BLOODY MONDAY: YELTSIN PROVOKES VIOLENCE TO JUSTIFY HIS POLITICAL REPRESSION
by Laure Akai
Many people, including the mainstream English press here wonder why the OMON didn't take more precautions at the Ostankino television center, and why they did such a bad job at simple crowd control. It was known for four days that the opposition were planning to take Ostankino and when they finally arrived, they rallied for over an hour before the storm began. Troops arrived at the scene much later. Others, including many pro-Yeltsinites, asked how Yegor Gaidar could go on TV and urge people to fight back.
The answers are not clear. Of course people were somewhat afraid of the well-armed White House defendants. But there is more and more speculation going on here that part of the events were provoked by pro-Yeltsin troops to rally public resentment against the opposition. Myself and several reliable people that I know were witnesses to some rather odd events that we think was part of a provocation. For example, some time around 6 or 7PM, before the tanks all started to converge on the White House, I and two friends were standing outside the Mayor's building across the street from the White House. We were completely surrounded on all sides by Yeltsin's troops. (Only after some while, as the tanks began to roll did they try to disperse us.) Every once and a while fire was breaking out, sometimes in the direction of the White House, sometimes in our direction. We witnessed a woman near us take out a pistol from her pocket and begin shooting in the air. It seemed entirely strange to us and we weren't sure who she was or what she was shooting at. There was so much going on that surely few people noticed this. Then she slowly walked to the blown out 1st floor windows of the Mayor's building. We watched very intently because we thought she might be a communist or a nationalist or sorts (although she was too well dressed) and we thought she might try to shoot one of the soldiers. She instead started to talk to one of them and entered the building from the side.
At this time the tanks started rolling so we went up Novy Arbat St. to the Garden Ring Road to try to find a telephone. Before we got to the Garden Ring Rd., soldiers were trying to get us to run and create some hysteria amongst the few people who were there. On the Garden Ring Rd. there were a few hundred spectators. While one of us went to find a phone, I and a friend watched on. Suddenly guns started firing down the Garden Ring Rd. We ran through an archway into a courtyard. We couldn't go further because there was fire into the courtyard where the corner house ended and where there was an alley between that corner house and the next building on Novy Arbat St. This fire from the alley way could have only come from the troops that we had passed and who were trying to creating a panic less than 5 minutes earlier. They were the only people there. Dozens of people tried to run into the courtyard, only to find that there was lots of gunfire there and so they were trapped in a small space where the corner building curved around from Garden Ring onto Novy Arbat St. The fire was apparently approaching. We noticed that there were people shooting from out of windows into the courtyard. I was wondering where the hell they were shooting at. We finally made a run for it through the courtyard, dodging bullets. I looked behind and saw something fall from the sky into the courtyard behind me. We ran further and turned back onto the Garden Ring Rd. There we witnessed general panic. There was lots of guns being fired at the top floors of buildings and also into the crowd. I was fairly upset and wondering why Yeltsin's troops were firing into the crowd. One person said that they are trying to disperse people. I thought this is a stupid way to do it, but I accepted that explaination for a while. Then it occured to me that the only people who could be firing into the courtyard at ground level were Yeltsin's troops. The local English language paper reported the incident. The TV reported sniper fire in several areas of the city and claimed that this was done by opposition rebels on the loose. They are using this fear to justify things like martial law. But after hearing more and more people report unusual incidents, and incidents similiar to mine, I'm beginning to wonder.
Sure there are armed rebels on the loose. Many White House supporters went home on the night of the 3rd and were not able to return. When the White House was beseiged by Yeltsin's troops, there were apparently several attempts made by groups of people to get on the territory of the White House. (In the morning this was virtually impossible, unless you were a journalist.) I had assumed that the people firing from the windows into the courtyards were the opposition. I was aggravated by the fact that they were firing into the courtyard. I wondered how they got into the buildings, if any of them actually resided in that swank neighbourhood or if they broke into apartments. At this point however I think that it was not the opposition who was doing the firing into that courtyard. They were not running around the streets firing at innocent people, and as far as I know, there were many instances of them trying to get people out of the line of fire. They generally operated by selecting their targets and going directly for them. Why would they fire into the courtyard and not in the other direction, into Yeltsin's troops? And what happened to these people up there in the building? They weren't killed or arrested; the media would have shown them and labeled them murderers. That particular house was not even fired upon or stormed. Yeltsin's troops, which were stationed right outside this house on Novy Arbat St. decided not to fire up at the windows from which gunfire was coming, but rather into the courtyard into which people, including bystanders, were fleeing.
