Journo's murder shocks Russia

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Russia is slowly stepping away from its shaky democracy. Somehow I do not trust Putin anymore. The reward will go nowhere. The hitman will be killed and no trace left.
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Journo's murder shocks Russia
09/10/2006

Moscow - The face of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya stared out from the front page of every major Russian newspaper on Monday as her colleagues hailed her fearless reporting and vowed to search for her killer.
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The apparent assassination on Saturday of Politkovskaya, Russia's top investigative journalist and a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was also cast as further evidence of the grim state of media freedom in today's Russia.
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Liberal daily Novaya Gazeta, where Politkovskaya had been finishing a report alleging torture of Chechen civilians by Moscow-backed militias, vowed in a front-page editorial: "As long as there is a Novaya Gazeta, her killers will not sleep soundly."
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A shareholder in the paper has announced a 25 million ruble ($930 000) reward for information leading to the arrest of the journalist's killer.
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Politkovskaya, 48, was shot in her apartment building in an execution-style killing as she stepped out of an elevator on Saturday.

The killer shot her three times in the chest, then once in the head, and left the murder weapon at the scene, daily Kommersant cited police sources as saying.
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Kommersant focused on possible motives for the murder, citing the work that made Politkovskaya a hero in the international journalistic community and a scourge for the Kremlin: investigation into the human costs of the brutal war in Chechnya.
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Noting that Politkovskaya had been finishing a report on allegations of torture by the Kremlin-backed Chechen leadership, Kommersant said the killing "could change the structure of political power in Chechnya".
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http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_2010035,00.html

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There's a good article about her in today's (Saturday, Oct. l4) Guardian; they've printed an essay/article she'd written that hadn't been previously published which told about why she felt that she had to continue to write - even though she knew it would mean a death sentence for her.

It's amazing to me as well the human rights violations Putin's government is apparently engaging in and guilty of with little outside attention or intervention from the rest of the world. She was intent on telling the truth about it, when everyone else was afraid to.

Really brave and inspiring woman.

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aidan wrote:

There's a good article about her in today's (Saturday, Oct. l4) Guardian; they've printed an essay/article she'd written that hadn't been previously published which told about why she felt that she had to continue to write - even though she knew it would mean a death sentence for her.

It's amazing to me as well the human rights violations Putin's government is apparently engaging in and guilty of with little outside attention or intervention from the rest of the world. She was intent on telling the truth about it, when everyone else was afraid to.

Really brave and inspiring woman.

Because Bush looked into Putin's eyes and saw...I forget what, but he liked it.

I am similarly amazed.

Fear of China and/or terrorists making strange bedfellows again?

Edit: Here are two Guardian articles:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1920801,00.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1920799,00.html

Anna in her own words from one of them, about why she continued to report:

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.

On 5 August 2006, I was standing in the middle of a crowd of women in the little central square of Kurchaloy, a dusty village in Chechnya. I was wearing a headscarf folded and tied in the manner favoured by many women of my age in Chechnya, not covering the head completely, but not leaving it uncovered either. This was essential if I was not to be identified, in which case nobody could say what might happen.

To one side of the crowd a man's tracksuit trousers were draped over the gas pipeline that runs the length of Kurchaloy. They were caked with blood. His severed head had been taken away by then and I didn't see it.

During the night of 27-28 July, two Chechen fighters had been ambushed on the outskirts of Kurchaloy by units loyal to the pro-Kremlin Ramzan Kadyrov. One, Adam Badaev, was captured and the other, Hoj-Ahmed Dushaev, a native of Kurchaloy, was killed. Towards dawn, not far short of 20 Zhiguli cars, full of armed people, drove into the centre of the village and up to the district police station. They had Dushaev's head with them. Two of the men suspended it in the centre of the village from the pipeline, and beneath it they hung the bloodstained trousers I was now seeing............

(That is only an excerpt, of course)

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She had incredible courage, to keep on reporting news that did not please the government. It is so much easier to ignore horrible crimes that feel uncomfortable.
The easiest way to gag our conscience is to talk about "terrorists". That makes it facile to ignore the crimes of the "good" soldiers.
Some fanatic cuts a head off and we are shocked beyond belief. Some military bombs and kills a thousand civilians and we say nothing.
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Atrocities in Chechnya
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Since the beginning of the conflict, Russian forces have indiscriminately and disproportionately bombed and shelled civilian objects, causing heavy civilian casualties. The Russian forces have ignored their Geneva convention obligations to focus their attacks on combatants, and appear to take few safeguards to protect civilians: It is this carpet-bombing campaign which has been responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths in the conflict in Chechnya.
The Russian forces have used powerful surface-to surface rockets on numerous occasions, causing death tolls in the hundreds in the Central Market bombing in Grozny and in many smaller towns and villages.
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Lately, Russian commanders have threatened to use even more powerful explosives, including fuel air explosives which could have a disastrous casualty count if used against civilian targets. The bombing campaign has turned many parts of Chechnya to a wasteland: even the most experienced war reporters I have spoken to told me they have never seen anything in their careers like the destruction of the capital Grozny.
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http://hrw.org/english/docs/2000/03/01/russia11094.htm

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When you take all the disparate pieces and start looking at them as part of a whole: this "new" (or I think just previously unreported) trend in Putin's Russia, North Korea, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine,etc., etc. and put it together with the cowboy mentality of this particular US administration - it's just aligning to create a scenario that's pretty ominous in my mind- all these scary players in a production I'd never want to see be staged - but I'm starting to feel that it will be, and sometime in the not too distant future.

I mean, if you had Bush and Gorbachev or Clinton and Putin working together - it might turn out okay. But Bush and Putin- not a good mix for diplomacy- although Bush and anyone else - except Tony Blair-don't seem to create a rational cooperative environment for diplomacy. What a cast of world leaders we have right now. Does it scare the **** out of anyone else?

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Yes.

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From yesterday's Guardian:

Quote:

The award-winning Russian journalist and author Anna Politkovskaya, a fearless reporter on the Chechen wars and critic of the Putin administration, was murdered in Moscow last weekend. In a previously unpublished article, she explains why, despite death threats, she had to continue writing

Full report: 'A condemned woman'

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One more obituary, this one from the Economist.
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Having discovered democracy and the free press as Soviet power collapsed, her faith was uncompromising and sometimes uncomfortable. Nor was she always easy company. A fondness for both sweeping statements and intricate details sometimes made conversation heavy-going. She was both disorganised and single-minded; that could be unnerving, too. But she enjoyed life. She often said that with a KGB officer as president, the least you could do was to smile sometimes, to show the difference between him and you.
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It would be nice to think that Russians will find her example inspiring. Sadly, they may conclude that brave work on hot topics is a bad idea.
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http://economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8023316

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Journo's murder shocks Russia

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