Poisoned by Putin
The horror of Beslan was made still worse by the intimidation of
Russia's servile media
Anna Politkovskaya
Thursday September 9, 2004
The Guardian
It is the morning of September 1. Reports from North Ossetia are
hard to believe: a school in Beslan has been seized. Half an hour to
pack my things as my mind works furiously on how to get to the
Caucasus. And another thought: to look for the Chechen separatist
leader, Aslan Maskhadov, let him come out of hiding, let him go to
the hostage-takers, and then ask them to free the children.
Then followed a long evening at Vnukovo airport. Crowds of
journalists were trying to get on a plane south, just as flights
were being postponed. Obviously, there are some people who would
like to delay our departure. I use my mobile and speak openly about
the purpose of my flight: "Look for Maskhadov", "persuade
Maskhadov".
We have long stopped talking over our phones openly, assuming they
are tapped. But this is an emergency. Eventually a man introduces
himself as an airport executive: "I'll put you on a flight to
Rostov." In the minibus, the driver tells me that the Russian
security services, the FSB, told him to put me on the Rostov flight.
As I board, my eyes meet those of three passengers sitting in a
group: malicious eyes, looking at an enemy. But I don't pay
attention. This is the way most FSB people look at me.
The plane takes off. I ask for a tea. It is many hours by road from
Rostov to Beslan and war has taught me that it's better not to eat.
At 21:50 I drink it. At 22:00 I realise that I have to call the air
stewardess as I am rapidly losing consciousness. My other memories
are scrappy: the stewardess weeps and shouts: "We're landing, hold
on!"
"Welcome back," said a woman bending over me in Rostov regional
hospital. The nurse tells me that when they brought me in I
was "almost hopeless". Then she whispers: "My dear, they tried to
poison you." All the tests taken at the airport have been destroyed -
on orders "from on high", say the doctors.
Meanwhile, the horror in Beslan continues. Something strange is
going on there on September 2: no officials speak to the relatives
of hostages, no one tells them anything. The relatives besiege
journalists. They beg them to ask the authorities to give some sort
of explanation. The families of the hostages are in an information
vacuum. But why?
In the morning, also at Vnukovo airport, Andrei Babitsky is detained
on a specious pretext. As a result, another journalist known for
seeing his investigations through to the end and being outspoken in
the foreign press is prevented from going to Beslan.
Word comes that Ruslan Aushev, the former president of Ingushetia,
rejected by the authorities for advocating a settlement of the
Chechen crisis, suddenly walked into negotiations with the
terrorists in Beslan. He walked in alone because the people at the
special services headquarters responsible for the negotiations were
unable for 36 hours to agree among themselves who would go first.
The militants give three babies to Aushev and then release 26 more
kids and their mothers. But the media try to hush up Aushev's
courageous behaviour: no negotiations, nobody has gone inside.
By September 3, the families of hostages are in a total news
blackout. They are desperate; they all remember the experience of
the Dubrovka theatre siege in which 129 people died when the special
services released gas into the building, ending the stand-off. They
remember how the government lied.
The school is surrounded by people with hunting rifles. They are
ordinary people, the fathers and brothers of the hostages who have
despaired of getting help from the state; they have decided to
rescue their relatives themselves. This has been a constant issue
during the past five years of the second war in Chechnya: people
have lost all hope of getting any protection from the state and they
expect nothing but extra-judicial executions from the special
services. So they try to defend themselves and their loved ones.
Self-defence, naturally, leads to lynching. It couldn't be
otherwise. After the theatre siege in 2002, the hostages made this
harrowing discovery: save yourself, because the state can only help
to destroy you.
And it's the same in Beslan now. Official lies continue. The media
promote official views. They call it "taking a state-friendly
position", meaning a position of approval of Vladimir Putin's
actions. The media don't have a critical word to say about him. The
same applies to the president's personal friends, who happen to be
the heads of FSB, the defence ministry and the interior ministry. In
the three days of horror in Beslan, the "state-friendly media" never
dared to say aloud that the special services were probably doing
something wrong. They never dared to hint to the state duma and the
federation council - the parliament - that they might do well to
convene an emergency session to discuss Beslan.
The top news story is Putin flying into Beslan at night. We are
shown Putin thanking the special services; we see President
Dzasokhov, but not a word is said about Aushev. He is a disgraced
former president, disgraced because he urged the authorities not to
prolong the Chechen crisis, not to bring things to the point of a
tragedy that the state could not handle. Putin does not mention
Aushev's heroism, so the media are silent.
