The dangers of Russian journalism

The vicious beating of journalist and blogger Oleg Kashin outside his apartment in Moscow in the small hours of 6 November is yet another reminder of the dangers facing media workers in Russia - there was a report by Richard Galpin on the BBC's News at Ten last night (starting at 21 mins 56 secs).

After being admitted to hospital, Kashin was put in an artificially induced coma. His condition is said to be "critical but stable".

President Medvedev reacted quickly to the attack. In a message posted on Twitter, he said he had ordered "the Prosecutor-General's Office and the Interior Ministry to take special control of the case ... the criminals must be found and punished."

The fact is, though, that those who order or carry out serious attacks on journalists are very rarely brought to book.

Kashin, who works for the business daily Kommersant, is an outspoken figure, and there is little doubt that the attack had an exemplary character. His attackers inflicted particularly grievous injuries on his jaw and fingers - body parts associated with speech and the profession of the writer.

The attack was reminiscent of the beating in 2008 that crippled journalist Mikhail Beketov. Beketov had been a leading campaigner against plans to build a motorway through the forest at Khimki just outside Moscow.

Kashin had also covered the Khimki forest story. He had, though, a much wider circle of ill-wishers than Beketov, including Pskov Region governor Andrey Turchak, who he recently insulted in his blog, and the pro-Kremlin youth group Molodoya Gvardiya (Young Guard). An article on the Molodoya Gvardiya website in August featured a manipulated picture of Kashin and another journalist next to the words "they will be punished" (the article is now inaccessible).

The journalist community responded to Kashin's attack by mounting rolling one-man pickets outside police headquarters in Moscow. The demonstrators carried placards with the words: "Journalist Oleg Kashin was assaulted - I demand the perpetrators and those behind them are found."

They also started a petition calling on Medvedev to ensure the Kashin case is "brought to a conclusion. The journalist in Russia must finally be defended." By 10 November it had received over 2,700 signatures.

The petition listed some of the high-profile unsolved murders of Russian journalists. It also noted that so far this year eight journalists had been killed and 40 attacked.

Two further attacks have occurred in the days following the Kashin beating. Anatoliy Adamchuk, like Beketov, had been active in reporting opposition to a highway development. The other occurred in Samara and may also have been a reprisal or intimidatory attack.

The figures quoted in the Kashin petition appear to come from the Glasnost Defence Foundation (GDF), whose website has been cataloguing violent incidents involving journalists for over a decade - albeit with a fairly indiscriminate definition of 'attacks on journalists'.

Of the 38 attacks it lists for 2010, 12 appear not to be related to the journalists' professional activity. They include a fight over a table in a restaurant, muggings and a run-in with football hooligans. There are a further four where the motive is unclear, four that were relatively minor altercations and two disputed arrests. That leaves 16 cases where there is clear evidence of an intention to intimidate or do serious harm.

A similar breakdown of violent deaths of journalists is facilitated by the Deaths of Journalists in Russia website - a searchable database of 331 journalists' deaths going back 17 years.

This total includes accidental deaths and deaths unrelated to journalistic activity. The database says that its information is based mainly on work done by the GDF and the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, another Russian body monitoring media freedom in Russia.

As of 10 November, the Deaths of Journalists in Russia website listed nine violent deaths for 2010. Six of these were homicides - five with unclear motives and one unrelated to journalism; one was a terrorist attack that was linked to the journalists' professional activity; and two were designated "not confirmed". Both of these were traffic accidents involving opposition journalists in the North Caucasus. The non-journalism-related homicide was the beating to death of a journalist in a drunk-tank in Tomsk.

In all, the website lists 22 homicides with motives related to journalism since 1993. Fifteen of these have occurred since current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000. They include the killings of opposition Novaya Gazeta newspaper journalists Yuriy Shchekochikhin (2003), Anna Politkovskaya (2006), Anastasiya Baburova and Natalya Estemirova (both 2009), Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov (2004) and opposition website Ingushetia.ru editor-in-chief Magomed Yevloyev (2008).

A further 24 deaths are recorded as homicides with unclear motives (16 since 2000); 13 as "not confirmed" with unclear motives; five terrorist attacks with motives related to journalism; eight disappearances with unclear motives; and 28 cases where journalists have been caught in crossfire.

Even more shocking than the roll-call of murders and suspicious deaths is the level of impunity enjoyed by their perpetrators and orchestrators.

According to the Deaths of Journalists in Russia site, just four of the 22 homicides clearly linked to the journalists' professional activity have resulted in convictions.

In the case of Yevloyev, who was fatally shot while in police custody, the police officer who pulled the trigger was convicted not of murder but of the lesser charge of "accidentally causing death".

In the other three cases - Kalmykia-based editor Larisa Yudina (1998), Novaya Gazeta reporter Igor Domnikov (2000) and web journalist Vladimir Sukhomlin (2003) - only the immediate perpetrators were convicted. The people behind these contract killings remain at large.

The Domnikov case is instructive. In an article in Novaya Gazeta on 8 November, Yelena Milashina said that Domnikov's immediate killers had only been brought to justice as part of a Tatarstan police operation against the Tagiryanov gang, one of Russia's most powerful organised crime outfits.

However, she said, despite Medvedev's personal intervention in the case last year, the Moscow police, who were leading the Domnikov investigation, failed to follow up leads against the men suspected of ordering the killing.