By Terance Walsh
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe
MOSCOW, Russia – Russian television station NTV aired a report on October 30 covering gruesome cases of torture in Chechnya. The station, which is owned by state-run energy company Gazprom, promptly removed the story shortly after it was introduced to the public.
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The video was a 10-minute piece that addressed a topic that is typically taboo in Russia. At one point it described Chechnya as a place that is “associated with the word ‘war’ and provoked elemental terror.”
It went on to accuse government agencies of “kidnapping Chechen citizens, torturing them, holding them incommunicado for months, and ‘disappearing’ them.”
The report was aberrational in its candor compared to typical Russian news reports. The primary subject of the video was Islam Umarpashayev, a 26-year old. Umarpashayev alleged that he was tortured, beaten, and told he would be killed for four months while held captive at the Chechen Interior Ministry. At one point he says he was chained to a radiator at the police base.
He is currently seeking the help of rights organizations to sue the Chechen government while in hiding in Central Russia.
The report only aired in Russia’s eastern time zones. Shortly after airing, the NTV headquarters in Moscow ordered that the video be removed before people in Russia’s more populous western portion had a chance to see the report. Instead, Russia’s European regions received programming that included ballerinas dancing in the newly opened Bolshoi Theater.
The apparent impetus for NTV’s order to pull the report was a call from the Kremlin to NTV. NTV’s spokesperson Maria Bexborodova, however, denies the Kremlin had anything to do with the decision to remove the report. “Yes, the report was shown in the Far East, after which the network’s management decided to send it back for further work, for confirmation and clarification of facts,” Bezborodova said. “In general, this is a normal practice in the work of an editorial office that is an official registered mass-media outlet.”
The video has since surfaced on You Tube.
Human rights advocates point to this incident and an example of an impediment to curing Russia’s human rights problems. Some say the removal of the report has implications on Russia’s ostensible counterterrorism struggle in the North Caucuses.
“We aren’t just talking about the kidnappings of people in Chechnya or about the kidnapping of people by the security forces or about the illegal methods of investigation but, essentially, about the falsification of the struggle against terrorism,” Memorial human rights group’s Aleksandr Cherkasov said. “Kidnapped, held for several months at an Interior Ministry base, and there he was fed and allowed to wash but he was not allowed to shave or cut his hair…. That is – as we know from many other episodes, after a few months any person who is held God-knows-where might turn up as a dead terrorist in a forest. It really is convenient.”
Cherkasov is also convinced that the Kremlin had a hand in getting NTV to remove the story. In his account of how the report came and went he said, “For two weeks NTV didn’t put the piece on the air. They promised to, but they didn’t. The two preceding Sundays it was supposed to appear on the same program, ‘Central Television,’ but it didn’t, because they didn’t want to release it without a comment from [Chechen President] Ramzan Kadyrov. But Kadyrov refused. So the channel overcame its own internal concerns and issued the story.”
The Russian government has relied on Kadyrov to rule with a heavy hand and maintain order in Chechnya, a troubled region that has seen two separatist wars since 1994. Rights activists have criticized this approach to maintaining order in Chechnya, claiming it leads to human rights abuses and impunity.
NTV was handed to the state-run gas company Gazprom by court order in 2001. Prior to the Gazprom takeover NTV was the only nationwide independent television station in Russia. It was owned by Media-Most, run by tycoon Vladamir Gusinsky. Gazprom was a creditor of Media-Most and received all control of NTV after the ruling by a Moscow court.
Gusinsky, who was exiled and charged in Russia with fraud and money laundering, maintains that the transfer of control of NTV to Gazprom was designed by the Kremlin. It sought to exact revenge against Gusinsky because his journalists criticized the Russian government.
Little has been said about the removal of the Chechnya report and few want to criticize the Kremlin or the heavily state-run media in Russia.
For more information please see:
RFE/RL — Gazprom’s NTV Airs Contraversial Report on Chechnya Abuses, Then Pulls It — 1 November 2011
The Moscow Times — NTV Censors Report — 1 November 2011
Index on Censorship — Russia: Report on Russian Torture of Chechen Man “Censored” by State Television — 31 October 2011
Reuters Africa — Russian TV Pulls Report on Chechnya Kidnappings — 31 October 2011
BBC — Russian NTV Handed to Gazprom — 4 May 2001