Comment, UK Press Features
Tragedy of truth-telling Russian reporter’s death
Evening Standard – October 10, 2006
I didn’t want to believe she’d be murdered. Anna Politkovskaya’s tall thin vehemence, her throaty, vibrant voice, her dangerous truth-telling, and the kooky smile that lit up her often sad face as she made a particularly caustic point, all made her death seem an impossibility. This graying woman with her air of a strict but fair headmistress, who managed to pack at least 36 hours into every 24, and always had time, with a brusque but accommodating “I’m in a hurry, but what’s it about?” to take on more phone calls and more causes, seemed simply too busy to die.
Yet her friends knew, deep down, that a violent death was always on the cards for Russia’s bravest investigative journalist. By the time I got to know her, a couple of years ago, Anna had already survived multiple death threats, and her refusal to quietly toe the line kept attracting more. So it was shocking, but not surprising, to discover she had been assassinated in the lift outside her Moscow flat on Saturday.
It was also shocking, but not surprising, to discover that President Vladimir Putin had not commented on her headline-grabbing murder at his Security Council meeting on Monday. For Anna’s had been the voice that most compellingly articulated the worry felt by many in Russia today, that her country, under Putin, is again falling under the influence of authoritarians and secret policemen – and that freedom of conscience, speech and action are again under threat from state-sponsored bullies and killers.
However much else is going on in the world today – whether in North Korea or Iraq – the silencing of a voice so commonsensical and so courageous will inevitably make news. What Anna did and said made her more than a natural cause around which the liberal literati of the global village could coalesce. Her work mattered worldwide because it was true democracy in action: because, unlike so many politicians in her own country and elsewhere, she genuinely put her life at risk to speak for the little people whose interests are all too often ignored.
The main targets of Politkovskaya’s searing exposes in the daily Novaya Gazeta, were the authoritarians who run Putin’s Russia — in particular its army — and the authoritarians who run the conflict zone of Chechnya in the Russian south.
She took issue with the swaggering, macho, murderous pro-Moscow leaders of today’s Chechnya, under Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, (she campaigned against Putin’s man in Chechnya being named to run the region, interviewing people who’d been interrogated by him and publishing reports that he was a sadistic torturer who enjoyed stripping the skin off his victims’ backs).
The article she had been about to publish yesterday (eds: Monday) was about torture and kidnappings perpetrated by Kadyrov’s pro-Moscow forces against their political opponents. It died with her, though Novaya Gazeta’s deputy editor, Andrei Lipsky, says her colleagues are trying to piece together the fragments from her notes.
Yet Politkovskaya had no romantic sympathies with the freedom fighters either. Her targets also included the swaggering, macho, murderous anti-Moscow separatists led by Shamil Basayev, now dead, whose extremism plunged Chechnya into a second war against Putin’s forces in 1999 and brought disaster to hundreds of thousands of ordinary Chechen civilians.
She’d had considerable sympathy for earlier, moderate, separatists, under Aslan Maskhadov, who’d tried to find accommodation with Moscow as well as more freedom for their people. But, if Politkovskaya was on anyone’s side, it was that of ordinary civilians. Civilians in Chechnya, torn between two rival tyrannies, who couldn’t get their own stories heard by the world – the people who get woken up by soldiers taking their teenage daughter away to rape, or who lose their legs treading on mines, or whose neighbours get their throats cut or their fingers cut off – whose predicament she movingly described. And, of course, she was on the side of ordinary Russians – the people increasingly hemmed in by a blinkered press and ignorant of the world’s bigger realities.
What motivated Politkovskaya to go on braving the danger of Chechnya, long after Putin made it clear that journalists were not welcome at his war, was more than compassion. It was love for truth – the conviction that Russians needed to know what was being done in their name in the secretive south, behind army lines. “I’m sure this has to be done, for one simple reason,” she wrote briskly in “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya”. “As contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won’t work. So I want you to know the truth. Then you’ll be free of cynicism.”
