How bad is it in Chechnya?

In Chechen’s Humiliation, Questions on Rule of Law
By C. J. CHIVERS, New York Times

ARGUN, Russia, Aug. 26 — The humiliation of Malika Soltayeva, a pregnant Chechen woman suspected of adultery, was ferocious and swift.

Ms. Soltayeva, 23, had been away from home for a month and was reported missing by her family. When she returned, her husband accused her of infidelity and banished her from their apartment. The local authorities found her at her aunt’s residence. They said they had a few questions.

C.J. Chivers/The New York Times

Malika Soltayeva, shown in a recent photo, was tortured by men who served as the police.

Video: Revival of Brutality in Chechnya

What followed was no investigation. In a law enforcement compound in this town in east-central Chechnya, the men who served as Argun’s police sheared away her hair and her eyebrows and painted her scalp green, the color associated with Islam. A thumb-thick cross was smeared on her brow.

Ms. Soltayeva, a Muslim, had slept with a Christian Russian serviceman, they said. Her scarlet letter would be an emerald cross. She was forced to confess, ordered to strip, and beaten with wooden rods and hoses on her buttocks, arms, legs, hands, stomach and back.

“Turn and be condemned by Allah,” one of her tormentors said, demanding that she position herself so he could strike her more squarely.

The torture of Ms. Soltayeva, recorded on a video obtained by The New York Times, and other recent brutish acts and instances of religious policing, raise questions about Chechnya’s direction.

Since 2004, the war in Chechnya has tilted sharply in the Kremlin’s favor, as open combat with separatists has declined in intensity and frequency. Moscow now administers the republic and fights the remaining insurgency largely through paramilitary forces led by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the powerful young Chechen premier.

Mr. Kadyrov’s public persona is flamboyantly pro-Russian. He praises President Vladimir V. Putin and has pledged to rebuild Chechnya and lead it back to the Kremlin’s fold. “I cannot tell you how great my love for Russia is,” he said in an interview this year.

But beneath this publicly professed loyalty, some of Chechnya’s indigenous security forces — with their evident anti-Slavic racism, institutionalized brutality, culture of impunity and intolerant interpretation of a pre-medieval Islamic code — have demonstrated the vicious behavior that Russia has said its latest invasion of Chechnya, in 1999, was supposed to stop.

Human rights groups and Chechen civilians say that these security forces’ ambitions and loyalties are uncertain and that their actions are unchecked. The republic’s course, they say, is dangerous for Russians and Chechens alike.

Few people have yet compared the current disorder with the end of the brief period of Chechen autonomy, in the late 1990’s, when rebels and foreign Islamic mercenaries operated terrorist training camps in the forests, and when Islamic courts sentenced criminals to execution by firing squads, which were broadcast on Chechen television news. But Mr. Kadyrov’s police and security forces, known as kadyrovsty, are staffed mostly with uneducated young men, some of whom have been fighting for years, including many former rebels who have changed sides.

Recent videos of their conduct, provided to The New York Times by outraged Chechens, show an unsettling pattern.

One shows a man and a woman in the town of Shali, each married to someone else, who were suspected of flirting in a car this summer. The police swarmed around the couple, jeering at them, and directed the man to kick the woman. The couple was then forced to dance a brief lezginka, a traditional and often sexually charged dance. The police kicked the woman, too, and pulled her scarf and hair.

Although the faces of several of the officers are clear, they have yet to come under investigation by higher authorities.

Another instance of unrestrained behavior occurred in late July in Kurchaloi, when one of Mr. Kadyrov’s units killed a rebel, Akhmad Dushayev, and beheaded his body. The severed head was displayed on a pipe in the town’s center, residents said in interviews.

Videos show that, later, the kadyrovsty, many in police uniforms, casually amused themselves with the head, joking as they displayed it in a garage. Another video shows the head adorned with a cap and with a cigarette in its mouth.

