Following the bad news from Beslan, there are strange goings-on in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where the press is struggling to keep up with ugly realities. One event seems somewhat conventional for Russia, if unfortunate:
The editor of the Russian newspaper Izvestia has been fired over its coverage of the Beslan hostage tragedy, according to local reports.Raf Shakirov left today amid claims that the privately owned paper's coverage of the tragedy had infuriated the Kremlin and unsettled investors in Izvestia's parent company, Prof-Media.
Izvestia was one of the first Russian media outlets to criticise the government's handling of the school siege and controversially devoted its entire front page on Saturday to a single image of a man holding a wounded child.
The Saturday edition also censured state-owned broadcasters over their failure to cover the unfolding drama in Beslan on Friday - an implied criticism of the Putin government, which controls the country's broadcasters.
A related development is dramatically more serious, even a possible throwback to the days of overt repression.
Under suspicious circumstances, two prominent Moscow journalists known for their critical coverage of the military campaign in Chechnya failed to make it to North Ossetia to cover the hostage crisis in Beslan.Radio Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky was detained Thursday at Vnukovo Airport and prevented from flying to Mineralniye Vody while police, who said they suspected him of carrying explosives, searched his bags.
After no explosives were found, Babitsky was released, but two men approached him and started provoking him. All three men were detained, and Babitsky was charged with "hooliganism." He was sentenced Friday to five days in jail.
In a separate incident Thursday, Anna Politkovskaya, who covers Chechnya for Novaya Gazeta, fell ill on her way to Beslan and had to be hospitalized. Her editor said she was poisoned.
Politkovskaya was flying from Vnukovo Airport to Rostov-on-Don and fainted on the plane. Immediately after landing, she was taken to a local hospital, where doctors found she had been poisoned, Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Muratov said Politkovskaya had not eaten anything that day and she felt sick after drinking tea on the plane. He did not speculate on who might have poisoned her. Politkovskaya is now recovering in a Moscow clinic.
Bringing harm to journalists is nothing new, even in today's Russia. For example, two were murdered earlier this year:
Russia's jittery foreign press corps was plunged into mourning yesterday for the second time in as many weeks after another foreign journalist was murdered in Moscow. The killing of Paila Peloyan, the Armenian editor of the Russian-language monthly, Armenian Lane, comes barely a week after Paul Klebnikov, the US editor of the Russian version of Forbes magazine, was gunned down in cold blood. Nobody has been arrested for his murder.
Putin's struggle to defend Russia against persistent attacks from Islamic terrorists and Chechan insurgents won't be any easier in such an atmosphere of intimidation. Apparently, old habits die hard.
Posted by Alan at September 6, 2004 04:28 PM