Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [131]
Why were the members of the Commission pledged to secrecy? What fearsome secret is it that you all have to keep?
I have no idea. I firmly believe that all the officials who passed before the Commission should have been questioned openly and publicly, in the presence of the press. That is a fundamental principle. The Commission was working to procedures approved by Sergey Mironov (Head of the Soviet of the Federation) but the rules were not even discussed in the Duma. I was informed that all the members of the Commission had signed a secrecy agreement and accepted legal liability if they breached the undertaking. I should mention that the recently passed law on parliamentary inquiries contains no such requirement. Our procedure specified that all the Beslan meetings were to be held behind closed doors, despite the fact that the law on parliamentary inquiries requires quite the opposite: that all sessions should be held in public except in exceptional circumstances, where matters involving state secrets are being investigated.
What part of the evidence heard by the Commission bore any relation to state secrets?
There were no classified matters, no state secrets. After we had been working for a year and a half Alexander Torshin, Chairman of the Commission, declared that only 1 per cent of what we were discussing was secret. What I could see as necessarily secret was only some diagrams showing the position of snipers and revealing their names, and also those of members of the tank corps who fired on the building. That was all. Even if nobody had signed anything, we would never have dreamed of talking publicly about that.
Then why was it necessary to shroud the Commission’s work in this ambience of high secrecy?
Boris Gryzlov, the Chairman of the Duma, came to one of our sessions. It was one of the sessions, incidentally, where every one of my proposals was turned down. I recommended that you and Andrey Babitsky from Radio Liberty should be questioned by the Commission to establish why you were unable to reach Beslan at that time, and what was behind the scuffle at Vnukovo Airport on September 2 for which Babitsky was detained just before he was to fly to Beslan, and so on [see above]. I also wanted us to seek information about the Alexander Pumane affair. You may remember, several dozen FSB and Interior Ministry generals met at a district militia station in the middle of Moscow, after which Pumane wasn’t just killed there but so badly beaten that neither his mother nor his wife were able to identify him. They had made mincemeat of him and DNA tests were required. It was claimed at the time that Pumane had been planning to blow up the President’s motorcade on Kutuzovsky Prospect, and that it was all closely related to terrorism.
Gryzlov, however, declared all that to be irrelevant, nothing to do with the Commission. They didn’t even vote on my proposal. The paradox is that the procedure made clear that Torshin was the Commission Chairman in charge of all sessions while Gryzlov, as Chairman of the Duma, could only attend as an observer, not take the chair or issue rulings about my proposals.
To Mironov’s credit, he was more tactful. He attended the sessions fairly frequently, sat, listened, asked permission to speak, and had to be granted it. Mironov, however, also made it very clear what the Commission’s job should be: “You need to channel, channel, and again channel.” Then everything became clear to me.
Channel what?
The public mood. Our job was to reassure the public.
But the only way you could do that would be by establishing the truth. I doubt whether even the truth would salve the suffering of the mothers of Beslan, but I emphasise that the Head of the Soviet of the Federation from the outset saw the Commission’s main task as being to channel public concern. He regarded the members of the Commission as public relations ditch-diggers. I believed instead that the Commission should be reporting the truth to society. I had been entrusted with establishing the causes and circumstances