Moscow roundtable claims the need to counteract terrorism in Internet

On September 15, the Press Centre of the RIA "Novosti" in Moscow hosted a roundtable on the role of the civil society and mass media in confronting terrorism and prevention of extremism. However, its main topic was in fact the statement of the authorities' defeat on the front of media war on terrorism.

Vladimir Gurevich, a member of the Board for Foreign and Defence Policy and editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Vremya Novostei" (Time of News), drew attention of the audience to the fact that terror acts and consequences of them have been ousted to the periphery of public consciousness.

"People think like that: this is not Russia, this is Caucasus; something happens there," Mr Gurevich has noted, having emphasized that now the authorities should pay much more attention to the memory of victims of terror acts.

He has also highlighted the need of active counteraction to terrorism in the Internet, since it is the main source of information for young people. Another problem touched on by Vladimir Gurevich was that plenty of reports about detentions, disclosures, etc. are of PR-character and, consequently, are often perceived by the journalistic community with irritation.

Evgeniy Satanovskiy, President of the Institute of Near East< drew attention to the fact that in mass media, including television, under the mask of anti-Americanism, people are active, who "promote the viewpoint of such organizations like al-Qaeda." On the other hand, by his estimate, the population of Northern Caucasus, where radical Islam emissaries are so active, was left to the mercy of fate.

"Until we fail to attract really reasonable and creative writers, journalists, etc., to counteracting the ideology of terrorism, we'll go on losing," Mr Satanovskiy has summed up.

Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of the weekly "Military and Industrial Courier" and magazine "National Defence", told about the "limping" official website of the FSB in the in the area of the war on terrorism: there is no regular news update; there is no English-language version, etc. Mr Korotchenko also moved the idea of placing social anti-terror clips on television in the prime time.

Elena Ovcharenko, first deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Izvestia", continued the topic of special agencies' closeness from the media and noted that special agencies and commission practically render no help to the journalists who make reports on modern suicide bombers - both on those acting in Northern Caucasus and from among active Russian nationalists.

Andrei Soldatov, editor-in-chief of the project "Agentura.ru" (Net of Agents), while continuing the topic of special agencies' estrangement from the society, has noticed that this is the reason why the new tactics of militants in Northern Caucasus, gradually borrowed by Russian nationalists, that is, attacks on employees of law enforcement bodies, fails to cause unequivocal condemnation by the population.

As a method of counteracting this tactics, he offered a greater openness of employees of the FSB and MIA, for example, in the form of running their blogs, which could contribute to a humane image of a militiaman.

However, Mr Soldatov was pessimistic on the chances to realize this idea. "Now, special agencies have got used to independent existence; and I don't believe that they are capable to do at least something to this end," he has noted.

The roundtable was "attended" by a different approach - traditional conspirology with accusations of Western countries of all sins, etc. Thus, Vladimir Lutsenko, president of the Association of Enterprises of Economic Security "Stealth" has accused the western countries of "accepting militants" even after the largest terror acts of early 2000s, and criticized the UN resolution adopted in 2006 on counteracting terrorism for its fuzziness, not enabling to demand direct delivery of suspects.