Russian wildfires produce media smokescreen?

Environmentalists and freedom of information campaigners have accused the Russian authorities of failing to provide vital information about the wildfires that have devastated huge tracts of the country's forests and the death rates in Moscow caused by extreme heat and choking smog. 

In some cases, officials stand charged with incompetence and a lack of information know-how. In others, they are accused of a deliberate cover-up.

Allegations of an information clampdown appeared in the Russian media after the website of a government body called the Federal Forest Protection Centre or Roslesozashchita was closed for "technical work" on 13 August. 

As business daily Vedomosti reported the same evening, the start of the technical work "coincided in an amazing fashion" with Emergencies Minister Sergey Shoygu's instruction that the Federal Forestry Agency (Rosleskhoz) and the Interior Ministry should look into the activities of the site after it reported that fires in Bryansk Region had spread to areas contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Three days later, the broadsheet newspaper Kommersant reported that Roslesozashchita's internet service provider had received a call from someone claiming to be linked to criminal investigators asking it to close down the site. The ISP asked for official confirmation of the request, but this was not forthcoming, the newspaper said.

Roslesozashchita's website became available again on 18 August, but, as Vedomosti noted, it no longer featured the reports from 6 and 11 August about the fires in the contaminated forests. As of 31 August, the website was still accessible, but its news section has not been updated since 11 August.

Environmental activists were quickly up in arms about the treatment of Roslesozashchita. Vladimir Slivyak, co-chair of the Ekozashchita (Ecodefence) ecology group, told Kommersant that the centre had provided the best information about the forest fires in Russia. Meanwhile, the head of Greenpeace Russia's forestry programme, Aleksey Yaroshenko, backed up the reports about fires in areas contaminated by Chernobyl.

Yaroshenko went on to echo a report posted on the Greenpeace Forest Forum on 13 August which stated that information about the fires had also been curtailed on the Roslekhoz site. It said that the site no longer carried "reports about the forest fire situation and that direct links to earlier reports are also failing to open". It implied that this was a failure on the part of the agency to meet its constitutional duty to provide "reliable information about the environment".

Attempts to restrict information about the fires did not stop with removing material from websites. On 18 August, a Greenpeace article on the Forest Forum reported that Rosleskhoz boss Aleksei Savinov had issued an order on 12 August "forbidding his subordinates to make contact with the media or give out information about the fires" without the permission of the agency's management. 

The following day an article on the forum reported that a Rosleskhoz official, Vladimir Kostin, had been sacked for giving an interview to the mass-market newspaper Trud in which, among other things, he lamented the cuts to the forestry service and complained that the media were giving too much coverage to Emergencies Ministry firefighters and not enough to the efforts of forestry workers. Savinov himself was sacked as head of Rosleskhoz on 20 August.

Like Vedomosti, Greenpeace linked the clampdown on information to Shoygu's suggestions that the forestry services were exaggerating the extent of the wildfires. A report on the Forest Forum on 12 August had noted that the Rosleskhoz site had given a figure for the extent of the wildfires in Moscow Region that was 30 times higher than the figures published by the Emergencies Ministry.

Doubts have been raised about Emergencies Ministry data in other quarters. A report in the liberal daily Vremya Novostey on 24 August quoted reports from volunteer firefighters that contradicted the ministry's assertions that all forest fires in Moscow Region had been put out.

Cover-up allegations have not been confined to forest fires. In an article on the US-based Global Voices website, journalist and academic Gregory Asmolov described how bloggers had confounded official attempts to obscure or bury figures on the death rate in Moscow as the city groaned under the double whammy of sweltering temperatures and choking smog.

One of the bloggers quoted by Asmolov was open-government campaigner Ivan Begtin, who posted charts on his blog graphically demonstrating how the death rate in the capital had dramatically risen in July, both compared to the early months of 2010 and to July 2009. The information that formed the basis for the charts came from a Moscow government website, but, as Begtin commented, it was presented in a form that was "of little use" and betrayed a complete lack of understanding of the concept of open data.

A statement about the doubling of the death rate in Moscow was made by the city's chief health officer, Andrey Seltsovskiy, on 9 August, but was quickly questioned by the Health Ministry and kept off primetime bulletins on the main national TV channels.

Elsewhere in his blog, Begtin criticised the authorities' information response to the wildfires and the ensuing health crisis, saying that reports on the Emergencies Ministry site were the "most general and useless statistics" that filled him with the "most negative emotions". He advocated the creation of dedicated online resources to provide the public with clear and helpful information about what was happening.

Government and government-sponsored bodies, he said, had proved no match for private individuals who had responded to both the wildfires and other crises, such as March's suicide blasts on the Moscow metro, by rapidly creating online resources that were of real practical help to people in their time of need.

As a Greenpeace contributor to the Forest Forum noted: "In the age of the widespread development of information technologies it is senseless to conceal official information as it simply increases the public's trust in independent sources."

Stephen Ennis is a Media Analyst for BBC Monitoring.