Saturday, September 4, the day after the terrible resolution of the
Beslan hostage-taking crisis. A staggering number of casualties, the
country is in shock. And there are still lots of people unaccounted
for, whose existence is denied by officials. All this was the
subject of a brilliant and, by present standards, very bold Saturday
issue of the newspaper Izvestia, which led with the headline "The
silence at the top". Official reaction was swift. Raf Shakirov, the
chief editor, was fired. Izvestia belongs to the nickel baron
Vladimir Potanin, and throughout the summer he was trembling in his
boots because he was afraid to share the fate of Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, who has been arrested on fraud
charges. He was doubtless trying to curry favour with Putin. The
result is that Shakirov, a talented newspaper manager and a
generally pro-establishment man, is out of the game, a latter-day
dissident - and this for deviating ever so slightly from the
official line.
You might think that journalists staged an action of protest in
support of Shakirov. Of course not. The Russian Union of Journalists
and the Media Union kept mum. Only a journalist who is loyal to the
establishment is treated as "one of us". If this is journalists'
approach to the cause that we serve, then it spells an end to the
basic tenet that we are working so that people know what is
happening and take the right decisions.
The events in Beslan have shown that the consequences of an
information vacuum are disastrous. People dismiss the state that has
left them in the lurch and try to act on their own, try to rescue
their loved ones themselves, and to exact their own justice on the
culprits. Later, Putin declared that the Beslan tragedy had nothing
to do with the Chechen crisis, so the media stopped covering the
topic. So Beslan is like September 11: all about al-Qaida. There is
no more mention of the Chechen war, whose fifth anniversary falls
this month. This is nonsense, but wasn't it the same in Soviet times
when everyone knew the authorities were talking rubbish but
pretended the emperor had his clothes on?
We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum
that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the
internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest,
if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility
to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial -
whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.
· Anna Politkovskaya is a journalist on the Novaya Gazeta newspaper;
she has won numerous awards for her reporting of the Chechnya
conflict and was involved in negotiations with the gunmen who
stormed the Dubrovka theatre in October 2002
novayagazeta.ru
The horror of Beslan was made still worse by the intimidation of
Russia's servile media
Anna Politkovskaya
Thursday September 9, 2004
The Guardian
It is the morning of September 1. Reports from North Ossetia are
hard to believe: a school in Beslan has been seized. Half an hour to
pack my things as my mind works furiously on how to get to the
Caucasus. And another thought: to look for the Chechen separatist
leader, Aslan Maskhadov, let him come out of hiding, let him go to
the hostage-takers, and then ask them to free the children.
Then followed a long evening at Vnukovo airport. Crowds of
journalists were trying to get on a plane south, just as flights
were being postponed. Obviously, there are some people who would
like to delay our departure. I use my mobile and speak openly about
the purpose of my flight: "Look for Maskhadov", "persuade
Maskhadov".
We have long stopped talking over our phones openly, assuming they
are tapped. But this is an emergency. Eventually a man introduces
himself as an airport executive: "I'll put you on a flight to
Rostov." In the minibus, the driver tells me that the Russian
security services, the FSB, told him to put me on the Rostov flight.
As I board, my eyes meet those of three passengers sitting in a
group: malicious eyes, looking at an enemy. But I don't pay
attention. This is the way most FSB people look at me.
The plane takes off. I ask for a tea. It is many hours by road from
Rostov to Beslan and war has taught me that it's better not to eat.
At 21:50 I drink it. At 22:00 I realise that I have to call the air
stewardess as I am rapidly losing consciousness. My other memories
are scrappy: the stewardess weeps and shouts: "We're landing, hold
on!"
"Welcome back," said a woman bending over me in Rostov regional
hospital. The nurse tells me that when they brought me in I
was "almost hopeless". Then she whispers: "My dear, they tried to
poison you." All the tests taken at the airport have been destroyed -
on orders "from on high", say the doctors.
Meanwhile, the horror in Beslan continues. Something strange is
going on there on September 2: no officials speak to the relatives
of hostages, no one tells them anything. The relatives besiege
journalists. They beg them to ask the authorities to give some sort
of explanation. The families of the hostages are in an information
vacuum. But why?
