all reasons, we are buzzing about Chechnya like furious bees. In that sense, at least, those homicidal men and women who took over the theatre in Moscow achieved something.

They were callous. They imprisoned the innocent, killed three of them and terrified the rest, until the Russian authorities stormed in, leaving more than 100 dead and many more injured.

The media and the Russian authorities describe them as Muslim separatists, not paramilitaries fighting for freedom from Russian occupation, which is how they see themselves.

We may loathe their latest act of terror - and I do without reservation - but that is no excuse to misrepresent deliberately the excruciating struggles of the Chechen people, which, in the eyes of radicalised Muslims, is just one more example of how unfair the world is to their people.

Depressingly, the only time Muslims are seen and heard by the world is when the pitiless among them turn to sickening violence or threaten Armageddon. Until this happens, their grievances and aspirations are ignored or crushed by the powerful. When it happens, moral authority is claimed by the powerful to perpetuate accusations against all Muslims.

Serb nationalists are not seen as Christian terrorists. But Muslims are different. We now know, guys, that damned Muslims are the indisputable barbarians in the new globalised world where all the rest of humanity has embraced the postmodern universe of pleasure and profit.

Even Russia, our old enemy, now smiles and shakes our hands. Old communists are so much more civilised than the cloth-heads who did the Twin Towers, Bali and now Moscow, not to mention all those sniper murders in and around Washington. All bloody al Qaeda.

You could see this as the continuation of what Edward Said and other scholars have called "orientalism", the demonisation of and unjustifiable violence against Muslims through history. Did you know, for example, that Muslims were persecuted from 1820 to 1920 across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, including in Bulgaria, Georgia and, yes, Russia?

Tolstoy described this in the 1840s: "Russian soldiers did not let the women and children escape the horrors that followed as they entered the houses under the cover of darkness, horrors no official narrators dared describe."

For months now I have thought about an 8-year-old girl who was repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers in Chechnya after watching her mother go through the same. She told her aunt she did not want to upset further her bleeding and screaming mother. The child apparently did not cry at all, and let the men push her on to the next, then the next rapist. Her father had been shot and her two brothers had disappeared, and like the African-American writer Maya Angelou, who was raped as a child, this girl is now wilfully mute.

Chechnya is full of shallow mass graves with chunks of bodies, hacked or blown apart. Vanessa Redgrave last year hosted a meeting in London with Ahmed Zakeav, the Minister of Culture in Chechnya, a civilised man who condemns terror and the vengeful brutality of extremist Chechens.

I believed his account of the human rights violations by the Russian Army and ignored by the United States and Britain. As the Palestinian academic Daud Abdullah says in an essay: "After 11 September, international criticism of Russia's human rights record in the Caucasus faded into silence. By playing the 'war against terror' card, Russia managed to deflect attention [from] the extra-judicial killings, detentions, torture and sexual abuse."

The rape story was emailed to me by a human rights activist. I have known her for many years and she is no apologist for all things Muslim. Before this she was in the villages of Pakistan where tribal leaders were using rape as a weapon against families who transgressed.

She, like me, is a Muslim by birth and one who struggles to keep her principles steady at this time when Muslims do so much wrong and are also much, much wronged.

If the raped child ends up with explosives strapped to her body to blow up theatregoers or sports supporters or travellers, is it possible to understand her actions? Or is this understanding itself criminal because it is, in fact, showing tacit approval of horrific acts by suicide bombers?

Yes, to the first and a resounding no to the second. We need the courage to ask difficult questions just when anger and outrage are pushing us towards retribution by which again the innocent will pay a greater price than the guilty.

In this new world order, how do the oppressed secure their rights or even have their voices heard? Passive resistance would have no impact. They cannot win battles because they are utterly out-armed whether by Israel, Russia, India or, ultimately, the US, whose spending on arms exceeds that of every other country put together.

The Gulf War and the war on Iraq to come are calculatedly unequal, with no deaths expected on our side and no need to count the bodies of the opposition.

To make things worse, this axis of good promotes the worst leadership in troubled areas, mostly people who can be bought off cheaply in return for ensuring that nothing like real democracy or civil society can emerge.

For what will the powerful globe runners do if there are assertive democracies in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq and Chechnya, or breakaway republics in China? Why would they say anything unpalatable to the Hindu fundamentalist Indian Government that allowed 5000 Muslims to be massacred in Gujarat after Muslim extremists killed hundreds of Hindus?

Am I here turning Stalinist Muslims into the real victims? No. I hate what they do. I hate their idea of Islam. I hate their hatred for all things Western. I reject the idea that the end justifies the means.

Suicide bombers, whatever the injustices they are fighting, do more harm than good. They make it easier for the enemies of Islam to make life even worse than it has been for Muslims in the past 20 years.

Most Muslims worldwide would agree with me. But we will not be believed because we cannot provide the proof required; we will not parrot the lies of Bush, Blair, Putin or Sharon. We can see too clearly that these leaders share the responsibility for the terrifyingly unstable world we are all now trying to cope with.

Unless they understand this, more and more angry young Muslims will turn up to join groups that offer their rage direction and weapons. And be very afraid because they, too, are globalised; they are fighting a guerrilla war in a world without boundaries.

Unconfirmed reports say that the women who held the hostages in the theatre were from the Middle East. Like the Britons fighting with al Qaeda, these are the new trans-nationals. They are indestructible because they are happy to die.

They will always find support and places to hide because for millions of the disenfranchised these obscene counterblasts may feel like the only way to get a better deal for themselves and their children.

-- Anonymous, October 31, 2002