Freedom of the press under attack - The murder of Anna Politkovskaya

I've recently posted some items dealing with attacks on freedom of expression in Bangladesh (Freedom of the press under attack - Bangladeshi journalist Salah Choudhury faces the death penalty) and elsewhere (Freedom of expression under attack - Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, Jeff Jarvis, & Piet Dorsman). Campaigns of repression and intimidation by governments, terrorists, and/or criminals--including high-profile murders of journalists and political activists--in places ranging from Zimbabwe to Colombia to the Middle East are well known. This is a dismayingly widespread problem, not a localized one.

Another part of the world where freedom of expression is under assault is in much of the former Soviet Union. The pattern is uneven. My impression is that the situation for freedom of the press and freedom of expression more generally is not bad in the Baltic countries and has improved in Ukraine since the 2005 Orange Revolution. But varying degrees of authoritarian repression have long been pervasive in countries like Belarus and most of the Central Asian republics. And in Russia, where a vigorous culture of independent journalism emerged with the withering-away of the Soviet regime, it is now under increasingly harsh and effective pressure. In general, this campaign to smother and suppress independent journalism seems to rely mostly on co-optation, marginalization, and economic strangulation. But a certain amount of violence is involved, too.

One of the most startling examples of this creeping repression was the murder of the prominent investigative journalist Anna Polikovskaya on October 7, 2006. Politskaya seems to have been one of those classically 'difficult' and unbendingly principled types that the Russian intelligentsia has regularly produced over the past two centuries. Her assassination generated international attention, alarm, and condemnation precisely because it has to be seen, not simply as an isolated incident, but as an especially striking symptom of a larger danger. A great deal has now been written about it (including this statement from US PEN), but among the pieces I have encountered, I think her obituary from the Economist and the BBC story that follows it stand out..

--Jeff Weintraub

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The Economist
October 12, 2006
Anna Politkovskaya
Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, was shot dead on October 7th, aged 48

She was brave beyond belief, reporting a gruesome war and a creeping dictatorship with a sharp pen and steel nerves. It may be a chilling coincidence that Anna Politkovskaya was murdered on Vladimir Putin's birthday, but her friends and supporters are in little doubt that her dogged, gloomy reporting of the sinister turn Russia has taken under what she called his “bloody” leadership was what led to her body being dumped in the lift of her Moscow apartment block.

Miss Politkovskaya's journalism was distinctive. Not for her the waffly, fawning and self-satisfied essays of the Moscow commentariat, nor the pervasive well-paid advertorials. Austere and a touch obsessive, she reported from the wrecked villages and shattered towns of Chechnya, talking to those on all sides and none, with endless patience and gritty determination.

She neither sentimentalised the Chechen rebels nor demonised the Russian conscripts—ill-armed, ill-fed and ill-led—who have crushed the Chechens' half-baked independence. She talked to soldiers' mothers trying to find their sons' corpses in military morgues where mangled bodies lay unnamed and unclaimed—the result of the Russian army's unique mixture of callousness and incompetence. And she talked to Chechens whose friends and relatives had disappeared into the notorious “filtration camps” to suffer torture, mutilation, rape and death.

Few journalists, from any country, did that. The second Chechen war, which started in 1999 and still fizzles on now, made that mountainous sliver of territory in the northern Caucasus the most dangerous place on the planet for a journalist. Most Moscow-based reporters went seldom, if at all, and then only in daylight and well-guarded. Ms Politkovskaya was unfazed, making around 50 trips there, often for days at a time.

Ordinary Chechens, and many Russians, adored her. Piles of post and incessant phone calls came, some offering information, more often wanting her help. Could she intercede with a kidnapper? Trace a loved one? She always tried, she said, to do what she could.

She loathed the warlords who had misruled Chechnya during its brief spells of semi-independence; the Islamic extremists who exploited the conflict; the Russian goons and generals, and their local collaborators. She despised the Chechen leaders installed by Russia: they looted reconstruction money, she said, using torture and kidnapping as a weapon. She was due to file a story on this the day she died.

The worst effect of the Chechen wars, she reckoned, was on Russia itself. Her reporting from all over her native country made her see it in what many regarded as an unfairly bleak light. Mr Putin's regime was utterly brutal and corrupt, she would say in her soft, matter-of-fact voice. He represented the worst demons of the Soviet past, revived in modern form. Hundreds had died to bring him to power, and that was just a foretaste of the fascism and war that was to come. Now her pessimism seems less extreme.

