Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist famous for her reporting of human rights abuses in Chechnya, was murdered yesterday in her apartment building in Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev is complaining--loudly--and Vladimir Putin is being blamed. Sebastian Alison, writing for Bloomberg, notes:
The murder is the third killing in weeks. Enver Ziganshin, the chief engineer of BP Plc's Russian gas unit, OAO Rusia Petroleum, was shot and killed in Irkutsk on Sept. 30. Russian central banker Andrei Kozlov, who led a fight against corruption in the nation's banking industry, was assassinated on Sept. 14.
Violence against journalists in Russia is ``frequent and impunity prevails,'' Paris-based Reporters Without Borders concluded in its annual survey this year.
Paul Klebnikov, the U.S.-born editor of Forbes Magazine in Russia, was shot dead in Moscow in July 2004. Klebnikov was at the time the 11th journalist to be murdered in a contract-style killing since Putin took office in 2000. No one has been brought to justice in any of the killings, according to the New York- based Committee to Protect Journalists.
David Holley in the LA Times reports:
Yaroshevsky [deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where she worked] said Politkovskaya had been working on an article about torture in Chechnya that was due to run in Monday's paper.
"As far as I know she was planning to write about Kadyrov people who torture people in order to get confessions from them for anti-government activities," Yaroshevsky said. "I don't know whether she managed to complete her story. But if she did, or there are some drafts left, we will certainly publish it. We know that she had testimonies from those who were tortured, and photos of them."
Everybody is pointing fingers at everybody else. I certainly don't know who's directly to blame, but I do know that this is sad news for journalism, sad news for Russia, sad news for Ichkeria and for all of Chechnya; it's sad news for us all. I would ask that if you read only one thing about Anna Politkovskaya, you read Yevgeny Kiselyov's op-ed in the Moscow Times which explains exactly why she was so important:
For me, Politkovskaya's bravery, single-mindedness and readiness to get the story no matter what the risks involved, put her up there with Veronica Guerin of The Irish Times, who was killed by Dublin drug dealers in 1996 as revenge for her investigative articles.
Many will remember Joel Schumacher's film about her story, with Guerin played by Cate Blanchett. The film was slammed by many critics for portraying the deceased journalist as highly ambitious and interested only in glory and celebrity. In fact, Guerin was completely different -- modest and concerned only with telling her readers the truth. I once met Veronica and can vouch for this personally.
Politkovskaya was from the same mold. If anything, she was even less interested in money. She was more ascetic, more of a human rights activist. She had one main theme: human rights violations in Chechnya. She not only wrote about this, but tried to help people whose rights had been violated, to get them out of torture chambers and back on their feet. This was where the royalties from her articles and books went.
[...]
[S]he spent almost every day investigating human rights violations and other crimes committed by federal forces and their Chechen allies during a war that, according to opinion polls, most Russians had not supported for years. It is a war that swept the man who started its latest phase into the Kremlin. President Vladimir Putin regards criticism of the war as a personal affront.
[...]
Politkovskaya long ago disappeared from our television screens. The media, and television in particular, is increasingly becoming a business, and business is often incompatible with critical opinions from journalists who cast doubt on statements made by government officials. This is happening everywhere, but unfortunately, as often happens, it becomes monstrous, grotesque and rampant in Russia. There is less and less space for journalism, particularly of the investigative kind.
Some journalists had apparently started a muttering campaign against Politkovskaya, asking why she kept hammering away about Chechnya and nothing else. Nothing can be done, they said. Everyone is fed up with Chechnya, people don't want to hear about it and readers are deserting her newspaper. But she stuck to her guns. In the end she paid with her life.
As the boss of a respected Moscow newspaper said cynically, "She kept on asking for it, and she fell."
[...]
I feel embarrassed for many of my colleagues. Alexander Mamontov, the editor of Russia's oldest and still-respected newspaper, Izvestia, which recently has recently taken an increasingly pro-government line, said that Politkovskaya's professional activities "had not the slightest thing to do with what happened to her." This was just hours after the murder, when no one knew any details of the crime. I wonder what he knew that enabled him to make such a categorical statement.
[...]
Much will also be said now about how the murder of a journalist should be seen as no less serious a crime than the murder of a politician; that journalism is a public profession and, as such, journalists should be untouchable. I agree completely. But the professional immunity of journalists must be guaranteed before their physical safety.
This immunity does not exist in Russia today, because the state has no respect for journalists' rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Everything springs from this. And for this, the authorities are definitely to blame.
It's important to look around at the rest of the world when we call the United States government a banana republic operating on the principle of the führerprinzip, and recognize how much worse it could be. I don't mean that in the "see, it's not so bad here" kind of way, but rather, "let's stop this before we get to that point."
Comments