Russia

Words of blood
by Sara Bicchierini

Being a journalist in the Russian Federation is one of the more risky trades. Criminalization campaigns, attacks and killings are commonplace. The power does not allow criticism.

In the Russian Federation for some time began to spread quite a stir in the forthcoming elections to be held at the end of 2011 and the presidential election in 2012. At the heart of debates, criticisms, assumptions and expectations, it appears that the controversial figure of Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister twice (1999 and 2008) and twice president (2000 and 2004), promoter of the fight against terrorism in Chechnya has become the symbol of a post Soviet-Russia launched in the golden world of business but still shaken by strong social inequalities and human rights violations.
The data relating to restrictions on press freedom in Russia are all too familiar, as well as some names of too many journalists have been killed or brutally assaulted for their work, first of all to Anna Politkovksaja. According to the "Press Freedom Index 2010" by Reporters Without Borders, which analyzed the situation of 178 countries, the country would be at 140 th place for threats to press freedom.
To give an account of the danger of the Russian media system not only contributes to the number of losses in terms of human lives but also the percentage of unsolved cases linked to the murder of journalists, a symptom of a total lack of interest on the subject by the authorities or, often, an involvement of the same political authorities in the investigation to silence those who make uncomfortable by the end of 2009, 94% of homicides occurred in 1992 against the media was still completely unresolved. In 3% of cases one could speak of "summary justice" - meaning by this expression the arrest of some of those responsible, usually not the principals but the perpetrators - and only 3% in the rest of the investigation had led to the identification all those guilty.

Ethnic cleansing

The double face of Russian politics, which claims to have at heart the respect for human rights and freedom of speech in front of the cameras and in official meetings abroad, is clearly in the pictures stolen during the demonstrations (whether those defending the forest in Khimki or the Gay Pride) departing from the guidelines of the Government, when the agents follow the letter of the Kremlin's orders striking indiscriminately the presents. It is also seen in the nationalist and xenophobic manifestations when the police, with undisguised indifference, leaves citizens massacred by the crowd of Caucasians, innocent scapegoats of a resentment fed by politicians and media. The movements that are organizing these protests are very close to the patriotic ideals of the majority party United Russia (Rossiya Edinaja) and find a justification even in anti-terrorism raids campaign - that are similar so much to ethnic cleansing - carried out by the government.
Today the independent exposition of the facts, even defended in words by the authorities, is actually accused of un-patriotism, and therefore punished as it was in Soviet times with the dissidents. In 2011, the Russian dissident are the supporters of opposition parties, human rights defenders, and then journalists and other intellectuals who are not aligned with the will of the government. In Russia of the third millennium it is possible to mention Adolf Hitler and apologize the Nazi, but is not to mention the existence of the National-Bolshevik Party led by writer Eduard Limonov.
Controlling the information has become much easier since the "rebels" oligarchs unwelcome to Putin were forced to silence and their media empires are back in state hands. The arrest warrants against the magnates Gusinskij and Berezovsky, who fled abroad, as well as the exemplary arrest of the young and powerful Khodorkovsky, who remains in prison, led to the confiscation of their vast holdings in the information field. The independent media in the Russian national landscape today are very few, have limited geographical coverage and are crushed by the state monopoly. The pluralism of information is nonexistent, and who still gives evidence of independence - as the newspaper "Novaya Gazeta" Radio Echo Moskvy and Radio Svoboda - knows that playing with fire.
In an attempt to defend his work from criticism, Putin has implemented a strategy to ensure the control of information, and then public support, which has been from the complaint of the failed to ransom operations at Dubrovka Theatre (2002) to prohibiting the publication of images of the massacre of Beslan School No. 1 (2004). Not being able to describe in this article all the control strategies on press freedom in place since 1999, the choice fell on the first case in which there has been the new policy of control of information desired by Putin, the Second Chechen War.