Another wierd incident. Two different journalists reported seeing 10 militia men shooting into the air in the Otradnoye section, just north of Moscow. Why were they there and why were they firing into the air? They suggested that perhaps they were trying to create a panic.
There are already dozens of reports of such irregularities. Of course little has made it into the mainstream media, except in the English language press, which isn't sold on the streets, which almost no Russians read, and which hasn't been subjected to censorship. In the Moscow Tribune on Oct.5 there was a very vivid description of the beginning of the action on Sunday Oct.3. (Neither English language paper appears on Monday.) Apparently the violence was started by about 10 people who ran into the street from out of a crowd of 40 demonstrators. 120 Omonovtsy (special police) stood without reacting. They weren't even wearing helmets. When a reporter from the Tribune asked why they were doing nothing, he was told "We've got other goals. We have other orders." Only after 45 minutes, when the crowd had grown substantially in size, did they act, and only then half-heartedly.
It is obvious to anybody who has seen these troops in action that they deliberately let the crowd gather and storm the Mayor's building and the White House. Just a few days earlier, when they arrived at the White House, they had an almost airtight seal on the place, and did a much better job of kicking ass and preventing a much larger and better armed crowd from going anywhere near the White House. As a matter of fact, they ran away from the demonstrators. At Ostankino, tanks that were headed to the area turned back just before the strom. Why? It has even conservatives and moderates like the Moscow Tribune asking "Could this have been a trap to encourage the violent elements on parliament's side to provide the justification the government needed to respond with the force it had sworn not to initiate?" [John Helmer, "Moscow Crisis:The First Spark", Moscow Tribune, Oct.5, 1993].
You bet this was a trap. What better way to justify the violence and the censorship, political repression and so on that followed? Also, by allowing these people to storm buildings, they had a concrete target to bombard. Of course lots of innocent bystanders also got hurt in the events. This too was part of the provocation. How did I and my friends get right to the seen of the action during crossfire? The soldiers pointed out the route for us. How come pedestrians were allowed to come so near to fighting? Was it that the soldiers couldn't control the crowd? They usually do a pretty good job completely blocking traffic when they want to. How come on Oct.5, troops were shooting at "snipers" on Novy Arbat street, but put up absolutely no obstacle to pedestrian traffic?
As far as the last question is concerned, the answer is simple: for all the bullets that Yeltsin's troops were firing up at rooftops, no bullets were being fired back down.
One man who witnessed this yesterday asked, "How can it be that they've been firing two days already and haven't caught the snipers? It doesn't seem like anyone's there. And how could they let people walk the streets like that?"
Izvestia reports that it is the city police and the regular army who are the only ones being used to shoot at the snipers. They are not specially trained at this. There are however many, many special troops that are. Where are they? Izvestia got past the censors with an article entitled "Troops Near the White House Shot At Everything That Moved". This is in fact what they did, but that they shouldn't have done. Now people are trying to justify this, saying that unmdoubtedly there were armed insurgents in the crowd, and that the people there were looking for trouble. But this was not the case. Now they keep making up stories about "snipers on the loose" and how communists were firing indiscriminantly into crowds of innocent people. They cannot hide the fact that they shot into the crowd so they have to make up all kinds of justifications for their actions and they blame the whole situation on the inhuman insurgents who put the civilian population in jeopardy. In fact it was Yeltsin and Grachev who put the crowd in danger, who shot onlookers.
More and more witnesses are coming foward to say that many of these "snipers" were in fact KGB or some similiar Yeltsinite force. For example, the snipers at the Mezdunarodnaya Hotel were let in past security. Would the security guards at this swank hotel which houses many shops and is adjacent to the Trade Center, housing many multi- national offices, have let opposition "snipers" through? If the hotel was stormed, how come there isn't a single report of it in the media? How come the media then describes the "snipers" at the hotels as part of the insurgents? More than likely, the snipers which were on the heavily guarded Hotel Mir across from the White House were also from the government.
Also, residents of the buildings from which snipers were shooting have also come foward to say that these were government snipers, but none of this has been reported in the media.
Yeltsin has a lot of blood on his hands, especially the blood of the people killed in anyone of the "sniper incidents" that were manufactured to create public outrage and fear and to provide him with reasons to justify his actions and political repressions.
Spunk Anarchist Collective.