september 2004

It is the morning of September 1. Reports from North Ossetia are hard to

Then followed a long evening at Vnukovo airport. Crowds of journalists were trying to get on a plane south, just as flights were being postponed. Obviously, there are some people who would like to delay our departure. I use my mobile and speak openly about the purpose of my flight: "Look for Maskhadov", "persuade Maskhadov".

We have long stopped talking over our phones openly, assuming they are tapped. But this is an emergency. Eventually a man introduces himself as an airport executive: "I'll put you on a flight to Rostov." In the minibus, the driver tells me that the Russian security services, the FSB, told him to put me on the Rostov flight. As I board, my eyes meet those of three passengers sitting in a group: malicious eyes, looking at an enemy. But I don't pay attention. This is the way most FSB people look at me.

The plane takes off. I ask for a tea. It is many hours by road from Rostov to Beslan and war has taught me that it's better not to eat. At 21:50 I drink it. At 22:00 I realise that I have to call the air stewardess as I am rapidly losing consciousness. My other memories are scrappy: the stewardess weeps and shouts: "We're landing, hold on!"

"Welcome back," said a woman bending over me in Rostov regional hospital. The nurse tells me that when they brought me in I was "almost hopeless". Then she whispers: "My dear, they tried to poison you." All the tests taken at the airport have been destroyed - on orders "from on high", say the doctors.

Meanwhile, the horror in Beslan continues. Something strange is going on there on September 2: no officials speak to the relatives of hostages, no one tells them anything. The relatives besiege journalists. They beg them to ask the authorities to give some sort of explanation. The families of the hostages are in an information vacuum. But why?

In the morning, also at Vnukovo airport, Andrei Babitsky is detained on a specious pretext. As a result, another journalist known for seeing his investigations through to the end and being outspoken in the foreign press is prevented from going to Beslan.

Word comes that Ruslan Aushev, the former president of Ingushetia, rejected by the authorities for advocating a settlement of the Chechen crisis, suddenly walked into negotiations with the terrorists in Beslan. He walked in alone because the people at the special services headquarters responsible for the negotiations were unable for 36 hours to agree among themselves who would go first. The militants give three babies to Aushev and then release 26 more kids and their mothers. But the media try to hush up Aushev's courageous behaviour: no negotiations, nobody has gone inside.

By September 3, the families of hostages are in a total news blackout. They are desperate; they all remember the experience of the Dubrovka theatre siege in which 129 people died when the special services released gas into the building, ending the stand-off. They remember how the government lied.

The school is surrounded by people with hunting rifles. They are ordinary people, the fathers and brothers of the hostages who have despaired of getting help from the state; they have decided to rescue their relatives themselves. This has been a constant issue during the past five years of the second war in Chechnya: people have lost all hope of getting any protection from the state and they expect nothing but extra-judicial executions from the special services. So they try to defend themselves and their loved ones. Self-defence, naturally, leads to lynching. It couldn't be otherwise. After the theatre siege in 2002, the hostages made this harrowing discovery: save yourself, because the state can only help to destroy you.

And it's the same in Beslan now. Official lies continue. The media promote official views. They call it "taking a state-friendly position", meaning a position of approval of Vladimir Putin's actions. The media don't have a critical word to say about him. The same applies to the president's personal friends, who happen to be the heads of FSB, the defence ministry and the interior ministry. In the three days of horror in Beslan, the "state-friendly media" never dared to say aloud that the special services were probably doing something wrong. They never dared to hint to the state duma and the federation council - the parliament - that they might do well to convene an emergency session to discuss Beslan.

The top news story is Putin flying into Beslan at night. We are shown Putin thanking the special services; we see President Dzasokhov, but not a word is said about Aushev. He is a disgraced former president, disgraced because he urged the authorities not to prolong the Chechen crisis, not to bring things to the point of a tragedy that the state could not handle. Putin does not mention Aushev's heroism, so the media are silent.

Saturday, September 4, the day after the terrible resolution of the Beslan hostage-taking crisis. A staggering number of casualties, the country is in shock. And there are still lots of people unaccounted for, whose existence is denied by officials. All this was the subject of a brilliant and, by present standards, very bold Saturday issue of the newspaper Izvestia, which led with the headline "The silence at the top". Official reaction was swift. Raf Shakirov, the chief editor, was fired. Izvestia belongs to the nickel baron Vladimir Potanin, and throughout the summer he was trembling in his boots because he was afraid to share the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, who has been arrested on fraud charges. He was doubtless trying to curry favour with Putin. The result is that Shakirov, a talented newspaper manager and a generally pro-establishment man, is out of the game, a latter-day dissident - and this for deviating ever so slightly from the official line.

You might think that journalists staged an action of protest in support of Shakirov. Of course not. The Russian Union of Journalists and the Media Union kept mum. Only a journalist who is loyal to the establishment is treated as "one of us". If this is journalists' approach to the cause that we serve, then it spells an end to the basic tenet that we are working so that people know what is happening and take the right decisions.

The events in Beslan have shown that the consequences of an information vacuum are disastrous. People dismiss the state that has left them in the lurch and try to act on their own, try to rescue their loved ones themselves, and to exact their own justice on the culprits. Later, Putin declared that the Beslan tragedy had nothing to do with the Chechen crisis, so the media stopped covering the topic. So Beslan is like September 11: all about al-Qaida. There is no more mention of the Chechen war, whose fifth anniversary falls this month. This is nonsense, but wasn't it the same in Soviet times when everyone knew the authorities were talking rubbish but pretended the emperor had his clothes on?

