OVER 150 JOURNALISTS HAVE BEEN MURDERED IN RUSSIA DURING THE PAST 15 YEARS
A commentary on the recent interview by Major-General Gribakin (police)
By John Crowfoot
International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) analyst
13 February 2008

On 4 February Major-General Valery Gribakin told Itar-TASS that the “number of instances when revenge is taken on journalists for their publications and investigations is, as a percentage of the whole, not large”. To illustrate his assertion about the main reasons for violent deaths among journalists in Russia, the head of public relations at the Ministry of Internal Affairs gave eight examples from the last seven years. At the same time, the general stressed that “those in charge of the ministry and its operative departments, of course, keep a special watch over the killing of journalists,” (http://www.mvd.ru/press/interview/6115/ ).

If the Ministry of Internal Affairs treats the murder of journalists as a special case and, as the general implies, the police keep a separate record of these killings, it is reassuring to know. It is also important that they do so. In many cases, as he says, the deaths are the result of street crime, to which all Russian citizens and visitors to the country are prone, or they arise from personal and domestic disputes. Other fatalities among journalists, however, demand the special attention of experienced investigators. Some of these deaths are planned assassinations in which those who ordered and paid for the killing must also be identified and charged if the crime is to be solved. In certain instances, targeted killings have been disguised as ordinary crimes or as death from other causes. Then only the most careful and determined investigation can uncover how and why a journalist died and ensure that all responsible are brought to justice.

General Gribakin’s remarks follow the recent shocking daylight killing of lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. Since 1993 journalists themselves have been recording the deaths of their colleagues from all causes, and it is both possible and necessary to set the 19 January murders in that longer time-frame and wider context. This shows, if nothing else, whether things are getting better or worse or if they remain much the same.

The information accumulated by the Glasnost Defence Foundation (GDF) and the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations (CJES) about the deaths and disappearances of more than three hundred journalists and media workers in Russia over the past 15 years has now been gathered, with the help of the International Federation of Journalists, into a single data base. This will soon become accessible to everyone. Then some of the more frequent and disconcerting //disagreements about figures can be objectively assessed. In the meantime those who want to see how journalists have classified the eight cases cited by General Gribakin, or those mentioned further in this text, can go to the websites of the media monitors and, in particular, refer to the Memorium site (www.memorium.cjes.ru) where material about dozens of cases has been systematically collected and arranged.

Why only give examples since 2002?

On examining the general’s comments certain questions arise. For instance, all the examples he gives of homicide and attempted murder refer to the period after 2001. We may wonder why that is.

Murder and manslaughter are classed in the RF Criminal Code as the most serious offences against the individual (§§ 105 and 111.4) and as such are crimes without statute of limitation. The investigation continues, and the case remains open, until the killers are apprehended. Not so long ago, for instance, the Russian public were told that the investigation into the 1995 contract killing of Vladislav Listyev was still being actively pursued. By the time of the first case mentioned by General Gribakin, the murder of Valery Batuyev on 31 March 2002 ­ not in March 2003, there is a misprint, evidently, in the Itar-TASS interview ­ more than one hundred journalists had already fallen the victims of homicide. So why only refer to the last few years?

Perhaps there is a simple and understandable explanation.

In the 1990s, it would seem, the law enforcement agencies could barely cope with the wave of murders and killings unleashed in Russia by privatisation wars and general criminality. There were 48 contract killings in 2008, says General Gribakin; in the 1990s the police recorded several hundred such professional assassinations each year. For whatever reason, cases of homicide involving journalists were not then satisfactorily investigated. Very rarely, at least, was anyone detained and not until 1997 were any of those responsible successfully prosecuted in court. For a third of the homicides committed in that period monitors have no information at all about any investigation by the police or the prosecutor’s office. The journalists’ relatives and colleagues, the monitors’ chief informants, do not know whether an investigation was conducted or how far it progressed before it was halted or closed. If the police have their own data base concerning homicide of journalists, it would be helpful to compare entries for these numerous violent deaths and only charitable to those bereaved to know a little more about the outcome of such investigations, however many years may since have passed. Who knows, perhaps some of these deaths are among the 875 cases from previous years, mentioned by the general, that were finally solved in 2008?

At the time homicides among journalists were increasing at an alarming rate: they reached a total of 16 deaths in 1995 and would peak again in 2002 with 20 recorded homicides. The lack of information or apparent activity on the part of the law enforcement agencies created a general uncertainty about the motives behind such killings of journalists. As a result there grew up a tradition among Russia’s media monitors of assuming, until proved otherwise, that any killing of a journalist might be due to professional reasons: the details and circumstances of all such violent and premature deaths were therefore recorded. Today these records can be compared with official documentation for the same period and will show, among other things, whether journalists were treated differently to the rest of the population.

General Gribakin’s assertion that “88% of such crimes [homicides and attempted murders, JC] are solved today” stands in need of clarification, therefore. Chosen as a title for the entire interview given to Itar-TASS, it certainly does not apply to the homicide of journalists since 1993. Over the last five years the clear-up rate for these crimes has been improving. Overall, however, only 48 of the 159 recorded murders have been solved to the satisfaction of the police; the courts have not always been as convinced by such investigations (see below). The 88% of solved homicides refers neither to journalists nor to police handling of the crime since 2003, but only to police records for last year.