In the morning, also at Vnukovo airport, Andrei Babitsky is detained
on a specious pretext. As a result, another journalist known for
seeing his investigations through to the end and being outspoken in
the foreign press is prevented from going to Beslan.
Word comes that Ruslan Aushev, the former president of Ingushetia,
rejected by the authorities for advocating a settlement of the
Chechen crisis, suddenly walked into negotiations with the
terrorists in Beslan. He walked in alone because the people at the
special services headquarters responsible for the negotiations were
unable for 36 hours to agree among themselves who would go first.
The militants give three babies to Aushev and then release 26 more
kids and their mothers. But the media try to hush up Aushev's
courageous behaviour: no negotiations, nobody has gone inside.
By September 3, the families of hostages are in a total news
blackout. They are desperate; they all remember the experience of
the Dubrovka theatre siege in which 129 people died when the special
services released gas into the building, ending the stand-off. They
remember how the government lied.
The school is surrounded by people with hunting rifles. They are
ordinary people, the fathers and brothers of the hostages who have
despaired of getting help from the state; they have decided to
rescue their relatives themselves. This has been a constant issue
during the past five years of the second war in Chechnya: people
have lost all hope of getting any protection from the state and they
expect nothing but extra-judicial executions from the special
services. So they try to defend themselves and their loved ones.
Self-defence, naturally, leads to lynching. It couldn't be
otherwise. After the theatre siege in 2002, the hostages made this
harrowing discovery: save yourself, because the state can only help
to destroy you.
And it's the same in Beslan now. Official lies continue. The media
promote official views. They call it "taking a state-friendly
position", meaning a position of approval of Vladimir Putin's
actions. The media don't have a critical word to say about him. The
same applies to the president's personal friends, who happen to be
the heads of FSB, the defence ministry and the interior ministry. In
the three days of horror in Beslan, the "state-friendly media" never
dared to say aloud that the special services were probably doing
something wrong. They never dared to hint to the state duma and the
federation council - the parliament - that they might do well to
convene an emergency session to discuss Beslan.
The top news story is Putin flying into Beslan at night. We are
shown Putin thanking the special services; we see President
Dzasokhov, but not a word is said about Aushev. He is a disgraced
former president, disgraced because he urged the authorities not to
prolong the Chechen crisis, not to bring things to the point of a
tragedy that the state could not handle. Putin does not mention
Aushev's heroism, so the media are silent.
Saturday, September 4, the day after the terrible resolution of the
Beslan hostage-taking crisis. A staggering number of casualties, the
country is in shock. And there are still lots of people unaccounted
for, whose existence is denied by officials. All this was the
subject of a brilliant and, by present standards, very bold Saturday
issue of the newspaper Izvestia, which led with the headline "The
silence at the top". Official reaction was swift. Raf Shakirov, the
chief editor, was fired. Izvestia belongs to the nickel baron
Vladimir Potanin, and throughout the summer he was trembling in his
boots because he was afraid to share the fate of Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, who has been arrested on fraud
charges. He was doubtless trying to curry favour with Putin. The
result is that Shakirov, a talented newspaper manager and a
generally pro-establishment man, is out of the game, a latter-day
dissident - and this for deviating ever so slightly from the
official line.
You might think that journalists staged an action of protest in
support of Shakirov. Of course not. The Russian Union of Journalists
and the Media Union kept mum. Only a journalist who is loyal to the
establishment is treated as "one of us". If this is journalists'
approach to the cause that we serve, then it spells an end to the
basic tenet that we are working so that people know what is
happening and take the right decisions.
The events in Beslan have shown that the consequences of an
information vacuum are disastrous. People dismiss the state that has
left them in the lurch and try to act on their own, try to rescue
their loved ones themselves, and to exact their own justice on the
culprits. Later, Putin declared that the Beslan tragedy had nothing
to do with the Chechen crisis, so the media stopped covering the
topic. So Beslan is like September 11: all about al-Qaida. There is
no more mention of the Chechen war, whose fifth anniversary falls
this month. This is nonsense, but wasn't it the same in Soviet times
when everyone knew the authorities were talking rubbish but
pretended the emperor had his clothes on?
We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum
that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the
internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest,
if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility
to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial -
whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.
· Anna Politkovskaya is a journalist on the Novaya Gazeta newspaper;
she has won numerous awards for her reporting of the Chechnya
conflict and was involved in negotiations with the gunmen who
stormed the Dubrovka theatre in October 2002
novayagazeta.ru
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