Elena Vlasenko reports on Russian state-owned television channel NTV’s move to censor a broadcast detailing a campaign for a fair investigation into the kidnapping and alleged torture of Chechen man Islam Umarpashaev
One of the recent items in Russian current affairs programme Central Television, broadcast by Russian TV channel NTV, concerned Islam Umarpashaev, who was kidnapped from his house in December 2009 — allegedly by the Chechen Special Purpose Police Unit. He claims he spent four months in a police station basement unduly and was beaten constantly. He was released in April 2010 after intervention by the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights.
The Russian Committee Against Torture sheltered Umarpashaev and is assisting him seek justice through the courts. Committee member Igor Kalyapin filed a complaint alleging negligence on the part of investigators, which was rejected by a Yessentuki court.
Human rights activists consider local investigators’ reluctance to investigate Umarpashaev’s case significant. There are hundreds of people in Chechnya who don’t know what happened to their disappeared children — mainly men from the ages of 18-35 whom authorities accused of cooperation with separatist forces.
The programme detailed how Russian human rights advocates, lawyers and journalists operate in Chechnya. It profiled activists who had created the Joint Mobile Group soon after Natalia Estemirova was killed in 2009. The key method is for activists to take turns so that nobody stays in Chechnya for too long. The method makes activists’ work relatively safer.
On 30 October, Central Television was shown in the Eastern part of Russia, but was censored in the Western part of the country. The piece about Islam Umarpashaev and the Joint Mobile Group was cut, and viewers had to watch commercials instead.
“NTV’s managers made a decision to send the piece back to editors to finish it off”, the NTV channel’s spokesperson Maria Bezborodova told journalists. She didn’t specify what exactly had to be revised in the piece and whether it will be broadcast in the future. She said there was nothing peculiar about the incident, adding that such incidents are “widespread practice in an editorial office dealing with imformation.”
Russian online news site Gazeta.ru has reported that anonymous sources at NTV claimed the piece was banned by the head of the broadcasting station, Vladimir Kulistikov. Bezborodova did not comment on this allegation.
In one way, Bezborodova is right: such bans are indeed commonplace on Russian TV. NTV, owned by a subsidiary of state-owned energy company Gazprom, is no exception. NotedRussian journalist Leonid Parfenov was fired from NTV in 2004 after interviewing Malika Yandarbieva, widow of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria president Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. The programme he made — “Namedni” — was banned in the European part of Russia. In May 2011, NTV also cut out a segment from “Central Television” about former oligarch and Vladimir Putin opponent Mikhail Khosorkovsky’s cellmate, Alexander Kuchma. The piece contained Kuchma’s interview regarding his assault on Khodorkovsky in jail.
Human rights activists agree that NTV stopped being independent in 2000, when it was taken over by Gazprom Media.
“It’s horrible when people suffer from tortures and kidnappings. But it’s twice as horrible when one doesn’t have a chance to discuss the problem in public,” a statement from the Russian Committee Against Torture read.
