Photo: AP
Photo: AP
A Sobering Effect of Politkovskaya’s Killing

09.10.2006

MosNews
The killing of Anna Politkovskaya, one of the few journalists who had refused to keep their mouths shut and continued to criticize harshly the Putin regime, has had a sobering effect on the Russians.

People responded to her death on Saturday, October 7, with anger and frustration, even those who had argued with her when she was alive, those who had laughed at her efforts and accusations she hurled at the official authorities, the Russian military and Moscow proteges in Chechnya.

People carried flowers to a house where she lived in downtown Moscow — and where she was murdered — and placed flowers and candles outside the offices of a newspaper where she worked.

Hundreds meanwhile rallied in Moscow’s Pushkin Square to protest her murder as well as the Russian crackdown on Georgians since a spy row erupted last week.

Underneath a photograph of Politkovskaya, one poster read: “The Kremlin has killed freedom of speech.”

Russia has seen several high-profile murders of outspoken journalists over the past decade. Paul Klebnikov, the U.S.-born editor of the Russian edition of Forbes who had been investigating the murky business world in Russia, was gunned down on July 9, 2004 as he was leaving his Moscow office. Two ethnic Chechens accused of carrying out the murder were acquitted earlier this year.

Valery Ivanov, editor of the newspaper Tolyatinskoye Oborzreniye in the southern city Russian city of Togliatti, was shot dead outside his home on April 29, 2002. The newspaper covered local organized crime, drug trafficking and official corruption.

Larisa Yudina, editor of the opposition newspaper Sovetskaya Kalmykia in the southern Russian region of Kalmykia, was stabbed to death and her body dumped in a pond on the outskirts of the regional capital, Elista, on June 7, 1998. Two men, both former government aides, were caught and convicted of murder.

Vladislav Listyev, executive director of the newly formed public television station ORT, was shot dead in the entrance hall of his apartment block March 1, 1995. Listyev was one of Russia’s best-known TV journalists.

Dmitry Kholodov, an investigative reporter for the Moscow newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, was killed in a bomb blast at the newspaper’s office on October 17, 1994. Kholodov, who had been investigating mafia connections with the military, was killed when he opened a briefcase he believed contained secret documents.

Anna Politkovskaya was found dead in her apartment block in Moscow on October 7, 2006.

The country’s top prosecutor, Yury Chaika, announced that he had personally taken control of the investigation into her death. The Kremlin, a frequent target of Politkovskaya’s often sharply critical reporting, again made no public statement on the death of one of the country’s most prominent journalists and commentators.

Another focus of her reporting, Ramzan Kadyrov, the prime minister of Chechnya, said her killing prompted “us to think about where things stand in this issue in our country,” Interfax reported. “Politkovskaya’s articles were not always objective, but it was her point of view,” he said. “I am sincerely sorry about what happened.”

Politkovskaya, 48, was a journalist with few equals in Russia. She was a special correspondent for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta and had become one of the country’s most prominent human-rights advocates, The NYT wrote.

Politkovskaya, who had two adult children, had worked for Novaya Gazeta since 1999; she had covered the second Chechen war and the terrorist siege of a Moscow theater in 2002. One of her books, “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya,” recorded her impressions of the war’s unrelenting and often macabre cruelty, and the manifest corruption of many of its participants. She wrote of torture, mass executions, kidnappings for ransom and to eliminate rebel suspects, and the sale by Russian soldiers of Chechen corpses to their families for proper Islamic burial.

Politkovskaya’s colleagues believe she paid the price for her vigorous opposition to the authorities on sensitive issues. “The murder of Anna Politkovskaya is a new attack on democracy, freedom of speech and openness in Russia,” the Moscow Union of Journalists said in a statement, published by the Reuters news agency.

Leading Russian journalists, international journalism watchdogs and Western governments condemned the killing of Anna Politkovskaya and demanded a thorough probe into the attack though many doubt that those behind the killing will be brought to justice.

Russia has become a deadly place for journalists who run afoul of government officials or their business and political partners, The Associated Press wrote Sunday. Those behind the killings, though, are rarely brought to justice, reinforcing a sense of impunity that may have encouraged the killers of Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of the war in Chechnya.

As the European Union and the U.S. demanded a thorough probe into Saturday’s contract-style killing, there was skepticism that the authorities would ever uncover the culprits of the latest in a series of killings of journalists in Russia under President Vladimir Putin, who has been increasingly accused of rolling back post-Soviet freedoms since coming to power in 2000.

The skepticism was underlined by the $929,700 reward for information that Novaya Gazeta has offered, signaling stronger faith in their own investigative efforts than those promised by the government, which has produced so few prosecutions before. Politkovskaya’s editors said she had been due to publish an investigative article on Monday about torture and kidnappings in Chechnya based on witness accounts and photos of tortured bodies.

Novaya Gazeta said on its Web site it believed her murder was either revenge by Kadyrov or an attempt to discredit him.

In a recent radio interview, Politkovskaya said she was a witness in a criminal case against Kadyrov concerning his alleged involvement in the kidnapping of two civilians — an ethnic Russian and a Chechen — who were tortured and killed.

Novaya Gazeta said Sunday its reporters would conduct their own investigation, and it called Politkovskaya’s slaying revenge for her coverage of Chechnya, which included the story planned for Monday. “We never got the article, but she had evidence about these (abducted) people and there were photographs,” Deputy Editor Vitaly Yerushensky, told Ekho Moskvy radio.

Back in 2004, at the height of the deadly school siege in North Ossetia, Politkovskaya survived an attempt on her life. She was taken off the plane as she headed to Beslan where a group of Chechen rebels were held nearly 1,000 people, most of the children, hostage.

Then, Politkovskaya claimed the government had taken measures to keep her out of the region, but officials played down her complaints refusing to take them seriously. That attempt on her life remained unsolved, allegedly because blood samples were deliberately destroyed before the toxin could be identified, Joan Smith of The Independent wrote Monday.

Anna was recognized internationally, her books were published in Europe and she enjoyed respect of media community world over.

All leading organizations, politicians and writers have condemned her death. Only the Kremlin remained pronouncedly silent.

But her death, it appears, has had a sobering effect on the Russians. For several years now, blinded by growing economy and improving living standards, we grew to believe that Russia was becoming — albeit slowly — a more civilized, safer place to live in where disputes are taken to court rather than solved through violence.

But the recent killing of a top banker, Andrei Kozlov, and, now — Anna’s death — sow strong doubts on claims of those who picture Vladimir Putin as the most devout liberal…
http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2006/10/09/journalistkilling.shtml