She was originally sent to Chechnya, not during the first war there – Boris Yeltsin’s botched attempt at a quick fix to local nationalism, which ended in 1996 – but only during the second, Putin war, following the little-known president-to-be’s crudely nationalistic promise to “bomb the Chechens even in the crapper”. This mother of a grown-up son was chosen for Chechnya then not because she was a war correspondent – she’d been writing about social problems until then – but precisely because “I am just a civilian”.
The breathtaking horror – and cynicism – she uncovered gave her a mission so important that she separated with her husband and ignored her son’s pleas to stop her new work. She found corrupt Russian soldiers working hand-in-glove with shady Chechen criminals and political extremists. Her stories put flesh on the widely held belief that Chechnya is a for-profit war. The Russian army, which faces being scaled down there is no Soviet bloc to defend, has found in Chechnya an excuse to perpetuate itself – and get rich. The economics are grisly: a civilian kept in a pit, alive, by Russian soldiers is worth a ransom from his relatives; a corpse’s price is rather higher. “Everyone has found a niche,” she wrote. “The mercenaries at the checkpoints get bribes of ten to twenty roubles around the clock. The generals in Moscow and Chechnya use their war budget for personal gain. Officers of the middle ranks collect ransom for temporary hostages and corpses. Junior officers get to go marauding during the purges.” Hence an official policy based on, at best, outrageous distortions of the truth, and a landscape empty of heroes or winners.
Anna’s discoveries gave her life a strange new shape.
She negotiated with Chechen hostage-takers who took over Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre in October 2002 (a friend of her son’s was among the prisoners). She was subjected to a mock execution by security forces in Chechnya. Recently, she’d been saying that Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov had “publicly threatened to murder me. He actually said during a meeting of his government that Politkovskaya was a condemned woman”.
The last time I saw her was the autumn before last, when she visited London to launch a new book. She had a shocking story to tell the party – about being poisoned. She’d been rushing south during the siege by Chechen separatists of a school at Beslan in southern Russia, she said, to report on the crisis and, she hoped, to act as an intermediary and help to get hundreds of child prisoners out of the boobytrapped gym. But she was slipped a Mickey Finn on the plane. The next thing she knew, she was in hospital and it was several days later –too late for the children, who had by then been killed in their hundreds. What she remembered of the experience was the three men she’d noticed in the plane, staring at her with the “eyes of enemies”. She blamed the Russian secret services for poisoning her.
Her execution-style killing now has reminded me not just of those multiple earlier brushes with death, but of the violent ends other Russian truth-tellers have met in recent years. Anna Politkovskaya was part of a small but inspiring group of women whose honesty – representing the best of civilized Russia – has proved dangerous.
Her murder echoes that of the outspoken social reformer and liberal politician Galina Starovoitova, whose plans to run for president in 2000 were terminated in November 1998 when she was gunned down on the stairs outside her St Petersburg flat.
That killing, in the dying days of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, was sometimes interpreted as an early attempt by the secretive conservative forces dominant in Soviet times to regain power after Yeltsin. Putin, then just the head of the ex-KGB security police, not a politician, didn’t ignore that death as he has Anna Politkovskaya’s. He called it “one of the black pages in our modern history.”
Eight years later, fears that the forces of darkness are taking hold in Russia are so often expressed that they almost count as mainstream.
“ Her murder emphasizes the arrogant brutality of the Kremlin KGB,” is how the actress Vanessa Redgrave puts it – from close up, since she’s one activist campaigning for the West to look more critically at Russia’s account of its struggle with Muslim Chechen separatism.
Redgrave is helping Lord Rea to rush together a tribute to Anna Politkovskaya, this Friday at the House of Lords, attended by rights activists and journalists. She backs Amnesty International’s demand for an in-depth investigation into the crusading journalist’s death.
“ We haven’t managed to protect Anna,” Redgrave says. “Now we must all try in all our ways to protect the human beings who are in such danger because there is no Anna. That’s how I see it.”
Good for her. Redgrave’s consciousness-raising work she’s done on the abuses perpetrated in Chechnya is spot on, and this is a timely rallying call. More needs to be done to make more people here aware of how easily freedom — and life itself — can be snuffed out, once people lose the courage to speak their minds.
ENDS