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

· Anna Politkovskaya is a journalist on the Novaya Gazeta newspaper; she has won numerous awards for her reporting of the Chechnya conflict and was involved in negotiations with the gunmen who stormed the Dubrovka theatre in October 2002

novayagazeta.ru

Looking for Cervantes the soldier I came upon Cervantes the wonderful war correspondent and later Cervantes the story teller with profound insight regarding the nature of women as the repository of unconscious wisdom. I know no more moving study than this of the mystique of Woman and her role in life. It is impossible to read it without tears.
Patrick Kavanagh.

School Siege in Russia Sparks Self-Criticism in Arab World

By JOHN KIFNER
September 8, 2004  The New York Times

BEIRUT, Sept 8 - The brutal school siege in Russia, with hundreds of children dead and wounded, has sparked an unusual round of self- criticism and introspection in the Muslim and Arab world.

"It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims," Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the widely watched Al-Arabiya satellite television station wrote in one of the most striking of these commentaries.

Writing in the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Mr. Rashed said it was "shameful and degrading" that not only were the Beslan hijackers Muslims, but also the murderers of Nepalese workers in Iraq, the attackers of residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar, Saudi Arabia, the women believed to have blown up two Russian airplanes last week and Osama bin Laden himself. "The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslim," he wrote. "What a pathetic record. What an abominable `achievement.' Does this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture?"

Mr. Rashed, like several other commentators, singled out Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a senior Egyptian cleric living in Qatar who broadcasts an influential program on Al Jazeera television and who has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling for the killing of American and foreign "occupiers" in Iraq, military and civilian. "Let us contemplate the incident of this religious Sheikh allowing, nay even calling for, the murder of civilians," he wrote. "How can we believe him when he tells us that Islam is the religion of mercy and peace while he is turning it into a religion of blood and slaughter?" Mr . Rashed recalled that in the past, leftists and nationalists in the Arab world were considered a "menace" for their adoption of violence, and the mosque was a "haven" of "peace and reconciliation" by contrast. "Then came the Neo-Muslims," he said. "An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry."

A columnist for the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyassa, Faisal al-Qina'I, also took aim at Sheikh Qaradawi. "It is saddening," he wrote, "to read and hear from those who are supposed to be Muslim clerics, like Yusuf al-Qaradawi and others of his kind, that instead of defending true Islam they encourage these cruel actions and permit decapitation, hostage-taking and murder."

In Jordan, a group of Muslim religious figures, meeting with the religious affairs minister, Ahmed Heleil, issued a statement today saying the seizing of the school and subsequent massacre was dedicated to distorting the pure image of Islam."This terrorist act contradicts the principles of our true Muslim religion and its noble values," the statement said.

Writing in the Jordanian daily Al-Dustour, a columnist, Bater Wardam, noted a propensity in the Arab world to "place responsibility for the crimes of Arabic and Muslim terrorist organizations on the Mossad, the Zionists and the American intelligence, but we all know that this is not the case." "They came from our midst," he wrote of those who had kidnapped and murdered civilians in Iraq, blown up commuter trains in Spain, turned airliners into bombs and shot the children in Ossetia. "They are Arabs and Muslims who pray, fast, grow beards, demand the wearing of veils and call for the defense of Islamic causes. Therefore we must all raise our voices, disown them and oppose all these crimes."

In Beirut, Rami G. Khouri wrote in the Daily Star that while most Arabs "identified strongly and willingly" with armed Palestinian or Lebanese guerrillas fighting Israeli occupation, "all of us today are dehumanized and brutalized by the images of Arabs kidnapping and beheading foreign hostages."
Calling for a global strategy to reduce terror, he traced what he called "this ugly trek" in the Arab world to "the home-grown sense of indignity, humiliation, denial and degradation that has increasingly plagued many of our young men and women."

A Palestinian columnist, Hassan al-Batal, wrote in the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Ayyam that the "day of horror in the school" should be designated an international day for the condemnation of terrorism. "There are no mitigating circumstances for the inhuman horror and the height of barbarism" at the school, he wrote.

In Egypt, the semi-official newspaper Al-Ahram called the events "an ugly crime against humanity."

In Saudi Arabia, newspapers tightly controlled by the government - which finds itself under attack from Islamic fundamentalists - were even more scathing.Under the headline "Butchers in the Name of Allah," a columnist in the government daily Okaz, Khaled Hamed al-Suleiman, wrote that "the propagandists of Jihad succeeded in the span of a few years in distorting the image of Islam. "They turned today's Islam into something having to do with decapitations, the slashing of throats, abducting innocent civilians and exploding people. They have fixed the image of Muslims in the eyes of the world as barbarians and savages who are not good for
anything except slaughtering people," he wrote, adding: "The time has come for Muslims to be the first to come out against those interested in abducting Islam in the same way they abducted innocent children. This is the true Jihad these days and this is our obligation, as believing Muslims, towards our monotheistic religion."

Looking for Cervantes the soldier I came upon Cervantes the wonderful war correspondent and later Cervantes the story teller with profound insight regarding the nature of women as the repository of unconscious wisdom. I know no more moving study than this of the mystique of Woman and her role in life. It is impossible to read it without tears.
Patrick Kavanagh.