{"id":61583,"date":"2018-03-28T06:40:18","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T06:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=61583"},"modified":"2018-03-28T06:40:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-28T06:40:19","slug":"putins-grim-reality-public-fury-over-childrens-deaths-in-mall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/world-news\/putins-grim-reality-public-fury-over-childrens-deaths-in-mall.html","title":{"rendered":"Putin’s Grim Reality: Public Fury Over Children’s Deaths in Mall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Putin’s Grim Reality: Public Fury Over Children’s Deaths in Mall<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

At the end of a month that has seen him unveil new \u201cinvincible\u201d missiles, announce a space mission to Mars and secure a sky-high vote in Russia\u2019s election, President Vladimir V. Putin faced a grim reality on the ground Tuesday: a nation enraged by the deaths of children trapped in a burning mall in Siberia.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Putin traveled to the town of Kemerovo to lay flowers next to a memorial for the at least 64 people, many of them children, who died in the fire on Sunday. Some of them died as they banged on locked exit doors and screamed into cellphones for help from their parents.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHow could this ever happen?\u201d Mr. Putin asked local officials, echoing a question now being asked across Russia by a population that just recently voted overwhelmingly to re-elect a president who, during his previous 18 years in power, repeatedly boasted of making Russia strong and safe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Public anger at the fire \u2014 and claims that official bungling and corruption played a part \u2014 drowned out the Kremlin\u2019s fury over Monday\u2019s expulsion of Russian diplomats by 23 countries. Even on state-controlled television, news about the fire pushed aside routine denunciations of the West just as four more countries ordered out diplomats over a nerve-agent attack for which London has blamed Moscow.<\/span><\/p>\n

Normally, the Kremlin would have used the diplomatic crisis to stoke patriotic fervor and promote its view of Russia as a fortress besieged by \u201cRussophobic\u201d foreigners.<\/span><\/p>\n

Continue reading the main story<\/span>
\nRussia-24, a round-the-clock state news channel, tried early Monday to stick to its usual fare of patriotic programming, broadcasting a panel \u201cdiscussion\u201d featuring fiery tirades against the West. But even that exercise had to pause to give the announcer time to express condolences over the deaths in Siberia.<\/span><\/p>\n

By afternoon, however, the coverage was focused almost entirely on the shopping mall tragedy and a tightly choreographed visit by Mr. Putin to Kemerovo, more than 2,000 miles east of Moscow.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Putin\u2019s comforting words in Siberia, where he harangued officials and visited the memorial, had to compete with a rival narrative of corruption spread on social media and on the website of Aleksei A. Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner who was barred from running in the March 18 election against Mr. Putin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eager to keep control of the story, Mr. Putin warned people to stick to official information. \u201cYou know it very well that social media is a murky source unfortunately,\u201d he told officials and relatives in Kemerovo. \u201cWe need to rely on the results of the actual inquiry.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That Russia is far from being a monolithic one-party state, despite Mr. Putin\u2019s lopsided re-election, was clear Tuesday evening in the two events organized to mourn the dead in Kemerovo.<\/span><\/p>\n

One was state-sponsored, near the Kremlin; the other was held in Pushkin Square, by Muscovites who wanted no part in the official gathering. The alternative wake began as a solemn vigil with mourners burning candles and laying flowers, some of them in tears, but gradually turned into a small-scale political rally with chants of \u201cRussia without Putin!\u201d \u201cCorruption kills!\u201d \u201cShame on television!\u201d and \u201cSilence means death!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of fuming at the United States and its allies, Mr. Putin, during his Siberia trip, used another tool in his repertoire of responses to most problems: He set the security apparatus to work, telling relatives of the victims that the Investigative Committee, Russia\u2019s answer to the F.B.I., had deployed 100 investigators and would find those responsible for the fire and punish them.<\/span><\/p>\n

He blamed \u201ccriminal negligence\u201d and \u201cslovenliness\u201d for the blaze, which started in a children\u2019s play area and then swept through nearby cinemas crowded with young people.<\/span><\/p>\n

The regional governor, Aman Tuleyev, a relic of the Soviet era, begged for forgiveness and accused opposition activists of trying to exploit the tragedy for political ends. \u201cIt\u2019s sacrilege when there\u2019s grief and you use it to solve your own problems,\u201d the governor said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Putin avoided mention of what many, including those who lost family members, believe was the real cause of the fire: a state system, including multiple agencies responsible for limiting fire and other risks, eaten away by corruption and incompetence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Russia has strict building codes and elaborate safety regulations but, instead of being enforced, they are frequently skirted with the help of corrupt officials willing to turn a blind eye to violations in return for cash bribes and favors. Law enforcement officers, who are supposed to prevent this, are themselves often on the take or under pressure from powerful political barons not to investigate.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Anton Gorelkin, a member of Parliament from Kemerovo, gave a list of possible reasons the fire started \u2014 a prank by children, a short circuit, arson \u2014 but he said the real cause of the tragedy was greed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Asserting that the mall, called Winter Cherry, should never have been allowed to open because of \u201cblatant safety issues,\u201d he accused an unnamed deputy mayor of signing off on the shopping center\u2019s opening in 2013 after receiving a bribe. \u201cHis eyes were closed by money,\u201d the legislator contended.<\/span><\/p>\n

