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19.04.07
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Setting The Wrong Kind Of Example
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Blog by Andrei Zolotov, Jr.
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We have long been planning to launch editorial blogs at Russia Profile, which would be written by different Russia Profile journalists and would reflect their personal views, rather than those of Russia Profile, RIA Novosti, Independent Media or any other affiliated organization.
However, it saddens me terribly that what finally stirred my creative process into action and led me to write my first blog was yesterday’s search at Internews Russia – the country’s most authoritative NGO in the field of mass media by Interior Ministry police. My friends from Internews tell me that by the end of the day yesterday, after 13 hours of search by sleek and polite officers from the Interior Ministry’s Economic Security Department, all of the organization’s documentation and its web server were removed.
In the spirit of full disclosure I should declare that Internews Russia director Manana Aslamazyan, her close associate Anna Kachkayeva – who also heads the television chair at my alma mater, the Journalism Department of Moscow State University – and other Internews employees, are my friends, many of whom I have known for 10 years, since I had begun reporting on the media for The Moscow Times. The New York-based Paul Klebnikov Foundation, established by my late friend’s family, is also working with Internews. I can also firmly call the organization friends of Russia Profile, because we collaborated closely on the production of our media issue two years ago, and we have been recently talking on how we could match the efforts of our website’s Resources section with the Internews website’s incredible database of Russian regional television stations.
That website, www.internews.ru, is down today, because the server was removed by police. And all I feel is outrage and the desire to do the little I can – declare my professional and personal solidarity with Internews, which is a very important hub of journalistic activity in my country.
It all began in January when Manana and another Internews employee were caught by Sheremetyevo airport customs officials carrying through the green corridor more cash than it is allowed to bring into Russia without a declaration ($10,000). Manana and her associate said that the whole episode was a mistake, because they were bringing in euros, having forgotten that the euro has long been more valuable than the U.S. dollar. A stupid mistake, of course! But how did this personal criminal case, over the course of which Manana said she has never even met her case investigator, get escalated to the degree that it required the country’s top economic crime department investigating the whole organization, intimidating and incapacitating it, even for a while?
I don’t know about Internews’ finances, of course. But my personal experience with this organization was one of painstaking bookkeeping and filing in full accordance with Russia’s cumbersome procedures. The three times Internews paid for my travel – to Perm, Krasnoyarsk and Voronezh – to sit on the jury of a local television news competition they ran, called Novosti – Vremya Mestnoye (News, Local Time), I had to sign a stack of papers stating that the money Internews spent on my plane tickets and hotel rooms was a payment to me that could be taxed.
I hope this painstaking bookkeeping will help Internews get through its current ordeal.
But this is a secondary matter after all. What is really sickening is that it is hard to interpret the case as anything other than some law enforcement officials trying to score points by cashing in on the message from the country’s top authorities: foreign-funded NGOs engaging in a broadly understood political activity – and media is certainly one such area – are a danger. That it is a result of post-Orange Revolution paranoia.
There are different kinds of NGOs, and the people arguing that some of them are used as a tool of political subversion can probably make a case for this. But Internews Russia is not such a case. It is one of the best examples of a group of dedicated enthusiasts finding an area where the interests of donors, both foreign and Russian, overlap with the national interest of developing the professional level of television journalists, not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but in various corners of our vast country. Is it not in the national interest of Russia that thousands of reporters in the swiftly growing local television sector progressed from producing dull reports about meetings held by the governor and paid for commercial reports to covering socially responsible news while checking facts, covering both sides of the story, showing real people and following trends in regional development?
A former theater administrator, Manana Aslamazyan created an organization that has trained hundreds of regional television journalists. She should take significant credit for the flourishing of local television in Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and many other cities and towns of Russia. She has connected Moscow’s snobbish journalistic elite with modest and hard-working journalists around the country. Those of us supposedly “teaching” local journalists were learning just as much – if not more – from our colleagues about life in the regions.
She has never been a political oppositionist, and her voice in the unruly choir of Russian NGO activists has always been that of moderation, evenhandedness and inclination to cooperate with the authorities for the public good. She is one of the very few figures in the can of scorpions that is the national television’s world who has managed to stay neutral in internal feuds even during the height of Russia’s “media wars” in the late 1990s as well as during the emotionally charged times of the NTV takeover and TV6 closure under President Vladimir Putin’s watch.
Manana’s unmatched personal authority in the Russian media world was best manifested when she served as an independent member of the Federal Competition Commission advising former Press Minister Mikhail Lesin on the distribution of television and radio frequencies.
Do police officers or their handlers see this as a danger?
I don’t want this to sound like an obituary to Internews. I am sure the organization will persevere and I hope justice will prevail in this highly public case, which has been covered by most of the Russian media. I also think that some of the talk about the government’s attacks on media and NGOs in Russia is often exaggerated, while many in the West lecture about the demise of democracy and civil society in Russia to the detriment of this democracy and civil society. But for the time being, every day that Internews’ server is in the hands of the police and not online for the use of Russian journalists, every day that this organization is not functioning because its papers are confiscated, the people who are in charge of this case are attacking Russian media and civil society in my country. |
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