Residents said the police justified the beheading by saying that Mr. Dushayev had previously cut off the head of a pro-Kremlin Chechen fighter, and that the vengeance was fair play.

Ms. Soltayeva’s own experience, much of which was captured on video, was an accumulation of terror, pain and loss.

She was seized March 19, and mocked throughout a torture session that lasted nearly two hours. “Call for Sergei!” one of the policemen said, using the name of her assumed lover as he beat her. “Sergei! Help!”

Next they told her to dress, and drove her to her husband’s courtyard and made her dance before her neighbors. “Look how ugly you are,” another policeman said.

When she staggered away, several of them kicked her with their heavy black boots. Two days later she miscarried, and has been largely out of public view since.

The episode, which took place five months ago, was not investigated, even though videos showing the torture were passed along on cellphones throughout Argun and other Chechen towns. The videos circulated widely enough that accurate details of her abuse were known by roughly half of the Chechens interviewed by The New York Times.

“It is just outrageous lawlessness,” Ms. Soltayeva said in an interview in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital.

As is common in crumbling marriages, the details of Ms. Soltayeva’s family life and behavior are in dispute. Her former husband’s family says she had an affair with a Russian serviceman she met at a store where she worked as a cashier. She says that she did not, and that she was faithful to her husband even though he beat her.

Her whereabouts in the weeks leading up to her beating are also a source of contention.

Ms. Soltayeva said she was away from home because she had been abducted by masked men who eventually released her, a phenomenon in Chechnya that is common enough that her own family says they believe her. Her husband’s family, and the police, say that she left Chechnya to try to live with her Russian lover, and that she returned when it did not work out.

Natalya Estemirova, a staff member at the Grozny office of Memorial, a private human rights group, said she tried to bring the case to the Chechen authorities, but they threatened Ms. Soltayeva with criminal charges for falsely claiming to have been kidnapped. They showed no interest in the police violence, she said.

Allegations of state-sponsored horrors, and claims that Russian and Chechen officials have allowed servicemen to commit crimes with impunity, have been a regular accompaniment to the Chechen wars.

Human rights groups have documented mass graves, extralegal executions, widespread use and tolerance of torture, illegal detention, rape, robbery and kidnapping.

Some cases have seemed a matter of policy, as when suspected rebel supporters have been abducted during police and military sweeps. Other cases appeared to flow from the rage, drunkenness or frustration of ordinary soldiers fighting a savage guerrilla war.

What has made several recent cases different is that many of the kadyrovsty, unsophisticated gunmen who have had little contact with the world beyond Chechnya, have acquired cellphones with small video cameras and have casually, even gleefully, recorded their own crimes.

The video sequences are then shared, multiplying as they swiftly pass from phone to phone.

In a long interview earlier this year, Mr. Kadyrov said that his units were being professionalized and that the armed men under his command integrated into formal government structures. He insisted that they would be able to provide security and competent policing.

[On Aug. 29, The Times provided Mr. Kadyrov’s office with four videos of Ms. Soltayeva’s torture. Mr. Kadyrov said through a spokeswoman that upon viewing them he had ordered the Chechen Interior Ministry to investigate. “Criminal charges will be brought against all responsible for this,” said the spokeswoman, Tatyana Georgiyeva.]

Ms. Estemirova said that the unit in Argun that seized Ms. Soltayeva had been formally disbanded in the spring, but that its members were simply transferred into new “professional” battalions, known as North and South.

“They were assimilated into North and South and never checked by prosecutors,” she said. “Now they are more difficult to arrest.”

Get to Know Iran via Blogs

Posted by Amy Gahran, Poynter Institute's e-Media Tidbits
10:28:49 AM, August 29, 2006

On Aug. 23, Chatham House (a leading U.K. think tank on international affairs) published an intriguing assessment of the current and future role of Iran in the Middle East. The report, "Iran, Its Neighbours, and the Regional Crises" (pdf download, release), faults the U.S. for misapplied power:

"On hostility with the US, the report argues that while the US may have the upper hand in 'hard' power projection, Iran has proved far more effective through its use of 'soft' power. ...The Bush administration has shown little ability to use politics and culture to pursue its strategic interests."

