Solidarity against bandits

A news agency editor lays out how journalists should respond to violence and intimidation

After sunset on Wednesday, March 9, twenty masked men attacked a car near the Ingush-Chechen border. They dragged the passengers from the vehicle, beating them as they did, and then set the car on fire, along with everything inside. The people who'd been in the car were a handful of journalists from Russia, Norway, and Sweden, and there was a team of human rights activists from the “Committee for the Prevention of Torture.” That same evening, armed men in Ingushetia attacked an apartment belonging to the human rights activists. At Meduza's request, Sergei Smirnov, the chief editor of the news agency Mediazona, summarizes what happened this week in Ingushetia (where one of his journalists was among those attacked).

I found out about the attack on the journalists while I was going into the Moscow subway, reading over our editors' chats. I decided to rely on the metro's wi-fi and went ahead and took my seat aboard a subway car, but as luck would have it there wasn't a signal. I got off at the next station, where I couldn't get a connection, either. The next train was supposed to have wi-fi, but I struck out again: it wasn't working. And before long the train even came to a stop in a tunnel. It was an indescribable feeling of impotent rage, that you couldn't learn anything more.

The situation was a bit clearer after about 20 minutes. They torched everything that belonged to our reporter, Yegor Skovorod, including his MacBook and mobile phone. It hasn't been easy getting in touch with him like before, so I still don't know every last detail about the attack. The main thing is that everyone is safe now. What we feared was a broken arm turned out to be only a bad bruise. Our correspondent, like all the other journalists and the human rights activists who were attacked, spent the whole night telling the police what happened.

What happened is pretty clear: Igor Kalyapin of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture was under surveillance for several days before the attack, which occurred the road to Grozny, still on Ingush territory. The bandits (I can't think of a better suited word) cut off the group's minibus, forced out all the passengers, beat them up, and then set fire to the car. Finally, the bandits drove off toward Chechnya, and nobody went after them. It's also worth noting that the attackers screamed at the journalists and human rights activists that they are terrorists.

Next came the natural reaction after the initial shock: what do we do in this situation? We all know how actively he [Ramzan Kadyrov] persecutes the Committee for the Prevention of Torture. We all know how the authorities react to these attacks, which have become a regular occurrence. And we all understand perfectly well that our chances of having any influence whatsoever on this situation—of bringing those responsible for this criminal attack before a court—are close to zero.

History isn't on our side. It's enough just to remember how Oleg Kashin's case was solved. They found the man who ordered the attack and the ones who carried it out, but nobody was brought to justice. And we remember how Kalyapin's office in Grozny was burned down. Again, they went unpunished.

Writing statements with the words “please” or even “we demand” is useless and pointless. It's as if the authorities themselves don't understand the meaning of this attack, or how to categorize it.

But we've got to respond somehow. There's nothing redeeming about a sense of powerlessness, like the one I had in the subway without wi-fi. We have to try to make it so these attacks on journalists don't fade into oblivion after a few days, as is often the case. We're going to remind people about it constantly, and state officials' statements only make this task easier.

Because this attack also targeted our own reporter, Yegor Skovorod, we decided to go a step further and announce the creation of a new labor union. I'll admit that we've already been discussing the idea for some time, including its legal aspects. Basically, it's long overdue that we start talking about creating an organization to take the place of the troubled Union of Journalists. At the same time, we understand the risk that Russians often view labor unions as political protest groups. But if we don't create this thing now, when are we going to do it? The only answer to these attacks by bandits should be the solidarity of journalists.