Igor Vostrikov, who lost his wife, three children and a sister in the fire, also blamed rapacious officials in an enraged message on social media. \u201cI no longer have a family,\u201d Mr. Vostrikov wrote. \u201cThe ruling regime is guilty. Every bureaucrat dreams of stealing like Putin. Every state functionary treats people like garbage.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Government investigators, added Mr. Vostrikov, \u201cwill find a scapegoat, and the issue will be done with, but the threats \u2014 incompetence, widespread corruption, alcoholism and total degradation of society \u2014 will go nowhere.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Just a few yards from the regional government offices where Mr. Putin met local officials, thousands of people gathered in Kemerovo\u2019s central square and called on the governor to resign, pouring scorn on those who repeated an official death toll that many believe undercounted the real number of victims.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Putin and the governor, Mr. Tuleyev, stayed away from the square. The governor\u2019s deputy, Sergei Tsivilev, did visit and, according to the news website Znak, was met with cries of \u201cThe truth!\u201d \u201cResign!\u201d and demands that Mr. Putin come and address the throng.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Putin knows from bitter experience how easily a tragedy can rebound against him. In 2000, his first year in office, he traveled to a naval port in the Arctic Circle in a disastrous attempt to calm the grief of the widows and relatives of the 118 crewmen who perished in the sinking of the submarine Kursk, an episode during which Moscow declined foreign help to save the crew despite not having equipment of its own needed to launch a rescue operation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Kursk fiasco was quickly followed by a Kremlin push to take control of NTV, a privately owned television station that had given voice to grieving widows and contributed to a public relations disaster that looked for a time like it might cripple Mr. Putin, then a newly installed leader. NTV, now firmly under state control, is today one of Mr. Putin\u2019s loudest cheerleaders.<\/span><\/p>\n

Public distrust generated by the Kursk tragedy was then reinforced by multiple disasters involving the authorities\u2019 incompetent and brutal response to hostage takings by terrorists at a Moscow theater in 2002, during a performance of a musical called \u201cNord-Ost,\u201d and at a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan in 2004.<\/span><\/p>\n

Increasingly tight control of the news media, ratcheted up after each such tragedy, has done little to dissipate this distrust and may even have aggravated it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEven if the official death toll reflects reality, at the end of the day people know how the government lied in Beslan, Nord-Ost, Kursk and many other places. So they have themselves to blame for the spiraling level of distrust,\u201d said a post on Twitter by Kaloy Akhilgov, a lawyer and former government official.<\/span><\/p>\n

State television largely ignored Tuesday\u2019s gathering in Kemerovo\u2019s central square, focusing instead on Mr. Putin\u2019s visit to a hospital ward and his solemn expressions of condolences.<\/span><\/p>\n

It also showed him pointing a finger at lowly local officials and strenuously avoiding the question of whether a system addled by corruption might be the real problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite draconian fire regulations and an army of inspectors to enforce them, Russia has one of the world\u2019s worst fire safety records. Between 2001 and 2015, according to a study by International Association of Fire and Rescue Services, Russia had an average of 7.5 deaths per 100,000 people from fires, compared with 1 in the United States, 2.7 in Kazakhstan and 0.5 in France and Germany. Russia, where fire inspectors are notorious for extorting bribes, had the worst death rate of 41 countries covered by the study.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Putin made no mention of Russia\u2019s lamentable and well-known fire safety record, but instead expressed puzzled outrage that the shopping mall had gone up in flames and killed so many people.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s happening here?\u201d Mr. Putin said in a highly scripted meeting with Kemerovo officials. \u201cThis isn\u2019t war, it\u2019s not a spontaneous methane outburst. People came to relax, children. We\u2019re talking about demography and losing so many people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The crowd on the square, however, had no interest in the official script. When Mr. Tsivilev, the deputy governor, announced that a total of 64 deaths had been recorded, one man shouted: \u201cWhy are you lying?\u201d A live stream by the video service Ruptly showed another clambering onto the platform to confront Mr. Tsivilev.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of calming the throng, the deputy governor only inflamed it by suggesting that some people were exploiting the tragedy to attract attention. This drew a furious retort from Mr. Vostikov, the author of the social media post denouncing corruption.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI have lost my sister Sabadash Alyona Igorevna; my wife, Vostrikova Elena Sergeevna; three children \u2014 5, 7 and 2 years old,\u201d he said. \u201cI came here for self-promotion, did I?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/03\/27\/world\/europe\/russia-kemerovo-fire.html<\/span><\/p>\n

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