A duty to tell

Mr Putin, condemning her murder four days late, said she had “minimal influence”. Yet Miss Politkovskaya was often threatened with death. Once Russian special forces held her captive and threatened to leave her dead body in a ditch. She talked them out of it. In 2001, she fled briefly to Austria after a particularly vivid death threat scared not her, but her editors at Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia's few remaining independent papers. In 2004, on her way to the siege of a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, where she hoped to mediate between the Chechen hostage-takers and the Russian army, she was poisoned and nearly died.

This time there was no mistake. She was shot in the body and the head. A pistol was left by her side—the blatant hallmark of a contract killing. She was well aware that the authorities might have her murdered, but in conversation she would brush this aside, saying that her sources were in much more danger than she was. Journalists had a duty to report on the subject that mattered, she said, just as singers had to sing and doctors had to heal.

Much of her life mirrored the changes in her country. She was born in New York, the child of Soviet diplomats. That gilded upbringing gave her access to a world of ideas and knowledge denied to most Soviet citizens. Her university dissertation was on Marina Tsvetaeva, a poet then in deep official disfavour. She had good jobs too, first on Izvestia, the government paper, then on Aeroflot's in-flight magazine.

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.

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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BBC News
Saturday, 7 October 2006
Chechen war reporter found dead
Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist known as a fierce critic of the Kremlin's actions in Chechnya, has been found dead in Moscow.

The 48-year-old mother of two was found shot dead in a lift at her apartment block in the capital.

A pistol and four bullets were found near her body and a murder investigation has been launched.

Ms Politkovskaya's murder has all the hallmarks of a contract killing, says the BBC's Emma Simpson in Moscow.

The award-winning journalist became ill with food poisoning on her way to report on the Beslan school siege in 2004, which some believed to be an attempt on her life.

'Brave defender'

Ms Politkovskaya, who worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was known for exposing rights abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya.

She also acted as a negotiator with the Chechen rebels who held a siege in a Moscow theatre in 2002.

The head of Russia's journalism union described her as the conscience of the country's journalism.

She was one of the few remaining high-profile, independent journalists in Russia - and her death will cause widespread anger and shock, says our Moscow correspondent.

"Russia has lost a brave and dedicated human rights defender," said Nicola Duckworth from the rights group Amnesty International.

Ms Politkovskaya "spoke out fearlessly against violence and injustice, and campaigned tirelessly to see justice done".

Amnesty International has called for a thorough investigation into the killing but Russian political analyst Anna Zelkina is doubtful there will be results.

"There is this series of politically motivated murders like hers," she told the BBC.

"I'm afraid that there will be less and less people who would be taking the risk to report... [she's] a very difficult person to replace."

'Honest journalism'

Ms Politkovskaya was killed at around 1630 local time (1330 GMT), Dmitry Muratov, editor in chief of the Novaya Gazeta said.
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RUSSIA'S CONTRACT KILLINGS
Sept 2006 - first deputy chairman of Russia's central bank Andrei Kozlov shot dead in Moscow
Oct 2005 - former bank head Alexander Slesarev gunned down near Moscow
July 2004 - US editor of Forbes' Russian edition Paul Klebnikov shot dead in Moscow
Oct 2002 - Magadan governor Valentin Tsvetkov killed in Moscow
Nov 1998 - liberal MP Galina Starovoitova killed in St Petersburg
March 1995 - leading journalist Vladislav Listyev shot dead in Moscow
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Vitaly Yaroshevsky, deputy editor of the newspaper, believes she was killed because of her work.

"The first thing that comes to mind is that Anna was killed for her professional activities. We don't see any other motive for this terrible crime," he told the Reuters news agency.

Moscow deputy prosecutor Vyacheslav Rosinsky has said investigators are considering the link between the journalist's death and her work.

"We think that one of the leads of Politkovskaya's intentional homicide is her public duty," he told Russian agency Itar-Tass.

Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said Ms Politkovskaya had frequently received threats.

"There are journalists who have this fate hanging over them. I always thought something would happen to Anya, first of all because of Chechnya," he told the Associated Press news agency.

"Whenever the question arose whether there is honest journalism in Russia, almost every time the first name that came to mind was Politkovskaya," he added.

In 2001, she fled to Vienna, Austria, after receiving e-mail threats claiming a Russian police officer she had accused of committing atrocities against civilians wanted to take his revenge.

In an interview two years ago with the BBC, Ms Politkovskaya said she believed it was her duty to continue reporting, despite receiving such death threats.

"I am absolutely sure that risk is [a] usual part of my job; job of [a] Russian journalist, and I cannot stop because it's my duty," she said.

