Muzzling the Media Won't Fool Anyone

The rumored sacking of Russian Television chief Oleg Poptsov may in the end have been no more than a storm in a teacup. It turns out that Poptsov, who last week said President Boris Yeltsin was about to fire him because of his station's refusal to toe the official line on Chechnya, is to keep his job after all.


But the threat is still there, hanging like a sword of Damocles, to remind the official media that their survival depends on the goodwill and favor of the Kremlin. For the unofficial media, other tactics have been used to apply similar pressure, ranging from threats to revoke visas or accreditation to physical intimidation in the war zone. Izvestia has published a list of cases of journalists being detained, beaten up, shot at or strafed by aircraft while covering the conflict.


Reporters and television crews have been held up or forcibly expelled from the war zone; video cassettes have been confiscated and films have been exposed by security officers determined to prevent anything but a sanitized version of events from getting out.


The authorities are far from sympathetic, frequently reminding the press that their security cannot be guaranteed and that they go to Chechnya at their own risk. This is indisputable. Covering war is a very dangerous business. Two journalists have already been killed in Chechnya: the American freelance photographer, Cynthia Elbaum, and the Krasnaya Zvezda reporter Vladimir Zhitarenko.


The fact is that the risks involved in providing an accurate picture in Chechnya are already great enough without the authorities weighing the dice through systematic intimidation. The worst cases did not take place in the heat of battle, when a commander's responsibility to his own men can excuse a measure of insensitivity in dealing with anyone else. On the contrary, all the serious abuses listed took place miles from the battlefront, at the hands of men removed from the danger zone.


One of the great achievements in post-communist Russia is that the media have learned to stand on their own feet and cover events as they see them, rather than according to an officially drawn line. It goes without saying that the preservation of this freedom is vital.


Nor will the public be duped by an official cover-up in Chechnya achieved by clamping down on the press, any more than it was by the carefully filtered reports of the last disastrous Russian military adventure in Afghanistan. The difference is that this time, when Russian troops are killing Russian rather than foreign citizens, the public will be far less forgiving. In fact, the authorities would do wisely to view the media as a life-saving barometer of public opinion, rather than as their enemy.