Moscow Times
August 4, 2005
ABC Case Looks Like a Populist Warning
By Nabi Abdullaev
Staff Writer
The Foreign Ministry's decision not to extend the accreditation of ABC television journalists appears to be meant as a reminder to all foreign journalists not to cross a line when writing about Chechnya and especially rebel leaders.
But it is unlikely to change foreign media coverage about Russia or even have much effect on ABC.
Journalists, including Russian nationals, employed by foreign media organizations cannot work legally in Russia without accreditation.
The Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that this was the violation committed by Andrei Babitsky, the journalist with Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who interviewed warlord Shamil Basayev in Chechnya in June.
A ministry official said Babitsky was required by law to obtain two forms of accreditation: one from the Foreign Ministry and the other from the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for areas that are designated as zones of counterterrorism operations, Interfax reported.
Babitsky, who said he obtained the interview on his own time, offered it to ABC, which broadcast it despite Russian objections last Thursday.
A Foreign Ministry official said by telephone Wednesday that the ministry believed ABC itself violated a 1976 United Nations pact in airing the interview. The official, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue, said Articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights set limits on freedom of speech when it comes to protecting state security and public order and also bans propaganda for war.
The last time the ministry denied accreditation to a foreign journalist was in early 2000, when Frank Hoefling, a German reporter with N24 television, "falsified news reports from Chechnya," ministry spokesman Boris Malakhov said Wednesday.
Authorities accused Hoefling of stealing graphic photographs and a film depicting dead bodies in Chechnya that had been taken by Russian journalists and presenting them on N24 as evidence of the brutality of federal troops against Chechen civilians.
The ministry official said several foreign journalists had been denied accreditation or not had their accreditation extended in recent years, but refused to elaborate.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, a media freedom watchdog, said that the latest case was on July 6, 2003, when the ministry denied accreditation to Ali Astamirov, a journalist working for Agence France Presse. Astamirov, who had applied for accreditation the previous December, was abducted in Ingushetia on the same day that his accreditation was denied, and he has not been seen since.
CPJ representative Alex Lupis called the case "an example where denial of accreditation was used to ensure that a journalist remained legally vulnerable to harassment by government officials."
Several foreign reporters interviewed for this report acknowledged that they had traveled to Chechnya without obtaining Interior Ministry accreditation, which would have immediately restricted their movements to officially approved routes and limited the independence of their reporting.
By doing this, reporters put themselves at risk of losing their Foreign Ministry accreditation and permission to continue working in Russia.
While most earlier denials were done quietly, the ABC decision is a warning to foreign and Russian journalists to curb their professional zeal when writing about Chechnya and terrorism, said Boris Makarenko, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies. "It is clearly a demonstrative action," he said.
Recalling that authorities have issued several warnings to the Kommersant newspaper for publishing interviews with Chechen rebel leaders over the past several years, Makarenko said they were forced to some extent to react harshly to ABC to prevent Russian media from being able to accuse them of double standards.
The big problem with the ABC report was that it gave a voice to Basayev, who has a $10 million bounty on his head but continues to elude federal forces, said Mark Franchetti, a journalist for Britain's The Sunday Times who has reported extensively from Chechnya and was the only journalist allowed into Moscow's Dubrovka theater during the 2002 crisis to interview the attackers' leader. Basayev has claimed responsibility for the attack, which ended with 129 hostages dead. "They viewed this broadcast as a provocation, as giving a tribune to terrorists," Franchetti said.
Basayev's appearance on U.S. television enraged Russian officials, especially the military and security officials in the Kremlin siloviki, because he is a living reminder of their failure to deliver on their promises to "waste terrorists in the outhouse," said Boris Timoshenko, a media analyst with the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a Moscow-based media freedom watchdog.
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Sunday demanded that ABC be punished, saying he had barred military personnel from speaking with the network.
Dmitry Orlov, an analyst with the Agency for Political and Economic Communications, said authorities were overreacting in an attempt to show the Russian public how strong Russia is in its dealings with the Americans.
"In fact, it is clear to everyone that this whole brouhaha will most likely pass unnoticed by most Americans," he said.
Makarenko said it was only a matter of time before the Foreign Ministry allowed new ABC reporters to work in Russia, noting that the ministry had left open the door to the possibility that it will issue accreditation to any ABC journalists who replace the current staff.
"It is not a question of giving or not giving accreditation to ABC; it is a question of doing it a year or two from now," he said.
The accreditation of ABC's Moscow chief bureau, Tomasz Rolski, expires in November, and the accreditation of the office's 10 staffers expires in the coming months.
Journalists have long faced problems in Russia and the Soviet Union. In 1982, ABC bureau chief Anne Garrels was expelled when a pedestrian died after being struck by a car she drove in Moscow. Prior to the accident, Garrels had received a warning from the Foreign Ministry for visiting a family of dissidents and had been criticized in a Soviet magazine. Garrels reports for National Public Radio from Baghdad, where she has been stationed since the start of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
In 1986, Nicholas Daniloff of U.S. News and World Report was arrested and charged with espionage before being expelled. The Russian government in 1995 revoked the visa of Steve LeVine, a correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post, citing a technicality involving the revoking of his visa in Uzbekistan.
Petra Prochazkova, a Czech journalist who reported extensively from both sides during the first conflict in Chechnya, was denied visa in 2001.
Vibeke Sperling, a correspondent for the Danish newspaper Politiken, said last year that she had been denied a visa because of her reporting about Chechnya and other sensitive issues.