Anna
Politkovskaya had previously featured in the pages
of The Blanket
where in 2002 she was profiled for the purposes
of highlighting the dangerous environment in which
she lived and worked. In 2004 as a result of her
speaking with James Meek, he wrote in the Guardian
that 'poison and death threats won't stop Anna
Politkovskaya from reporting the truth about Chechnya.'
How right he proved to be.
While
many of her colleagues felt she was taking too
many risks and had developed a crusading zeal,
she insisted to Meek that despite all her brushes
with death, 'I wanted to stay alive.' It was not
to be. And so, almost five years after she was first
profiled in this journal she features in very
different circumstances, an obituary. It is the
result of her having being murdered last month
in the apartment complex where she lived by a
gunman believed by many to be in the pay of the
Russian security services. The Washington Post,
while not directly implicating Russian president
Vladimir Putin, alleged that the climate of brutality
which he had created was responsible for her death.
New
York born, her parents who worked as UN diplomats,
sent her to the Soviet Union to be educated. She
studied at Moscow State University and in a clear
statement of her intent to deal with matters frowned
upon by authority, and which would later come
to characterise her style of journalism, she completed
her dissertation on Marina Tsvetayeva, a poet
generally airbrushed out of Soviet literary life.
But
it was her stance on the Russian occupation of
Chechnya which both infuriated the Kremlin and
saw her scale unparalleled heights of Russian
investigative journalism. In addition to working
as a correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, the
main opposition newspaper in the country, the
uncompromising mother of two authored a number
of books, two of which were A Small Corner
of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya and Putin's
Russia. In a country where 85% of the population
get their news from the state controlled television
stations the importance of independent media outlets
such as Novaya Gazeta and autonomous publishing
houses is not to be understated. Although stung
by Politkovskaya, Putin dismissed her work as
'extremely insignificant.'
When
Boris Yeltsin invaded the Chechnya in 1994 the
media made it so difficult for the Russian forces
that the invasion had to be aborted two years
later. However, Putin, Yeltsin's successor, in
launching his own invasion in 1999, was determined
to succeed where Yeltsin had failed. The media
would be intimidated into acquiescing in Kremlin
policy. Politkovskaya became an avowed opponent,
meticulously chronicling mass executions, torture,
rape and kidnappings perpetrated against Chechen
civilians.
On
occasion she would abandon her journalist role
for a more hands-on approach. During the Moscow
theatre siege she acted as a negotiator between
Chechen rebels and the Russian authorities. En
route to the Beslan school siege to play a similar
role she was poisoned.
US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's decision
to meet the son of Politkovskaya while on a recent
visit to Moscow lent a sense of accentuated chutzpah
to the West's dealing with Russia. Her country's
courting of Putin to tie him into US global strategy
continued unabated while Rice sat in her hotel
room talking to the bereaved son of the murdered
journalist. It was for the optics. The reason
for her visit was only to drum up support against
North Korea. In 2005 Robert Chandler wrote of
Politkovskaya that 'unless there is whole-hearted
support for her from Western journalists, politicians
and the general public, she is likely to be assassinated.'
The US and its allies were aware of this but decided
that Putin was more a strategic asset than his
critics who advocated democracy and human rights.
Politkovskaya
was under few illusions and pummelled the West
for its tolerance of Putin. She wrote how the
Russian president had used the Bush 'war on terror'
to portray himself in a positive light while he
went about murdering and torturing the Chechens.
Taking advantage of a nervy international climate
ratcheted up by 9/11, Putin tried to link the
Beslan siege to Bin Laden. Politkovskaya was scathing
in her response:
What's
Bin Laden got to do with it? The Russian government
created these beasts, brought them up, and they
came to Beslan and behaved like beasts.
Putin's
claims that by keeping his boot on the neck of
Chechnya he is bringing peace and security to
the general region while at the same time protecting
Russian lives is belied by the uncomfortable statistic
that over one thousand Russian civilians have
been killed in reprisals by Chechen rebels.
Since
1992 a total of 42 journalists have been murdered
in Russia, 12 of them since Putin took office.
Generally Putin says very little about murdered
journalists but as a result of the public outcry
and international opinion he was forced to condemn
the murder of Politkovskaya, although he waited
two days in the hope that the furore would blow
over. His general disdain for the perspective
of Politkovskaya and others is to be found in
the introduction of a new law which discriminates
against foreign non-governmental organisations.
As a result the work of Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch has been suspended.
At
the time of her death, Anna Politkovskaya had
been working on a story about torture by the government
of Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin prime minister
of Chechnya. A couple of days before she was murdered
she claimed to have 'two photographs on my desk
now. These photos are of his torture chambers,
today and in the past, and people who were kidnapped
for no clear reasons.' It was discovered after
her death that both her article and the photos
had gone missing.
48
year old Anna Politkovskaya knew the risks and
was prepared to take them. The potency of her
life's work and her death in defence of it will
be diminished if journalists elsewhere, particularly
in the West where the level of state repression
is nowhere near as severe, fail to pick up the
baton that was shot from her hand and press it
against the throat of their own governments. Through
such pressure may Western state powers they be
dissuaded from courting murderous modern tsars
to the fatal detriment of brave but beleaguered
journalists.