Report contributor Ali Ansari, interviewed this morning on NPR's Morning Edition, noted: "Western policy towards the Middle East shows a complete lack of imagination. There is a world of opportunities between neglect and military action which has yet to be fully explored."

I was particularly struck by this perspective because I've recently started reading a fascinating new book, We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs, by Nasrin Alavi. It's a compilation of poignant entries from Iranian blogs, mostly translated from Farsi. Reading them, I see a stunning thoughtfulness and diversity -- as well as deep insight into world affairs, and hope for the future.

You may be as surprised as I was to learn that Farsi is one of the most popular languages in the blogosphere, according to the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, which maintains the statistical resource Blog Census. The book notes that "Blogging in Iran [and among expatriate Iranians] has grown so fast because it meets the needs no longer met by the print media." These Iranians -- who often blog at great personal risk -- are worth getting to know. Especially now, as the headlines are filled with high-level political posturing over nuclear concerns, with scant attention to the people of Iran.

If your news organization is covering the Iranian nuclear standoff, it might be a good idea to start looking beyond official pronouncements and cultivate sources among the best Iranian bloggers.

If no one on your staff reads Farsi, there is a huge selection of English-language blogs by Iranians. And of course, get a copy of We Are Iran -- it's still fairly current. In Farsi, a good starting point is PersianBlog, which compiles many of the most active Farsi-language blogs. If the Chatham House report is right, then perhaps blogs might represent a potentially powerful new avenue for person-to-person diplomacy -- especially since, through comments and cross-links, they are conversational media, not mere publishing.

Collectively, people are always more powerful than their governments, as long as they can communicate and coordinate well enough to act in concert. I have a sneaking suspicion that in Iran, China, and elsewhere, blogs may play an increasingly important role in global power struggles. Journalists should keep watching them, even though they're not "official." News -- even international politics -- is about regular people, too.

Newspapers getting better vis-a-vis the Net
Aug 24 2006
from the Economist magazine

Newspapers are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded.

THE first thing to greet a visitor to the Oslo headquarters of Schibsted, a Norwegian newspaper firm, is its original, hand-operated printing press from 1856, now so clean and polished it looks more like a sculpture than a machine. Christian Schibsted, the firm's founder, bought it to print someone else's newspaper, but when the contract moved elsewhere he decided to start his own. Although Schibsted gives pride of place to its antique machinery, the company is in fact running away from its printed past as fast as it can. Having made a loss five years ago, Schibsted's activities on the internet contributed 35% of last year's operating profits.

News of Schibsted's success online has spread far in the newspaper industry. Every year, says Sverre Munck, the executive vice-president of its international business, Schibsted has to turn away delegations of foreign newspaper bosses seeking to find out how the Norwegians have done it. "Otherwise we'd get several visits every month," he says. The company has used its established newspaper brands to build websites that rank first and second in Scandinavia for visitors. It has also created new internet businesses such as Sesam[1], a search engine that competes with Google, and FINN.no[2], a portal for classified advertising. As a result, 2005 was the company's best ever for revenues and profits.

Unfortunately for the newspaper industry, Schibsted is a rare exception. For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending. Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.

Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices. Most have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry--"remarkably, unaccountably complacent," as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year--but now they are making a big push to catch up. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and is beginning to offset some of the decline in print.

Newspapers' complacency is perhaps not as remarkable as Mr Murdoch suggested. In many developed countries their owners have for decades enjoyed near monopolies, fat profit margins, and returns on capital above those of other industries. In the past, newspaper companies saw little need to experiment or to change and spent little or nothing on research and development.

At first, from the late 1990s until around 2002, newspaper companies simply replicated their print editions online. Yet the internet offers so many specialised sources of information and entertainment that readers can pick exactly what they want from different websites. As a result, people visited newspaper sites infrequently, looked at a few pages and then vanished off to someone else's website.

