COMMENTARY
by Gordon Hahn
The Washington Post (WP) and New York Times (NYT) initial coverage of the Domodedovo airport terrorist bombing in Moscow diverged significantly. The WP featured the usual biases and prejudices; the NYT broke significantly from past coverage providing an unusual respite from the Russophobic bacchanalia common to the U.S. media’s reporting on Russia.
The WP’s first words regarding the terrorist attack focused not on the attack or the likely perpetrators, but rather that it had occurred “despite Putin’s promises of order”: “Vladimir Putin's years in power have been marked by a series of terrorist acts that have given him the latitude to acquire ever-tighter control over Russia, all in the name of security and stability. Monday's explosion in a crowded hall at Moscow's busiest airport reminded Russians, once again, that they have neither.” (Kathy Lally, “Terrorists strike Moscow despite Putin promises of order,” Washington Post, 24 January 2011.)
No matter that nearly every airport throughout the world is equally vulnerable to suicide bombings. Ask yourself: When was the last time you noted an obstacle to someone entering an airport with luggage capable of holding several small bombs? If the Christmas Day bomber or Abu Nidal had chosen this route, we would have likely seen similar results.
Lally’s focus was followed by the usual coverup of the jihadists in the North Caucasus: “With regions of the North Caucasus rife with bitterness and racial tensions growing in Moscow and elsewhere, ordinary people were afraid, and there was little reason to hope an end to the violence was near.” ‘Ethnic tensions’ as Lally terms it, have very little to do with the violence in the Caucasus, where a radical Islamist Al Qa`ida-like group, the Caucasus Emirate, has carried out some 30 suicide bombings in the last 20 months. From this article, readers got ‘bitterness’ and ‘racial tensions’ rather than the admission that: ‘The Caucasus Emirate mujahdin carried out some 600 attacks last year, including the March 2010 Moscow subway subicide bombing that killed 41 and wounded 101.’
Three years and three months since the Caucasus Emirate’s creation and 1,500 jihadi attacks later, neither the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, nor any other mainstream media outlet has managed to give their readers these facts.
But while Lally ignores violence perpetrated by people from the Caucasus, she makes sure to bring in Russian nationalists’ rampage through Moscow on December 11th and to mischaracterize the origins of what the Russians engaged in. First, the terrorist attack had nothing to do with the pogroms. Second, it is presented through a distorted lens by omitting the key fact that the violence was sparked not so much by the Caucasus natives’ killing of an ethnic Russian, but by the release of the suspected murderers by the police.
Criminal ethnic mafias often pay a bribe to corrupt MVD officials for the release of their members or for those they protect. In connection with these events, it was suddenly deemed not obligatory to refer to this form of rampant corruption in Russia’s MVD, lest it require noting the high rates of criminality among North Caucasus immigrant groups.
Another egregious omission comes in Lally’s discussion of the beginning of the second post-Soviet Chechen-Russian war when she skips over the fact that up to 2,000 Dagestani, Chechen, and foreign Islamist mujahedin invaded Dagestan in August 1999 to ‘defend’ a self-declared Islamic Shariah law-based state across the border from Chechnya. This attack was led by internationally-wanted terrorists Shamil Basaev and the Al Qa`ida operative Khattab.
To Lally it is not the Dagestan invasion or the four Moscow apartment bombings that sparked the second war; rather, it is Putin who “set off” the war. Similarly, in her view, the 2002 Dubrovka and 2004 Beslan events are not seen as part of a jihadi threat facing Russia and the world. Rather, they are important only in that they can be used to incriminate Putin’s decision to replace the election of regional governors with presidential nomination of gubernatorial candidates. Lally closes with eerie reference to the possibilities of a “crackdown” by the authorities and “Russian nationalist” involvement in the attack. As predicted on this website first (see IIPER #33 - Download KAVKAZJIHAD_MonTREP_IIPER_33_Jan_2011), the attack was orchestrated by the Dagestani mujahedin of the Caucasus Emirate, according to Russia’s counter-terrorism unit, the National Anti-Terrorist Committee.
