MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti political commentator Yury Filippov). Federation Council Deputy Speaker Alexander Torshin, who is the chairman of the special parliamentary commission that has been investigating the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attack in Beslan, has said that the commission will not present its final report before the end of the year. He promised that the results of the investigation will be made public in 2006 but did not specify the date.
The reasons for such a delay (at first the report was expected before September 1, and then no later than December 31) are easy to understand. A Russian parliamentary commission is neither a government agency nor a public body. On the one hand, the members of a commission represent the public, and therefore want society to accept their findings as both objective and final. On the other hand, unlike the members of strictly public organizations, the parliamentarians are also government employees, and as such do not want to rush out their findings before the government and, in particular, the Prosecutor General's Office, have issued their versions of events.
This approach is probably justified. Indeed, during the work of the parliamentary commission, the Russian MPs, by virtue of their positions, have on many occasions only learned about new details and circumstances second or even third hand, often after the information had already been leaked to the press and become the subject of broad discussion. This was the case with the discovery of the archives of the late Ichkerian president Maskhadov, videotapes of terrorist meetings, and interviews and statements by terrorists published on the Internet.
This is by no means a purely Russian phenomenon. In essence, parliamentary commissions throughout the world are very similar despite striking superficial differences. (Take, for example, the "interrogation of the U.S. President" by congressmen in the Oval Office). It was no coincidence that the commissions investigating the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in the U.S. and the blasts in Madrid in March 2004 only started presenting their conclusions to the public once the official investigators had completed their work.
The new instructions which Vladimir Putin gave the Prosecutor General's Office after he met on September 2 with relatives of those killed in the Beslan tragedy will compel the Russian parliamentary commission to verify its conclusions again and to add more details to its findings. This meeting may even have an unexpected impact on the commission. Even if the relatives with whom Putin met did not ask him outright, they made it clear that they want the president himself to head the investigation.
