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Journalists beaten and bus torched on Chechnya tour, say activists Journalists and activists beaten and bus torched on Chechnya tour
(about 9 hours later)
Journalists on a tour organised by human rights activists in Chechnya have been attacked by masked men, with their minibus burned and two reporters hospitalised, according to activists. A minibus carrying journalists and human rights activists on a tour of Russia’s Northern Caucasus region has been attacked by a group of masked men as it approached Chechnya.
Nine people, including five journalists, had been en route to Grozny, the main city in Chechnya, when their bus was cut off by several cars, according to the Committee to Prevent Torture, which oversees a group of rights activists in Chechnya called the Joint Mobile Group. A number of the journalists were beaten up and their bus was set on fire, in the latest incident of violence and intimidation against those who investigate rights abuses in the region.
“Men in masks pulled journalists and employees outside and beat them. They burned the bus,” the group said. Two human rights activists and six journalists, including one from Sweden and one from Norway, were travelling in the minibus when it was attacked on Wednesday evening. All were injured and five were hospitalised, according to reports.
“Journalists from Norway and Sweden, our lawyer and the bus driver were hospitalised with injuries.” The rest of the group were testifying to Ingushetia policemen. They were on a press tour organised by Committee Against Torture, one of the few NGOs still working on human rights in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, to introduce the journalists to people who had been tortured or whose relatives had been kidnapped.
Dmitry Utukin, a lawyer for the Committee to Prevent Torture, formerly known as the Committee Against Torture, said the incident happened in Ingushetiya, close to the border with Chechnya, but was likely orchestrated by Chechens. The bus was attacked on the border between the Russian republics of Ingushetia and Chechnya as the group returned from a day trip.
“This would not be in the interest of the Ingushetiya side, this would be in the interest of the Chechen side,” he said, since Chechnya had paid “a lot of attention” to the work of the committee and journalists operating on its territory. “It was awful, I thought I was going to die,” Norwegian reporter Öystein Windstad told the country’s Aftenposten newspaper. “They tried to pull us out of the bus, hitting us with batons and sharp objects, and I fought as hard as I could. I thought if they got us out of the bus, I’d be dead.”
“They have watched the group from the moment the journalists arrived,” he said of the unofficial press tour organised to take reporters to victims of human rights abuses and relatives of kidnapped people. Maria Persson Lofgren, who works for Swedish Radio, told the broadcaster the assailants accused them of being terrorists who were “killing our people”. She said she was beaten and needed 10 stitches in her thigh after she was thrown onto an iron beam by the roadside.
He said it was the first press tour that was not organised by Chechen government and focused on the dark sides of the region where strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov has little tolerance for any dissent. Dmitry Utukin, a lawyer from Committee Against Torture, said: “It seems the goal wasn’t to maim or kill people but the goal was to scare them. They said there is nothing for you to do in Chechnya, you aren’t human rights defenders but supporters of terrorists.”
In 2015 the Joint Mobile Group’s office in Grozny was destroyed by masked men after it criticised Kadyrov’s policy to burn down houses belonging to relatives of suspected Islamists. Chechnya is run by Ramzan Kadyrov, a former insurgent who has rebuilt the republic with Moscow’s money after two devastating wars. Kadyrov is credited with ending the insurgency but his methods are often brutal, and critics say he has established a de facto independent fiefdom where Russian laws do not work. A high-ranking commander of one of his battalions was implicated in the murder of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov outside the Kremlin last year.
Kadyrov is accused by rights activists and political opposition of running the region as his personal fiefdom with a private army, with wide use of kidnapping and torture and little oversight from Moscow. Last month Kadyrov said he would step down from his position, but the move appears to be a gambit to force the Kremlin to ask him to stay.
This year he issued threats against Kremlin critics and independent journalists, calling them “a gang of jackals” and offering to put them in a mental asylum. Local rights activists and journalists frequently receive threats or worse, but the targeting of journalists from national publications and even foreign reporters is unusual and suggests an escalation of intimidation.
“This was a demonstration that they are all-powerful,” said Igor Kalyapin, the head of Committee Against Torture. “They were saying: ‘See we are not scared, we can do anything we want to anyone, we don’t care who you are or where you’re from. We can stop you in any place, and beat you up or kill you.’ It’s a demonstration of force.”
Kalyapin has frequently been featured on Kadyrov’s Instagram account, where the Chechen leader has accused him of working for western intelligence services or helping the Islamic insurgency. The group’s offices in Chechnya have previously been burned down.
A few hours after the attack on the bus, armed men, some in civilian clothing and some in camouflage, attacked the offices of the Joint Mobile Group, a monitoring organisation set up by Committee against Torture, in Ingushetia. None of the employees were there at the time but they monitored the attack on security cameras.
“These brazen attacks on journalists and human rights defenders show how dangerous it is to report on human rights abuses in the North Caucasus,” said Tanya Cooper, Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“The authorities have made no meaningful attempt to prevent or investigate the repeated attacks in the North Caucasus on people who criticise the government.”