Russia Cinema Drops 'Political' Chechen Films

By Oliver Bullough, 10/1/2003

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian cinema Wednesday dropped a scheduled series of films about Chechnya that had packed in audiences in New York and organizers accused the security forces of being behind the move.

The festival, which has also run in Washington, London and Tokyo, was to open Wednesday, days before a Kremlin-sponsored poll to elect a new leader in the rebel region where Russian troops have been fighting separatists for a decade.

"They did not tell us what films they were going to be," Vladimir Medvedev, manager of the Krasnaya Presnya cinema near the Russian government buildings, told Ekho Moskvy radio.

"We have no objections to Russian films, but these foreign films have an anti-Russian bias, and we will not have this in our theater. We do not get involved in politics."

The election Sunday is key to a Kremlin peace plan for Chechnya where soldiers and police die daily and more than 150 people have been killed in rebel suicide bombings since April.

Members of the organizing consortium, which included Amnesty International, saw the hand of the Federal Security Service Russia's state security body and successor to the Soviet KGB.

The films included "Assassination of Russia," funded by exiled Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky. It links the security service to a string of 1999 bombings used to justify the return of Russian troops to Chechnya.

Others included "Terror in Moscow," a documentary about the seizure of a Moscow theater by Chechen rebels a year ago, and a Polish film called "Murder with International Consent."

"I think the cinema's managers were ordered to do this by the FSB (security service). They only objected to films which did not show the FSB in a good light," said Yuri Samodorov, director of the Andrei Sakharov foundation, which helped organize the festival.

"We wanted to show that the situation in Chechnya is more terrible than is shown on Russian television screens, and that you can't close your eyes to it."

Russia's nationwide television channels, which are all state-controlled, focus on the rebuilding of Chechnya, but Samodorov said they should also report the daily violence and allegations of rights abuses made against the Russian army.

"If we had been allowed to screen in a cinema, it would have meant our government was prepared to allow opponents to speak. This government does not want to hear the truth."

The films, made by directors from Britain, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Russia, will now be screened from Thursday in the Andrei Sakharov museum, set up in honor of the Soviet-era dissident and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.