From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 12/15/2007 4:28 AM

Anna Politkovskaya

A condemned woman (from a piece written shortly before her assassination on October 7 2006), Saturday Review, October 14 2006

I am a pariah. That is the main result of my journalism throughout the years of the second Chechen war, and of publishing abroad a number of books about life in Russia and the Chechen war. In Moscow I am not invited to press conferences or gatherings that officials of the Kremlin administration might attend, in case the organisers are suspected of harbouring sympathies towards me. Despite this, all the top officials talk to me, at my request, when I am writing articles or conducting investigations - but only in secret, where they can't be observed, in the open air, in squares, in secret houses that we approach by different routes, like spies.

The officials like talking to me. They are happy to give me information. They consult me and tell me what is going on at the top. But only in secret. You don't get used to this, but you learn to live with it. It is exactly the way I have had to work throughout the second war in Chechnya. First I was hiding from the Russian federal troops, but always able to make contact clandestinely with individuals through trusted intermediaries, so that my informants would not be denounced to the top generals. When Putin's plan of Chechenisation succeeded (setting "good" Chechens loyal to the Kremlin to killing "bad" Chechens who opposed it), the same subterfuge extended to talking to "good" Chechen officials, whom of course I had known for a long time, and many of whom, before they were "good" officials, had sheltered me in their homes in the most trying months of the war. Now we can meet only in secret because I am a pariah, an enemy. Indeed, an incorrigible enemy not amenable to re-education.

I'm not joking. Some time ago Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the presidential administration, explained that there were people who were enemies but whom you could talk sense into, and there were incorrigible enemies into whom you couldn't and who simply needed to be "cleansed" from the political arena.

So they are trying to cleanse it of me and others like me ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2224918,00.html