Information warfare

The Second Chechen War (1999-2009) can be considered one of the "hermetic" in modern history for the lack of reliable data for the well-orchestrated censorship made by the government of Vladimir Putin. The strategy of news management in place by the Kremlin as counter-information action against the flow of news coming from the West has in fact led to the formation of a lack of information on the conflict, depriving citizens of their right to inform and be informed. The revolution of the rules on media system (2000) and the application of the "vertical of power" by Putin to the world of information, meant that the media have been almost totally under the control of the Russian government: on the one hand, major media outlets have been placed within the sphere of state action, and second, through a massive institutional restructuring, have made the appearance in the various political bodies aggressive regulators siloviki (intelligence officials, police and 'army), spokesman of the will of Putin and his ruthless executors of each order.
You have created a group for the intergovernmental coordination of information, formats, among others, representatives of the Ministries of Defense, Interior, Foreign Affairs, Justice and Emergency Situations, and the Centre for Public Relations FSB - the successor to the KGB - was converted into the main source of information to which the media were able to draw on.
The attitude of the authorities towards the press has changed drastically compared to that of the First Chechen War: it was not possible to interview the wounded Russian soldiers, who denounced the inefficiency and corruption, nor the leader of the Chechen resistance, or follow the flight of guerrillas, we are no longer able to show the weaknesses of the political-military or losses, and access to areas under the control of separatists has been banned for both Russian journalists and foreign ones, while the information was carefully selected, filtered and "packaged" for the media by the Kremlin's special press officers. It was possible to move only in special trains, heading towards destinations agreed between the authorities and with official escorts.
Forced to imagine the fighting from a distance, and suspended in the fictitious reality of an organized trip, the journalists have been unable to show the "other side"of the war, that of the guerrillas who are fighting for independence and the violence committed against the civil population. The restrictions in the standards of accreditation and access to combat zones for journalists have helped to create a sort of censorship at the source, while the flooding produced by media statements - many and not verifiable - the Russian army have prevented the larger slice of the public to understand what was really going on in the South Caucasus.
The way in which the Second Chechen War has been presented through the media is not removed from that adopted for dealing with major conflicts fought in recent years at international level since the Gulf War of '91. This is information warfare, informacionnye vojny, in which campaigns for "marketing"of war can reach out and gather public support.
In a narrative more functional to the strategies and national policies detached from the reality of who kills and who is killed, the asymmetric war between the powerful army of the Russian Federation and the Chechen separatist disorganized system of cells has undergone a kind of "spectacular", becoming on Russian TV a simplified representation of the struggle between absolute good and absolute evil, personified in the conflict between a hero who fought to defend the Motherland (Vladimir Putin) and anti-heroes who inexplicably wanted to destroy (Basayev, Khattab and other separatist leaders ). With the intensification and prolongation of the fighting, the small screen began to demonize the entire Chechen people: a relentless propaganda against the Chechen "black asses" (černožopy), "bandits"and "terrorists ", has persuaded to take sides in favor of the armed intervention even those which had opposed the First Chechen War, journalists included. The struggle of the rebels was no longer that of "David against Goliath" as in the previous war. Thanks to the complete silence about the methods of "pacification" of the federal Russians agencies in Chechnya (rapes, murders, summary trials, kidnapping, torture), has emerged within the country the idea of a "just" war.
But the "invisible war" in Chechnya, which is celebrated on the small screen display without bloodshed or victims, romanticized and already declared officially over in 2001, is still dragging in the confused cauldron in the Caucasus. It drags in the streets of the rest of Russia, where the campaign of demonization of the Chechen people has led to the development of a dangerous Caucaso-fobia among citizens. He had understood Stanislav Markelov, the lawyer who defended the Chechen victims of the abuses of federal soldiers, shot in 2009 together with the journalist Anastasia Baburova. What he wrote in his latest article, on the evening before he was assassinated, is pitiless picture of our times. Thanks to the patriotic frenzy everything can be changed, you can change the story, embellishing the reality, say that black is white and vice versa.
Behind a beautiful film of nationalism lies just our fear of looking reality in the eye and demand a response from those ... who have plunged their people into poverty and injustice. Patriotism is a form of injustice that we suffer. It is the appearance in which we hide our lack of courage.