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By Owen Matthews
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Radio liberty correspondent Andrei Babitsky is--or maybe was--a man with powerful enemies. From the Kremlin down, the Russian authorities hated his guts. His offense? Reporting from inside besieged Grozny, telling the world of Russia's military setbacks, contradicting the official Kremlin line. In other words, truth-telling. Telling the truth, it seems, is once again becoming a criminal, even capital, offense in Russia. Babitsky first went missing as he tried to cross the front lines in north Grozny on Jan. 16 to get back to the Russian side and home. Initially, Russian authorities claimed they had no idea where he was--though at least one eyewitness saw him on the evening of his disappearance in the Russian forward headquarters at Khankala, being led away by two officers from the FSB, successor to the KGB. After nine days, the Russians finally admitted that Babitsky was in fact being held in a federal jail in north Chechnya, and had been charged with "participation in an illegal armed group"--a crime that could land him in jail for five years.
Protesting executives from the American-funded Radio Liberty were assured that Babitsky, a Russian citizen, would be released late last week and the case "sorted out." Instead, after 18 days of detention without access to an independent lawyer or a phone, Babitsky was taken to a lonely road somewhere in Chechnya last week and handed over to a band of masked Chechen gunmen in exchange for two Russian prisoners of war. The bizarre scene was filmed by the FSB, who then distributed it to national TV networks--though they insisted that the FSB had had nothing to do with the exchange. No one has seen or heard from Babitsky since--and his family and colleagues fear he is dead.
Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Russia's smooth spinmeister for the Chechen campaign, produced a letter supposedly written by Babitsky on Jan. 31, in which he asked to be handed over to the Chechens. He also named two Chechen field commanders who had supposedly requested Babitsky in exchange for the Russian POWs. But even the most experienced reporters in Chechnya had never heard of the commanders he cited.
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What happened to Andrei Babitsky is not just mysterious--it's deeply disturbing. Babitsky, like many brilliant war correspondents, is a little crazy--but surely not crazy enough to ask to be handed over to unknown Chechen warlords without some duress being applied. If the Chechens wanted Babitsky to continue covering their side of the story, wouldn't he be back on the air by now? If they wanted him as a hostage, why no ransom demand as yet? The most sinister explanation may be the likeliest: the handover was staged, and Babitsky has been murdered, either by the Russians or their Chechen allies. Whatever Babitsky's fate, it will say much about the shape of things to come in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Babitsky's arrest is not an isolated incident. The Russian authorities have also made heavy-handed moves to try to control the coverage of the Chechen war by foreigners. They have established unpublished "rules" that forbid foreign journalists from going to the war zone except as part of an Intourist-style official tour. This week, as Russian forces finally took the Chechen capital of Grozny after nearly two months of merciless bombardment, only one Western TV crew was allowed onscene. Over the last two months eight Western journalists have been detained and questioned--though not, thankfully, imprisoned--for being in Chechnya "without permission." Many more, myself included, have been threatened with arrest. Yet Russian law states quite clearly that foreign journalists accredited by the Foreign Ministry have the right to work without hindrance anywhere within the Russian Federation.
A day after Yastrzhembsky told me that "censorship is illegal in Russia," our weekly NEWSWEEK pouch containing photographs from Chechnya was seized by customs at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. After a lengthy argument, the pouch was sent on its way--but in the future, we were warned, any photographic material from the war could be confiscated by the FSB for "investigation." Western journalists in the Assa hotel in Nazran, near the Chechen border, have found computer cables mysteriously sliced. Phones are regularly tapped--as one Western bureau chief found after scheduling a rendezvous with a Chechen contact by telephone, only to be stopped as he went to the appointment by a plainclothes policeman who warned him that "things will end badly" if he tried to make the meeting.
The KGB-style tactics don't stop with journalists covering Chechnya. Alexander Khinshtein, a controversial reporter for the popular daily Moskovsky Komsomolets and a vehement critic of Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky, went into hiding late last month after local medical authorities had ordered him to undergo a psychiatric "evaluation"--just like in the bad old days.
Press freedom was one of the few real achievements of Boris Yeltsin's democratic reforms--indeed, it was glasnost, freedom of speech, that was the foundation of Russia's democratic revolution. Now Yeltsin's heir and Russia's likely next president of Russia, the ex-KGB spy Vladimir Putin, is attacking that foundation head-on.
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