A hearing on the freedom of word initiated by Tuvan journalist Alexandr Filatenko, editor of the Tuvan State TV Broadcasting Company, is to take place in the European Court on Civil Rights Defense, reports 'Novaya Gazeta'. The news-paper gives its version of the events in Tuva in 1999 during the election Duma campaign. Alexandr Filatenko according to this account fell victim to the party of power - 'Yedinstvo' and now he is suing Russia in the European Court. It really seems like that if you had not known the whole truth. First and foremost that Al Filatenko has always been a true implementor of the tasks set by the directorship of the TV company.
'Yedinstvo' in 1999 in Tuva was rather an oppositional party than a party of power as it is now backed by Vladimir Putin and correspondingly by the regional governers. The Tuvan government at that time had its own candidate for a deputy mandat into the State Duma and put into implementing this goal all its alexistrative resource. Tuvan State TV company at that time was a part of this alexstrative reform, wholly loyal and trully fulfilling all the tasks set by the executive power of the republic. The task awas as simple as that - to drwon at any cost Nikolai Loktionov, candidate of the 'Yedinstvo' party and support with all fervour Galina Salchak, a governmental appointee.
All the so-to-speak neutral inews issues glorified Salchak's achievements and spoke of Loktionv's drawbacks. In this tight election fight even provocations were engaged with slogans and leaflets - Vote for a Tuvan not for a Russian! On the day after which any kind of propaganda was prohibited a group of young men was shuttling in a bus decorated with the Tuvan Flag and Salchak's potraits in the vicinity of Loktionov's head-quaters'. Nobody knows exactly how it all happened but when a man from Loktionov's support group came out to ask the bus to go to another place the flag turned out to be on the ground and the 'neutral' TV crew - to be at hand filming the shouting man and the flag nearby. In a news issue the story acquired new details in a journalist's interpretation - Loktionov's men took the flag from the bus, TORE it into pieces and stepped on it humiliating the dignity of all the Tuvans. In the live program on the same evening where Loktionov was to give an interview, Al Filatenko who interviewed the candidate asked a question as if freshly coming from a TV spectator about the attitude of the candidate to the fact that his supporters humiliated the Tuvan flag. Loktionov won the election (mostly due to the protest voting - peole do not like being brainwashed by the authorities). The winner sued the journalist in the Tuvan court, Filatenko lost, but applied to the Russian court which did not change the decision. Now the 'defender of the freedom of word' goes further...