Another early mistake was for papers to save their best journalists for print. This meant that the quality of new online editions was often poor. Websites hired younger, cheaper staff. The brand's prestige stayed with the old medium, which encouraged print journalists to defend their turf. Still today at LA STAMPA, an Italian daily paper owned by the Fiat Group, says Anna Masera, the paper's internet chief, print journalists hesitate to give her their stories for fear that the website will cannibalise the newspaper.

For the past couple of years, however, newspapers have been thinking more boldly about what to do on the internet. At its most basic, that means reporting stories using cameras and microphones as well as print. The results can be encouraging. America's Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has introduced a new Emmy award for news and documentaries on the internet, mobile phones and personal media players. Five of the seven nominations for this September have gone to reports by nytimes.com[3] and washingtonpost.com[4].

It also means being more imaginative. In the late 1990s, the early years of the WALL STREET JOURNAL's website[5], one of the paper's journalists came up with the novel idea of posting online a 573-page document that backed up an article. "It wasn't the most compelling content," remembers Neil Budde, its founding editor and now general manager of news at Yahoo!, an internet portal. But it was a start. Now newspapers have a better idea of what works online. This is not always traditional journalism as taught in journalism school. Brian Tierney, who became owner of the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER after Knight Ridder sold it last year, noticed that a popular item on the paper's website[6] has been a video of Mentos mints causing a 2-litre bottle of Diet Coke to explode into the air. "We should do more of that," he says.

More newspaper companies are likely to treat their websites as a priority these days. "Before, newspapers used their second- and third-rate journalists for the internet," says Edward Roussel, online editorial director at Britain's Telegraph Group, "but now we know we've got to use our very best." Many companies are putting print journalists in the same room as those who work online, so that print writers are working for the website and vice versa. Some insist that this is a mistake. "It is completely wrong not to separate web and paper operations," says Oscar Bronner, publisher of DER STANDARD, a daily paper in Austria. Print journalists don't have time to reflect and analyse properly if they also have to work for the website, he argues.

How impressive are the results of these online experiments? At lots of newspaper companies, internet advertising is growing by at least 30% a year, and often more. At LA REPUBBLICA in Italy, for instance, the paper's website[7] gets about 1m visitors a day, nearly double the circulation of the printed paper. The value of online ads grew by 70% in the first half of 2006. For the first three months of 2006, the Newspaper Association of America announced that advertising for all the country's newspaper websites grew by 35% from the same period in 2005, to a total of $613m. But to put that in perspective, print and online ads together grew by only 1.8%, to $11 billion, because print advertising was flat. At almost all newspapers the internet brings in less than a tenth of revenues and profits. At this point, says Mr Chisholm, "newspapers are halfway to realising an audience on the internet and about a tenth of the way to building a business online."

The big problem is that readers online bring in nowhere near the revenues that print readers do. All but a handful of papers offer their content free online, so they immediately surrender the cover price of a print copy. People look at fewer pages online than they do in print, which makes web editions less valuable to advertisers. Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers in Paris, says that print readers are much more valuable than online readers, who use newspaper websites in a "haphazard and fragmented way". Vin Crosbie, of Digital Deliverance, a consulting firm, recently estimated that newspapers need between 20 and 100 readers online to make up for losing just one print reader. Many newspaper bosses would say this is too pessimistic: one British paper, for instance, reckons that one print reader is worth ten online. But even that is a daunting multiple.

Newspapers today concentrate on only two parts of the market for internet advertising. They earn little or nothing from internet search, which is bigger than either display or classified ads. Especially in America, newspapers rely heavily on classified ads online and have fewer display ads, says Mr Crosbie. Elsewhere, the pattern may be reversed, but newspapers still lack a broad base of internet-advertising revenue; for instance, Juan Luis Cebrian, chief executive of Grupo PRISA, the owner of EL PAIS, says the Spanish newspaper is enjoying strong growth in display advertising, but has few online classified ads.

