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Simons is attached to the Swedish National Defence College, Sweden. For the purposes of this book, whose introduction deals a lot with definitions, he defines terrorists as those who seek to bring about some form of societal change through the use of violence – political violence; they use violence against a target audience as a means of indirectly putting pressure on the authorities; and civilians are deliberately targeted as part of the terrorists’ campaign. Is this a helpful start? I am unsure. When the US or NATO - with little accountability for choice of targets, less than trustworthy public verification of alleged hits, amid frequent evidence of ghastly error - deploy drones against Taliban, Al Qaeda, or “insurgents” in Afghanistan or Pakistan, they are seeking societal change through violence (never mind the questionable rationale for their presence there in the first instance) and indirectly “putting pressure” on their enemies to give up. They don’t exactly target civilians, but they know that they will frequently kill civilians. How huge a difference is this from targeting only civilians? Or are questions of definition eventually resolvable in terms of those “others” who inconveniently refuse to fight according to “our” preference as to how they should fight? Simons begins his account with a fairly helpful background to post-Soviet developments in Russian media. In broad-brush terms it is a relatively simple story: “glasnost” and “perestroika” opened Pandora’s box to a contest between conservative and pro-Gorbachev media (Simons does not identify the private news agency Interfax among this group, but frequently cites it as a source). This was a brief manifestation of mass media as a Fourth Power. Such media began to be squelched under Yeltsin, first president of the new Russia, as, seeking out non-government patrons, they opened their doors to the “new oligarchs.” Deployment of the term “Russian oligarch” often implies some exotic creature peculiar to the post-communist world when really its equivalent is a familiar presence in the history of corporate and capitalist acquisition of the press almost anywhere else. The oligarchs introduced a period of yellow journalism, what Simons calls “mediacracy.” Putin fought back against oligarchic power, in part by resurrecting the centralized State, with substantial central control over the media, while pleading the virtues of a “single information space,” a concept that was also well in line with the Doctrine of Information Security established shortly after his accession to power in 2000. Putin replaced oligarch control of the media with control by trusted appointees from the “Power Ministries” namely, the Interior Ministry, FSB and armed forces, which Simons says have effectively closed down public debate concerning freedom of the press. Simons moves on to the identification of factors that motivate and determine censorship in Russian media. In addition to identifying the principal legal mechanisms and actors, whose singular outcome appears to be self-censorship, he comments in particular on the phenomenon of public demand for censorship, nurtured by acts of terrorism and the responses to them of the authorities and the media. The laws on mass media are very liberal, but reality on the ground is different. This chapter is an important and relevant background to the author’s main focus, namely Russia’s war on terror, starting with a summary of the major acts of terrorism in Moscow from 1999-2004. These have inspired the creation of an “official” vocabulary of the war on terrorism, one of whose purposes is to strip away any association of the separatist movement in the Northern Caucasus with Islam or anything Muslim. This official vocabulary or “rhetoric” also serves to normalize Russia’s war on terror on the international stage, where the western world appears to share with Russia a common conundrum, even if its responses are different, namely, whether to integrate the language of anti-terrorism with the language of “anti Islamic extremism.” In common with Russian media policy and Russian media, Simons offers a disappointing level of detail, insight or empathy concerning these resistance movements of the North Caucasus or elsewhere in the new Russia, the countries of the CIS, or the old Republics of the Soviet Union. But without a thorough grounding in the history, background detail and perspectives of those who have been marginalized by Moscow, no matter how contemptible their actions may be judged, it is difficult to move beyond standard discourses, legitimated by Russian elites as by the Western “security” community, all framed within a double-standard Westphalian ideology of how the globe should be structured. The emphasis instead is on the strategies of Russian governing elites in structuring public perceptions of the conflict by means of control of the media, of the vocabulary and terms of debate, including of definitions of terror and violence, of judgments as to just how bad things are and of what progress the forces of civilization and decency are achieving, and of the efficacy of the official “response”. The role performed by Russian media, Simons concludes, has much less to do with that of “witness,” than with a variation between acting as “mirror” (of what has happened) and as “transmitter” (of the official viewpoint). How have Russian authorities discouraged the media from reporting the Chechen war from the rebel Chechens’ point of view? The media are urged to align themselves with the challenges faced by the “nation.” Criminal cases against journalists discourage or hinder reporting in sensitive areas - 30-35 such cases a year under Putin. The burden of proof is placed upon the accused. Authorities seem to have little difficulty in planting their “good” stories on the war against terror. To get around the problem of Kremlin disapproval of “negative news,” Simons notes that some Russian journalists have taken to reporting from western news agencies. He concludes that security forces “seem to be more than adequately fulfilling their role as a primary definer in the field” (p. 105). He examines a number of case studies including the Dubrovka Theatre hostage-taking of 2002, the passenger jet bombings of 2004, Chechnya, and the horrific School school hostage crisis in Beslan, 2004. There is a section on Anna Politkovskaya’s assassination in 2006. No connection is made between her death and the investigations of those journalists such as Artyom Borovik (killed in a plane crash in 2000) who ascribed the apartment complex bombings of 1999 to the Russian security apparatus, although Simons does discuss this “conspiracy theory” in a paragraph in the same chapter. Russian authorities’ rhetorical response to Chechnyan separatism works alongside changes in international perception that have moved closer to the Russian position since 2001, presumably persuaded that Russia and the West share a common enemy in “radical Islam,” although some sources (e.g. Ahmed, 2006) argue that Western intelligence agencies likely had a hand in transporting mujahedin fighters from Afghanistan to Chechnya. A concluding chapter looks at the role of the Internet as a host of terrorist web-sites, and at State efforts to police the Internet. A new rule came into effect in 2009 that requires domain users to provide passports or other accepted forms of identification to the registrar. Simons identifies a range of web-sites under the control of Chechen separatist groups. These are fractured across at least three different groups: pro-ChRI, pro-Emirate, and nonaligned web-sites. The chapter could helpfully supply a fuller historical accounting of these groups. Considerable discussion is devoted to Kavkazcenter.com a site sometimes used by separatist Chechnyan leader Shamil Basayev. It was forcibly moved from one location to another, including Estonia, Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, as the Russian authorities successfully exercised diplomatic clout to have it shut down. Simons’ discussion here takes the usual but problematic frame that “marks” Chechnyan separatist web-sites as in themselves controversial and worthy of discussion, while mainstream sites and their ideologies apparently need no prolonged discussion or justification any more than do the web-sites, say, of “extreme” Russian military, Russian nationalist or Christian groups. This is an interesting and useful book. Indeed, it is required reading for anyone interested in the relationship between Russian authorities, Russian media, and the “war on terror.” While maintaining a respectable distance from the perspectives of Russian authorities, the book is consumed principally with those perspectives, how they have impacted policy and legislation, their associated discourses, and the consequences for Russian media and media coverage. A fuller account would provide more substantial background to the history of conflicts within Russia and the old Republics of the Soviet Union, to the principal similarities and differences between separatist movements and their concrete connections to politics, ethnicity, culture and ideology, as well as to their media and their journalists.
Reference
Oliver Boyd-Barrett © the war and media network, 2010
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