The WP’s second article, while evincing a tone of sympathy over the general tragedy, used the usual slight of hand to reduce the undesired impression that Russia is plagued by radical jihadi terrorists (Will Englund and Kathy Lally, “Moscow airport blast: Suicide bomb kills 35,” Washington Post, 25 January 2011). Although Lally and Will Englund actually mention “Chechens and other Islamic separatists from the North Caucasus,” they note that past terrorist attacks have been “attributed to” them not ‘committed by them’. This, despite the fact that not just Russian authorities but the Caucasus Emirate’s amir ‘Abu Usman Doka Umarov and Western intelligence also state that the CE mujahedin carried out these attacks, which of course goes unmentioned. Similarly, they write that “the violence has included”, not ‘the mujahedin have carried out’ “bombings of buildings, trains and domestic flights, as well as mass hostage takings in a hospital, a school and a theater.”
We will have to wait a long time for the U.S. mainstream media to abandon these textual convolutions and contortions and report about the Caucasus jihad.
The next WP article by Lally and Englund (“Russia's leaders fault airport after bombing,” Washington Post, 26 January 2011) further develops two themes from the first: ‘blame Putin and Russia for terrorism’ and “fears of a clampdown.”
It contains nothing even hinting at the role of the North Caucasus, Islamists, militants, and related groups. Nor does it mention reports in the Russian media that the security forces were on the trail of possible perpetrators, including a woman who accidentally detonated a bomb at a shooting club in Moscow. The bomb was apparently intended for a suicide mission. Instead she killed herself and her husband who was wanted by federal authorities on terrorist-related charges. The article promotes the impression that Russia’s security forces are completely incompetent in and/or indifferent to preventing terrorist attacks against civilians. The three hundred mujahedin killed this year by Russian forces might beg to differ.
In short, the WP’s plays up Russian shortcomings and covers up those of the North Caucasians.
The NYT’s reporting on the attack stood in sharp contrast to that of the Post. It managed to eschew its usually similar approach and instead covered the attack and aftermath without political correctness and agendas.
For example, rather than writing that previous attacks have been “attributed to” Islamists from the North Caucasus, Ellen Barry writes that they “have been traced to militants” (Ellen Barry, “Deadly Blast Comes at Sensitive Time for Russia,” New York Times, 25 January 2011). She still calls them “militants” instead of factually ‘Islamist militants’ or ‘jihadists’ – the latter terms are apparently banned from the U.S. journalistic vocabulary – but we need to be thankful for small blessings in the world of mainstream media.
Although there has never been mention of the Caucasus Emirate, Barry does manage to mention amir Umarov, his “organization,” and his claim of responsibility for the March 2010 Moscow subway suicide bombings.
Thus, this and other terrorist attacks are not discussed as if they came out of thin air, but as part of the Caucasus militants’ operations. Contrary to the WP’s cynical sneering at the Russian authorities’ inability to prevent the Domodedova attack, Barry notes: “The authorities have since worked to tighten security.” Astonishingly, we even read for the first time in the NYT and perhaps any U.S. mainstream media outlet, of Medvedev’s “liberalization”, “tentative” albeit.
A second NYT article focused on the difficulty in securing airports from such attacks, again avoiding the WP’s cynical snickering (Joe Sharkey, “By Nature, Airports Have Risks,” New York Times, 24 January 2011).
Another NYT article covered Domodedovo’s and Russia’s return to “business as usual” with some focus on public fears over security while avoiding the dark pessimism of the WP articles regarding the inevitability of continuing terrorism (Andrew E. Kramer, “After the Bombing, It’s Business as Usual,” New York Times, 24 January 2011).
Initially, at least, the NYT’s coverage has been exceedingly more objective than that of the WP. We’ll see what the future holds.
To the best of my recollection, Kathy Lally has never written anything positive about Russia unless it was couched as a potential benefit, directly linked to the election of some liberal reformer like Boris Nemtsov. Her coverage pertaining to Russia is otherwise uniformly Russophobic.
Posted by: Mark | February 08, 2011 at 01:24 PM
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Posted by: adam | March 21, 2011 at 07:36 AM