On the other hand, newspapers' websites have higher profit margins than print does, because they have no newsprint or distribution to pay for. The WALL STREET JOURNAL is one of the few papers that charges for its content online. Others may follow suit, especially if growth in advertising slows. The online business model is still in flux, argues Richard Zannino, chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the WALL STREET JOURNAL. The average price of ad space in the printed paper is now only three times higher than on Wall Street Journal Online, says Mr Zannino, compared with six to seven times for the industry as a whole in America. He expects the relative price of an internet ad to rise.

The secret of making money online, according to Schibsted, is not to rely on news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo!. Three-quarters of traffic to the websites for Schibsted's VG and AFTONBLADET comes through their own home-pages and only a quarter from other websites. "If visitors come from Google to stories deep in the paper and then leave," explains Mr Munck, "Google gets the dollars and we get only cents, but if we can bring them in through the front page we can charge EURO19,000 [$25,000] for a 24-hour banner ad." In spite of this, most newspapers still depend on news aggregators.

The danger for newspapers is that all their efforts on the internet may only slow their decline. Doing the obvious--having excellent websites and selling ad space on them--may not be enough. The papers with the best chance of seeing their revenues grow are those experimenting with entirely new businesses online and off.

Some are launching profitable new ventures that are only indirectly related to journalism. Schibsted, for instance, has started an online slimming club, called Viktklubben.se[8], using its AFTONBLADE newspaper brand. Viktklubben.se charges its 54,000 members EURO50 each every three months. The Telegraph Group in Britain uses the DAILY TELEGRAPH to sell readers everything from goose-down pillows to Valentine's Day topiary baskets to insurance. The division now contributes close to a third of the firm's total profits, according to an executive at the company. "Newspapers will have to get into new businesses and extract more value from their audience," says Paul Zwillenberg, global head of media and entertainment at OC&C Strategy Consultants in London. Examples like these are fairly rare, though. Most newspaper companies still insist that producing high-quality journalism and distributing it in new ways will be enough to keep them growing.

Consultants advising newspaper groups argue that they need to adjust their output. Research into the tastes of mainstream newspaper readers has long shown that people like short stories and news that is relevant to them: local reporting, sports, entertainment, weather and traffic. On the internet, especially, says Mr Chisholm, they are looking to enhance their way of life. Long pieces about foreign affairs are low on readers' priorities--the more so now that the internet enables people to scan international news headlines in moments. Coverage of national and international news is in any case a commodity often almost indistinguishable from one newspaper to the next. This impression is exacerbated as papers seek to save money by sacking reporters and taking copy from agencies such as Reuters. "Our research shows that people are looking for more utility from newspapers," says Sammy Papert, chief executive of Belden Associates, a firm that specialises in research for American newspapers. People want their paper to tell them how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening.

Few newspaper companies like to hear this and they tend to ignore the research they have paid for. Most journalists, after all, would rather cover Afghanistan than personal finance. But some are starting to listen. Gannett, the world's biggest newspaper group, is trying to make its journalism more local. It has invested in "mojos"--mobile journalists with wireless laptops who permanently work out of the office encamped in community hubs. Morris Communications, based in Augusta, Georgia, recently launched a new home-delivered free paper for Bluffton, a fast-growing area of Beaufort, South Carolina, called BLUFFTON TODAY, with a page of national news, one of international and the rest "hyper-local". Its website[9] has pictures and blogs from readers and detailed community information. "Back in the 1940s and 1950s papers used to be full of what we call 'chicken-dinner news'--the speakers at civic clubs and whose daughter won a blue ribbon in canoeing," says Will Morris, the firm's president. "But then newspapers started to lose touch with their readers."

