RUSSIA’S BRUTAL ATTACKS ON JOURNALISTS CONTINUE

Posted By on November 9th, 2010

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,727871,00.html

Another Journalist Attacked in Russia

Reporter in Artificial Coma after Ambush

By Benjamin Bidder in Moscow

Oleg Kashin’s appparent transgression was to report on a controversial highway project outside Moscow. The brutal attack on the Russian journalist has outraged many in and outside the country. Still, official organizations had campaigned against the reporter and the case highlights continuing persecution of the free press in Russia.

There was no warning. There were no threats either, the wife of the reporter Oleg Kashin, 30, a reporter with the respected Russian daily Kommersant, said. Except of course for the usual online diatribes, along the lines of how he was a “traitor to the Russian people” who now “needed to be punished.”

Now Kashin is lying in hospital with a double jaw fracture, broken legs and cranial trauma. Doctors have had to put him into a medically induced coma. The journalist’s colleagues believe Kashin was targeted because of his critical reporting. For his part, Kommersant Editor in Chief Mikhail Mikhailin spoke of “demonstrative brutality.” The manager of Kashin’s apartment building, meanwhile, said that, “they didn’t beat him with their fists but with some sort of objects.”

According to another neighbor, two men lay in wait for the journalist on Saturday night. Kashin was on his way home and the men waited at the gate until after midnight with a bouquet of flowers, as though they were waiting for a date. Then they attacked.

A Warning to Russian Journalists

The beating is also a general warning to journalists writing critical stories in Russia. Since 2009, Kashin had been writing mainly about extra-parliamentary opposition for Kommersant. It was for this reason that Molodaya Gvardiya, or the Young Guard, the youth wing of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, had made inflammatory comments against Kashin. They said that he belonged to a “fascist-journalistic underground center.” And, on their website, they said that the “journalist-traitor” needed to be punished.

The pro-Kremlin activists had been angered by Kashin’s recent reporting about a conflict just outside of the city of Moscow. Northwest of Moscow, in the city of Khimki, an eight-lane highway is slated to be built through a section of local forest — environmentalists have been protesting the building plans for years and, this summer, the conflict had escalated. First groups of masked thugs had attacked the environmentalists’ tents, then hundreds of anarchists and activists belonging to the “Anti-Fascist Movement” hurled stones and smoke bombs at the Khimki town hall, also firing on the building with gas pistols. Afterwards, Kashin published an anonymous interview with one of the organizers of the latter attack that read:

“If they cut down the forest, wood chips will fly.”

“Who are these ‘wood chips’?”

“The cops.”

Debate Rather Than Violence?

Following the the ambush, Young Guard officials were quick to condemn the “barbaric crime.” “Those who attacked journalist Oleg Kashin must be punished to the full extent of the law,” said a statement on the organization’s website. The group said it preferred the means of “political debate.”

When it comes to political debate, the Young Guard certainly doesn’t hold back. In the minds of the pro-Kremlin youth, journalists like Kashin bring such extremism upon themselves, even just by writing reports. The youth groups greet human rights activists, critical journalists and opposition politicians with the same hateful tirades, declaring them all “enemies of the Russian people” and, thus, outlaws.

Another pro-Kremlin youth group known as Nashi is known for disparaging its opponents as being the stooges of fascism. They dress up dolls that are supposed to look like members of the opposition and human rights activists in German Wehrmacht uniforms from WWII. But of course, they only do this after their international guests and any reporters have left the grounds.

Medvedev Demands Investigation

Now Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev has also gotten involved in the Kashin case and has instructed Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika and Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev to give the investigation the highest priority. “The criminals must be found and punished,” Medvedev wrote in a Twitter message over the weekend.

Medvedev has been calling for a modernization of the giant Russian realm for a long time now and he has been overseeing a careful liberalization. Recently, international experts have noted advances in freedom of the press in Russia. According to a recent ranking by Reporters without Borders, Russia advanced 13 places on its annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index. However, it still lies at place No. 140, one spot behind Ethiopia.

Additionally, there has been hardly any progress into investigations into attacks against critics of the regime. Neither the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya on Oct. 7, 2006, also Vladimir Putin’s birthday, nor the death of human rights activist Natalya Estemirova in July 2009 have been cleared up.

Journalist and environmental activist Mikhail Beketov, 52, will never recover from the assassination attempt made on him either. Just like Kashin, Beketov, the founder of the local newspaper Khimki Truth had also reported on the controversial plans to build a highway in the area. In November 2008, unknown individuals lay in wait for him, in front of his apartment building, and then beat him almost to death. He is permanently brain damaged and has lost a leg.

Attacks on journalists have taken on a “systematic character,” Vladimir Lukin, the Kremlin’s ombudsman for human rights, complained. “We cannot provide each journalist with a bodyguard,” he said, in comments carried on the Russian news agency Interfax. There was only one way to prevent these kinds of attacks, he said and that, “is to improve the quality of the work of law enforcement — and to ensure punishment is inevitable.”

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