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21.11.07
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Whose Crime?
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Comment by Georgy Bovt
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Collision of Interests over Lake Boden
Vitaly Kaloyev’s return home after being released from a Swiss prison, has received the most contradictory responses. Some, like members of the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth movement, lined up along the highway from the airport to the city with greeting posters (the same way leaders of communist parties friendly with the Soviet regime were greeted back in the day). The posters said that the man guilty of murdering an air traffic controller found responsible for the airplane collision over Lake Boden in Germany, in which Kaloyev’s whole family died, is “a true hero”. Other reactions were indignant: have the moral and ethical norms in our country been so distorted that “a true hero” is a murderer, even if he has already served his term.
In fact, there is nothing at all surprising about the heroization of Kaloyev. He has become merely a reflection of our present-day social life. Kaloyev is not so much a “mirror of distorted moral and ethical norms” as a personification of the national complex of resentment.
For many people Kaloyev resembles a movie hero who entered everyday life directly from a Hollywood action blockbuster. Isn’t it a Hollywood plotline that we are so used to – a story where the main character has given up any hope of getting justice the legal way and starts taking matters into his own hands to the ecstatic applause from the audience? Such a narrative is especially inspiring in a country where the sense of justice, so often trampled on by the authorities and fellow citizens, is perhaps the most important trait of national character.
Moreover, let’s remember the history of the episode. How did it all happen and how was it covered in the Russian mass media? Yes, it was covered as a tragedy, but a tragedy that had one specific culprit – the company Skyguide and a very young man who was on duty that night and who made the fatal, criminal mistake.
Public opinion, properly stirred up by mass media, could not understand for a long time why the Swiss authorities did not want to apologize to the relatives of the deceased Bashkir Airlines passengers, and why the unfortunate air traffic controller was set free, and, moreover, why he was appointed a personal psychologist to help him come to his senses. Public opinion became the subject of informational brainwashing: there is a lot of “hype” surrounding this news, and all this “hype” was based on the kind of presentation that is considered to be the most effective way to deliver information in modern journalism – through a specific individual.
But what if, for argument’s sake, the same “hype” approach was used for reports about the incident a few years ago, when Ukrainian Air Defense Forces accidentally brought down a Sibir Airlines passenger jet en route to Russia from Israel? If, in that case, a specific culprit was also discovered – the person responsible for launching the missile – and if his fate was the same as the Swiss air traffic controller’s, would his murderer have become a hero?
I think that he would have had much fewer chances. Ukraine and its Air Defense Forces do not fit the “enemy profile,” whereas Switzerland, a “Western country,” no matter how neutral it is, fits just fine.
There was only one way for our public opinion to understand why the Swiss authorities were taking so long to apologize – because for them “these dead Russians” were second-rate people. Also, nobody ever really tried to explain to our public opinion that any attempt to inflict the cruelest – and at the same time quite exemplary – punishment on the responsible air traffic controller can turn out to be a double-edged sword. Because as a result of such punishment, the work of all air traffic control companies might be filled with elementary fear that would paralyze the will and the mind, endangering the lives and the safety of hundreds of thousands of other passengers in the future. These companies would then be led to cover up in case something goes wrong, instead of systemically solving the problem of flight safety.
It is probably easy to notice that almost all Russian news reports about any extraordinary events in our country end with an almost standard phrase: “The prosecutor general’s office initiated a criminal investigation into the matter.” The investigation almost always results in the designation of a specific culprit, who is then punished in an instructive and cruel manner.
Formally, everything is done according to the law, because banal human carelessness, corruption or negligence of professional duties are frequently to blame. However, in the process of investigation and punishment, people often forget about the much more important task of finding a systemic solution to the problem that caused the event – that is, eliminating the cause of such events.
Not many people in Russia know about the huge efforts undertaken within the whole European Union as a result of the investigation into the Lake Boden tragedy. New, more precisely calibrated rules have been developed, which I hope will prevent such tragedies in the future. But all of this, obviously, is too “boring” for the Russian mass media. For them, the whole story still concludes with the fate of the unfortunate murderer Vitaly Kaloyev. And this intentional simplification, just like in many other cases and with reference to many other publicly important topics, is the professional crime of this mass media. |
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