Independent press chafes at Russia's national security obsessions

Analysis

By Sophia Kornienko
and Mikhail Rostovsky
Special to freedomforum.org

03.12.01

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Anna Politkovskaya

Kornienko, Russian correspondent for the Prague-based Transitions Online, and Rostovsky, political correspondent for Moskovsky Komsomolets, attended the conference and provided the reporting and analysis for this account.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Russian authorities are starting to equate independent journalism with espionage, speakers said at the recent "What Price National Security?" conference.

About 150 journalists, human rights activists, lawyers and students crowded the House of Journalists on March 2 for the conference, organized by The Freedom Forum' European Center with the northwest branch of the Press Development Institute.

No one appeared surprised when the conference opened with an announcement that all of the invited state officials had declined to attend. These included ex-president Boris Yeltsin's aide Alexander Korzhakov, President Putin's ombudsman on human rights and Chechnya, Vladimir Kalamanov, and Putin's close adviser and analyst, Gleb Pavlovsky.

The journalists in attendance seemed to share a spirit of togetherness, as the Internet correspondents, war reporters and their lawyers considered what the balance should be between protecting a country's national security and the public's right to know.

It was the European Center's second conference on that theme. As at the first, in London in November, it was noted that Russia has stopped all attempts at what is called "whistleblowing" in the West — a word that has no precise equivalent in Russian language. A prevailing theme on March 2 was the Putin government's use of the FSB, formerly the KGB, to threaten journalism and journalists.

The three panels discussed the general issue of national security vs. the right to know; Chechnya and crimes of war reporting; and the Internet — its power and influence and the FSB's attempts to control it.

The panels were launched with a speech by Mikhail Fedotov, a former Minister of Press and Information of the Russian Federation.

He provided a thorough overview of the media-related legislation, a lion's share of which he himself had written.

"It is almost impossible to draw one straight borderline between secret and public information; a piece of information may often fall into both categories, which causes confusion among both the state officials and the media," Fedotov said, emphasizing the need for a stronger legislative basis for open information.

"There should be access and information avail to everybody," he said. He added, "We should [fight] monopolization of the mass media. The main monopolist in the mass media is the government."

The first panel illustrated proof of Fedotov's words.

One invited panelist could not make it because he is in legal trouble with the security services over his reporting: navy journalist Grigory Pasko. He has been taken to court in the Far East over his investigations of nuclear-waste dumping by the military.

In an earlier interview with Freedom Forum European Director John Owen filmed in Moscow, Pasko stressed that it was the Russian security agency FSB, not the military, that had tried to prevent him from doing his job as a reporter.

Andrei Milekhin of the www.monitoring.ru said the government's "premise" regarding what is and isn't a secret is generally so vague that a reporter never knows what reaction to expect.

"What kind of independent journalism can we expect now that journalism in Russia is so destitute?" Milekhin asked.

Emma Gray of the European branch of the Committee to Protect Journalists said that persecution of the news media had clearly become "the hallmark of Putin's rule" in today's Russia, where only "a pool of loyal journalists receive easy access to information."

"This is a man and a regime that divides the media into the loyal and the disloyal," she said.

Attorney Yuri Shmidt agreed, explaining that any journalist working with open sources today hardly stands better chances to avoid espionage charges than back in the Soviet times.

But Nick Fielding of the London Sunday Times noted that security obsessions are not confined to Russia. He said that in the United Kingdom, a country with a strong democratic tradition, much of the open-source reporting has been considered to violate the Official Secrets Act.

"We have been able to win some battles. The fact that I am on this platform and not in prison is an example," Fielding said.

Shmidt, chairman of the Russian Committee of Lawyers in Defense of Human Rights, said in an address that Russian criminal legislation in many ways still failed to comply with modern international standards and insufficiently protects the rights of journalists who write about national security.

"Any scientist, researcher or analyst who has been using readily available data in open sources can find himself or herself [investigated by] a federal security service, or liable for prosecution," Shmidt said. "I can see many journalists in this room, and you guys belong to this basic risk category. And those who have been permitted to know state secrets can be brought to court for collection of data. You are not protected."

The talk turned to news coverage of the Chechen war on another panel.

"The society refuses to realize that it is most often not at all the guerrilla fighters and terrorists who are made answerable in Chechnya today," said journalist Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya Gazeta. Author of dozens of provocative reports from Chechnya, she had been released from what she said was FSB captivity shortly before the conference in connection with her reporting in Chechnya.

The Chechnya panel agreed that the Russian people needed the truth about Chechnya, but did not want it, and that politicians were fully exploiting that public aversion to Chechen realities.

"I know we have fantastic anti-Chechen sentiments in society," said Politkovskaya. "But society is not ready to know ... that in the Chechen villages, those who were actually involved (in terrorism against Russians) are in prison, and those who were shown on television as terrorists and accomplices ... are not terrorists and accomplices."

On the reporting of war crimes, New York Times correspondent Thom Shanker said, "Most wars in the past decade have been sequential war crimes masquerading as a military campaign."

"There is an old tool that helps us get beyond moral outrage and burning houses and crying mothers," Shanker said. "That tool is international law. To the extent that we journalists understand international law as the template of our reporting, we are liberated to describe events that go beyond mere drama and patriotism and nationalism to right and wrong."

Closing this panel, Crimes of War Project Director Elize Munoz gave a presentation of the www.crimesofwar.org Web site and a new edition of the Crimes of War book.

According to Andrei Richter, director of the Moscow Media Law and Policy Center, an "enemy within" atmosphere has been created in Russia.

Sergei Churkin, human rights consultant, said Russia today was experiencing a return to the Soviet values, where "the interests of the state are protected from the interests of the people."

And Glasnost Defense Foundation President Alexei Simonov said, "Journalism could become the second most dangerous profession."

A discussion on "who controls the Internet" featured Adam Powell, Freedom Forum vice president/technology and programs, who presented an analysis of online resources for journalists working on state security issues.

Although earlier Gray had said she was "alarmed by increased Internet surveillance" and noted that Internet service providers in Russia were now required to install equipment to route electronic traffic through law enforcement agencies, two speakers on the Internet panel noted that Russian authorities would have an extremely difficult time trying to control the Internet and how journalists use it.

Andrei Soldatov, of the Agentura.ru site, and Nail Murzakhanov of Bayard-Slavia Communications, the first internet-providing company to oppose state monitoring, expressed confidence that even the FSB was not up to the task of systematic Internet interference.

And journalist Alexander Boreiko of the newspaper Segodnya said the Russian people were beginning to use the Internet, as well.

"The online media are gaining popularity, especially at the times of controversial crises in the country," Boreiko said. "Instead of reading jokes or viewing other entertaining Web pages, many users turn to the news services available online as the least biased ones."

Editor in chief Anton Nosik of the independent online daily Lenta.ru added, "As opposed to the television media outlets, we don't care what Mr. (Boris) Berezovsky [who heads] ORT television, or Mr. (Vladimir) Gusinsky of the NTV think."

Speakers agreed that even if the federal security service shut an online newspaper's office down, it was always possible to set up an office outside the country and continue posting news and analysis online.

"Once a Web site is banned, it can open again at a different Web location in no time," Soldatov said. And he said controlling online news would become even harder as wireless technology develops.

As Fielding had observed earlier: "Information technology will be liberating for all of us."

Adam Powell contributed to this report.