It should be added that the impressive clear-up rate (in 2006 it was said to be 83%) refers to those homicides that are registered. Police experts themselves estimate that over 25% of all homicides in Russia are not recorded (reported, registered, etc). In this respect journalists have been better served than the population as a whole. The Russian Union of Journalists and, in particular, the two media monitors GDF and CJES, have for years been carefully recording all fatalities among journalists anywhere in the country. Since 2000 it is doubtful that they have overlooked the death of a single journalist in a fatal accident, combat situation or by homicide.

The term “solved” itself requires elaboration. It does not always mean that the offenders have been apprehended, charged and brought to court ­ merely that the police have identified, to their own satisfaction, who committed the crime, and then passed the case to the prosecutor’s office. Adjusting such police records to the likely total number of murders, and comparing those figures with data for murder trials from the judicial department of the Supreme Court, it would seem that 75% of such offences come to court in any one year.

Finally, and most important, this figure is a vast generalisation.

It offers an average for an enormous country with the seventh largest population in the world. The official clear-up rate for homicide and attempted murder in Moscow or St Petersburg is certainly lower than 88%. The statistic also covers every type of homicide. The number of contract killings is significantly reduced compared to the 1990s. In 2006 the Ministry of Internal Affairs admitted to “solving” only 10% of such complex murders: this is most relevant to the deaths of journalists because up to three dozen of the recorded fatalities are known, or strongly suspected, to have been contract killings.

GDF and CJES documentation and statistics

The preceding comments clarify, we hope, what Major-General Gribakin’s assertions do and do not actually tell us about the deaths of journalists in Russia. Let us offer a few facts and examples from our own statistics of the last 15 years to set beside his examples and deductions.

Over three hundred journalists have died violent or premature deaths, or have disappeared, in Russia since 1993. (The total includes 9 foreign journalists.) Some have been killed in combat situations; a few have died in terrorist acts; a great many have been the victims of traffic accidents on Russia’s deadly roads. Sixteen journalists and media workers died from these and other causes in 2007. Incidentally, when General Gribakin refers to the 361 policemen (and women?) who died in 2008, his figure also perhaps includes traffic accidents occurring in the course of duty: it would seem from his phrasing that not all those killed were the victims of violent attacks.

The greatest single cause of death among journalists remains homicide. Almost one hundred and sixty recorded deaths are attributable to murder and manslaughter. In very few instances have the police disagreed with this evaluation of the offence. At the insistence of the dead man or woman’s colleagues and relations, they have registered the crime and begun to investigate. The cause of certain other fatalities remains the subject of dispute.

Journalists continue to suspect foul play in the deaths of their colleagues but this has not always been acknowledged by the relevant authorities. The most dramatic case is the poisoning in 2003 of Yury Shchekochikhin. For four years the law enforcement agencies insisted that the Duma deputy and deputy chief editor of Novaya gazeta had died from a severe allergy. Only in late 2007 was the death reclassified as murder and an investigation begun. The data base reveals over twenty other cases of similar uncertainty. The death in 2005 of Pavel Makeyev, a 21-year-old reporter from the Rostov Region, was supposedly a hit and run case; the suspicion remains that he was deliberately run down and then left to bleed to death.

A police investigation is not sufficient in itself, naturally, to confirm the causes of death and the motive for a murder and to convict the guilty. Getting to court can provide much more certainty about the correct identification of the culprits and their motivation. Trials have been held for 40 of the 159 recorded murders of journalists, leading to 36 convictions and four acquittals. Not all trials prove a satisfactory conclusion to such investigations. General Gribakin mentions the July 2008 conviction in Tajikistan of those accused of killing Ilyas Shurpayev on 21 March last year. One of Russia’s monitors has raised serious doubts about the validity of the trial and the evidence on which the men were convicted (www.cjes. ///). Only twice in the past 15 years in Russia have those who ordered the killing of a journalist faced prosecution in court, alongside the men they hired to carry it out.

The litany of these more serious and complicated cases began on 17 October 1994 with the assassination of Dima Kholodov by a booby-trapped briefcase. That act was an unambiguous and unmistakable provocation. Since then some deaths have been disguised as road accidents, air crashes and, famously, as a fatal allergy. For the most part, however, they are passed off as the mundane, all too frequent (and often drink-fuelled) street crimes or personal disputes that plague Russia and its capital, in particular. Among the causes of death among journalists it is homicide, therefore, which produces the highest level of uncertainty concerning motive.

Local and international monitors are convinced that 13 of the deaths of journalists in Russia have been deliberate targeted killings. A further 34 cases of homicide arouse more or less strong suspicions that the motive for the fatal attack was professional. Yet without determined and expert investigation, backed by the authorities, these cases have not reached the courts or, when they do so, only prosecute the perpetrators of the act itself. Targeted killings thus make up at least one tenth of the total and the uncertainty surrounding over thirty more cases of murder and manslaughter means that a third of all homicides are suspected of being linked to the dead journalist’s profession. On any definition that fits poorly with Major-General Gribakin’s estimation that the proportion of such cases within the total is “not large”.

The geography of such fatalities

One last, very important point concerns where these murders and fatal attacks take place.

Journalists have died in all the seven Federal Districts and across 8 of the 10 time zones of the Russian Federation. In most places such a crime is an unusual occurrence. Only in a handful of Russian cities has more than one journalist ever been killed in the past 15 years. Togliatti with its five murdered chief editors is justly notorious. St Petersburg, Chelyabinsk and Smolensk also have several murders apiece and, what is more disturbing, in only one of those cities have any of those responsible been brought to trial.