Sent: 4/24/2006
Covert Operation Sheds Light on Media Freedom
One of the key players in the separatist conflict that still rages today in Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev had proclaimed himself leader of the independent republic of Ichkeria. In a covert operation that Russian defense officials have yet to officially confirm or deny, special forces located Dudayev by intercepting a mobile communication.
“Dzhokhar Dudayev fell victim to an attack of revenge for an April 16 ambush of a [Russian military convoy], which resulted in a missile bombing campaign in the mountainous regions of Chechnya,” Tamara Zamyatina, then a correspondent for the state-operated ITAR-TASS news agency, wrote in a news report that broke the story. “This is confidential information given by a high-placed representative of Russia’s Interior Ministry, who wished to remain anonymous.” The official reaction among Russia’s political elite was that the flag-bearer of the Chechen separatist movement was defeated. But unofficially, the fact that the story was broken at all served as a test for Russia’s new law on media freedom – a test that it then won, but lost later.
Zamyatina’s report caused a stir among high-placed officials. A commander of the Russian troops in Chechnya denied that federal forces had anything to do with Dudayev’s death. “Officials from the Interior and Defense Ministries began calling me demanding that I reveal my source,” she recalls today, now as a staff writer for the Moskovskie Novosti weekly. “There was even talk of plans to initiate a special parliamentary committee to investigate my reports.” But the fact that Zamyatina was repeatedly requested to speak before the said committee, in her words contradicted press freedom laws that the same parliament had passed earlier.
The management of her state-operated news agency backed Zamyatina in her resolve. Indeed, that may have been the main reason why eventually Russian officials gave up. “The parliamentary committee didn’t happen because in the end they understood that it would go against the law on the media” which protected anonymous sources.
This week, still under anonymity, the Interior Ministry source gave Zamyatina another interview, published in this week’s edition of Moskovskie Novosti, in which he talked of the government’s reasons for keeping the operation covert. “To kill a leader of that caliber you needed two conditions: in politics and military technology,” the source said in this week’s interview. “That is why any information that was discussed in the Kremlin went to the [separatist] militants.”
Even today, he says, officials have made no moves to confirm that the operation took place. Ten years ago, meanwhile, what was at stake was “the fate of those people who took part in the operation, and the possibility of a negative reaction from the press.”
Ironically, Zamyatina cites TASS’s government sponsorship as one of the main reasons why it was more difficult to pressure journalists under Boris Yeltsin’s administration. Today, she says, when much of the media belongs to businesses that are afraid of a government crackdown, newspapers would rather fire a journalist who refuses to reveal a source than deal with the repercussions.
Even with the recent scandal revolving around New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s choice to go to prison rather than reveal her source, Zamyatina thinks that Russia ten years ago was closer to the West in terms of press freedoms than it is today.