The more adventurous newspaper companies, like Morris Communications, are showing themselves willing to embrace content and opinions from readers. Rather like OhmyNews[10], a Korean "citizen-journalism" operation that many people think heralds the future for news-gathering, Schibsted exhorts its readers to send information and photographs. When a mentally disturbed man ran amok and killed people on a tram in Oslo in 2004, it was a reader with a mobile-phone camera who sent VG its front-page picture of the arrest. At ZERO HORA, a Brazilian paper owned by RBS Group, the circulation department asks 120 readers what they think of the paper every day and Marcelo Rech, the editor, receives a report at 1pm. "They usually want more of our supplements on cooking and houses and less of Hizbullah and earthquakes," says Mr Rech.

Still more changes to the content and form of newspapers are likely as businesspeople gain power at newspaper firms. "You won't be able to have many sacred cows...Newspaper companies will have to become more commercial," says Henrik Poppe, a partner in McKinsey. Some leading titles, including the WALL STREET JOURNAL, have recently decided to put advertisements on the front page for the first time. For the moment, the trend towards greater commercialism is most evident in America, but is likely to spread elsewhere as newspaper companies struggle financially. At the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, Mr Tierney, a former advertising executive, shocked people by announcing that he would bring in an advertising person to redesign the paper--traditionally a task strictly for editorial. In future, businesspeople are likely to insist that newspapers adopt practices that are already standard in other industries. Mr Tierney, for instance, says it is unreasonable to expect everyone from the age of 18 to 88 to buy the same product. The industry needs to sell papers for different age and demographic groups, he says.

The most shocking development for traditional newspapers has been the wild success of free dailies, which like the internet have proved enormously popular with young people. Roughly 28m copies of free newspapers are now printed daily, according to Metro International, a Swedish firm that pioneered them in 1995. In markets where they are published, they account for 8% of daily circulation on average, according to iMedia. That share is rising. In Europe they make up 16% of daily circulation. Metro calculates that it spends half the proportion of its total costs on editorial that paid-for papers do. In practice that means a freesheet with a circulation of about 100,000 employing 20 journalists, whereas a paid-for paper would have around 180. Metro's papers reach young, affluent readers and are even able to charge a premium for advertising in some markets compared with paid-for papers.

"The biggest enemy of paid-for newspapers is time," says Pelle Tornberg, Metro's chief executive. Mr Tornberg says the only way that paid-for papers will prosper is by becoming more specialised, raising their prices and investing in better editorial. People read freesheets in their millions, on the other hand, because METRO and others reach them on their journey to work, when they have time to read, and spare them the hassle of having to hand over change to a newsagent.

Some traditional newspaper firms dismiss free papers, saying they are not profitable. Carlo De Benedetti, chairman of Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, publisher of LA REPUBBLICA, for instance, says that Metro loses money in Italy and that other freesheets are struggling.
Globally, however, Metro has just become profitable.

Consultants say that lots of traditional newspaper companies are planning to hold their noses and launch free dailies. In France, for instance, LE MONDE is planning a new free daily, and Mr Murdoch's News International is preparing a new free afternoon paper for London, to be launched next month. Deciding whether or not to start a freesheet, indeed, perfectly encapsulates the unpalatable choice that faces the paid-for newspaper industry today as it attempts to find a future for itself. Over the next few years it must decide whether to compromise on its notion of "fine journalism" and take a more innovative, more businesslike approach--or risk becoming a beautiful old museum piece.

[1] http://www.sesam.no/
[2] http://www.finn.no/
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/
[5] http://online.wsj.com/public/us
[6] http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/
[7] http://www.repubblica.it/
[8] http://www.viktklubben.se/
[9] http://www.blufftontoday.com/
[10] http://english.ohmynews.com/

Jill Carroll's story, published in the Christian Science Monitor

As mentioned in class, a special multimedia online feature: Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story. Along with a gripping, detailed account of Monitor freelancer Jill Carroll's widely publicized 82 days of captivity while on assignment in Iraq, this package also includes streaming video of an extensive interview with Carroll -- as well as links to related coverage, including the still-active Jill Carroll update blog.

Back in May, the Monitor started taking reader questions for Carroll. This is an excellent example of how multimedia can become conversational media.