Radio Australia Today Editorial

Women terrorists: the elastic breaks

31 March 2010

(Source: ABC News)

This is a photo, probably taken on a camera phone immediately after a suicide bomber blew herself up on the Moscow subway. Around the same time another woman killed herself in the same way in another part of the Metro. Together, the two bombers were responsible for the deaths of 39 people on those trains.

We have heard of women suicide bombers before, but they have never been the norm. People across the world were asking what would encourage two women to take so many lives, many of them young lives.

The answer was not long in coming. Moscow’s Echo radio is reporting there is evidence that links the suspects to Chechnya. There are suggestions that the women are part of a Chechen group called The Black Widows. What they do is kill in revenge for the deaths of husbands and other relatives in the Chechen wars.

In other words, these women want to be martyrs. Their psychology can only be guessed at, but if some media reports are right, these women are eager volunteers, wanting blood revenge, even if it does mean that their lives end in the process.

The suicide aspect might also explain how they are capable of taking so many innocent people with them. They and their community had been destroyed by the Russians, so perhaps they feel the just revenge would be to do likewise to the Russians.

That means killing young girls and other innocents: people who may well have personally been opposed to the Chechen occupation or the Russian government’s heavy-handed tactics in that region.

It shows how grief can transform a loving mother, wife and daughter into someone who has gone beyond caring; beyond logic.

It is a lesson for every head of government who makes a decision to wage war. It stretches the elasticity of people, and their resilience can only be pulled so far.

Then you get a Moscow bombing.