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RFE/RL honors slain journalist

Anna Politkovskaya's killing spotlights wider problem in Russia

By Lisa Nuch Venbrux
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 10th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
RFE/RL head Jeffrey Gedmin hosted the Oct. 5 panels detailing violations of press freedoms in Russia.
COURTESY PHOTO
Anna Politkovskaya championed ordinary people in her reporting.
On Oct. 7, 2006, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found dead in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. Politkovskaya, a government critic known for exposing human rights abuses in Chechnya, had been shot multiple times in the body and head in an apparent contract killing.
As journalists and officials gathered at the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Oct. 5 to commemorate her, many roundly condemned the Russian government’s oppressive hold over the lives of journalists and citizens.
“It is the [Russian] law enforcement officers who assisted, helped and participated in Anna’s killing,” Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta said by video link from Moscow.
Politkovskaya’s death was one chapter in an ongoing story of repression and sabotage by Russian state forces. A 2007 Freedom House report details crackdowns on human rights groups and political opponents, as well as the strangling of domestic media outlets.
For Muratov, at the helm of one of Russia’s few independent media organizations, tactics to silence government opponents have become increasingly familiar. He accuses state officers of not only colluding in the killing of his former colleague, but of subverting the investigations into her death.
“When, with the help of our newspaper, the prosecutor’s officers finally got some information about the possible executors of this crime, there were some leakages of information,” he said. These leaks undermined the investigations by allowing guilty parties to “disappear.”
According to lead investigator Petros V. Garibyan, interviewed in a special Oct. 8 edition of Novaya Gazeta devoted to the case, the gunman who carried out the killing has already been identified. Garibyan and Novaya Gazeta employees are maintaining strict silence about suspects to avoid jeopardizing the investigation. Ten people have been arrested so far.
“There was an image of the alleged killer from the outside surveillance camera. But there was no face — only a vague figure of a person who skillfully hides his appearance. All the rest had to be found grain by grain.” Garibyan said in the interview. “But it’s too early to say that the one who organized it … has been arrested.”
Russia’s downhill slide away from civil liberties has been precipitated by two significant factors cited by panelists: popular complacence and a timid, atomized West.
“The sad fact is that people in Russia will use freedom of speech much less than people in other countries,” said Elena Rykovtseva, a host for RFE/RL’s Russian service who knew Politkovskaya for 10 years. “Russian society doesn’t seem to have even understood what they lost with Anna. They have lost their only chance to learn the truth about Chechnya.”
Fifteen ceremonies marking Politkovskaya’s death were planned outside Russia this month. Yet, over the past year, only two demonstrations, each of just about 100 people, have been held for her inside the country, Rykovtseva noted.
In Putin’s Russia, written in 2003, Politkovskaya sharply criticized the West for standing by as President Vladimir Putin consolidated power.
Edward Lucas, an Economist editor who has covered Central and Eastern Europe since 1986, admitted that her assessment was probably right.
Since then, however, “The wind has changed … which I’m sure is bad news for the Kremlin,” he said. “I think the long slow rally of the West against the chauvinistic and neo-imperialist … policies of the Kremlin has begun.”
For the past 15 years, many concessions were made to Russia, in the interest of preserving peaceful relations with the growing energy giant in the aftermath of the Cold War.
Now leaders are becoming more aware of the Kremlin’s corruption, the blatant way senior Kremlin officials head businesses and the deadly means authorities use to deal with opponents. As a result, the European Union has recently posed a united front to Russia, rather than allowing individual countries to face showdowns on their own.
“The atmosphere now at EU meetings is far different from how it was three or four years ago, when the former captive nations of Eastern Europe would be told to sit down and shut up and stop complaining by the big, rich countries of the West,” Lucas said.
Though positioned on the front lines of what appears to be a losing battle for press freedom, Muratov too offers shreds of hope that justice could prevail, at least in Polikovskaya’s case.
“Dozens of people who still have consciences and work in the law enforcement structures share their info with our employees. I don’t think [corrupt officers] can undermine this investigation,” he said.
“I hope that the paymaster and the hitman will end up in jail, and I would be very glad to go to this jail, look at them in the eye, and say ‘Be you cursed.’ ” Muratov concluded. “That’s all.”

Lisa Nuch Venbrux can be reached at lvenbrux@praguepost.com


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