"I think the duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer to sing. The duty of [the] journalist [is] to write what this journalist sees in the reality. It's only one duty."

"True heroics" in the cause of freedom (Montreal Suburban)

A fine editorial from the The Suburban (which describes itself as "Quebec's largest English-language weekly"). Some highlights:

The year 2007 doesn’t look too promising for Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. For those who have never heard of Choudhury, he is a Bangladeshi journalist arrested in 2003 on his way to a conference in Israel on the media’s role in education for peace. [....] Choudhury is about to stand trial on charges of sedition, treason and blasphemy, all of which according to Bangladeshi law, are punishable by death.

Choudhury is not alone in his plight. Every day journalists around the world risk their lives to uncover and report human rights abuses and political corruption. [....]

Sitting in the comfort of a free and democratic society, it’s hard for some people to understand why individuals such as Choudhury, [Hayar Ullah] Kahn, [Anna] Politkovskaya and dozens of others continue to risk their lives to probe, investigate, and publish articles aimed at exposing threatening regimes. Cynics would say some of these journalist are just glorified ambulance chasers, hoping to capture 15 minutes of fame by way of a prize for reporting. Others say they are foolhardy slobs with a death wish.

They are neither. They work alone, with no support, forging ahead to bring the truth into the open. The International Press Freedom Awards that recognizes courage in journalism is an important event that brings the plight of these journalist to light. But it’s not enough. They deserve encouragement and support because in dangerous situations, they champion everything we hold dear, and often take for granted.

--Jeff Weintraub
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The Suburban (Montreal)
January 3, 2007
Editorial — True heroics

The year 2007 doesn’t look too promising for Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. For those who have never heard of Choudhury, he is a Bangladeshi journalist arrested in 2003 on his way to a conference in Israel on the media’s role in education for peace. More specifically, Choudhury, who published his work in the Bangladesh Weekly Blitz, which he edits, has written about promoting dialogue between [Muslims and] Jews and Christians. For that crime, he has been beaten and interrogated. Two months later, with no evidence, he was charged with sedition and put in solitary confinement for 16 months in a Dhaka prison.

Choudhury was released on bail in April 2005, mostly because of pressure from the U.S. State Department and protest by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Journalistes sans frontieres. According to Mount Royal MP Irwin Cotler who acts on behalf of many political prisoners around the world, as of October 2006, Choudhury was attacked by a large crowd at his newspaper offices, he was called “an agent of the Jews” and was badly beaten. When he reported the attack to police, instead of being protected, he was arrested.

Choudhury is about to stand trial on charges of sedition, treason and blasphemy, all of which according to Bangladeshi law, are punishable by death.

Choudhury is not alone in his plight. Every day journalists around the world risk their lives to uncover and report human rights abuses and political corruption. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a U.S.-born Russian journalist, was known for her outspoken opposition to the Chechen conflict and the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The 48-year-old mother of two was shot dead Oct. 7, 2006 in an elevator located in the Moscow apartment building where she lived. Reports indicate it was a contract killing carried out by a professional.

Hayar Ullah Khan, a freelance tribal reporter and photographer covering the military action in Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, was abducted in October 2005, four days after releasing pictures from an attack on North Waziristan. His reports contradicted official accounts claiming that a senior Al-Qaeda commander, Abu Hamza Rabia, died after munitions exploded inside a house. Khan’s family say he was taken prisoner by the government. His bullet-ridden body was found last June. He leaves behind his wife, Mehrunnisa Khan, and four children.

Abeer Al-Askary is an Egyptian journalist who has published several investigative reports on state security officers within the Ministry of Interior who have supervised torture against activists and prisoners. Al-Askary was one of the victims of a May 25, 2005 assault that targeted activists and journalists covering demonstrations against the referendum on constitutional amendments in Egypt. Female journalists were not only physically assaulted, but also sexually harassed.

Shi Tao is serving a 10-year prison sentence for “leaking state secrets abroad.” Shi, a freelance journalist in Internet publications and an editor for Dangdai Shang Bao, a Chinese business newspaper, drew ire from Chinese authorities because he published essays on political reform on news websites outside China.

Sitting in the comfort of a free and democratic society, it’s hard for some people to understand why individuals such as Choudhury, Kahn, Politkovskaya and dozens of others continue to risk their lives to probe, investigate, and publish articles aimed at exposing threatening regimes. Cynics would say some of these journalist are just glorified ambulance chasers, hoping to capture 15 minutes of fame by way of a prize for reporting. Others say they are foolhardy slobs with a death wish.

They are neither. They work alone, with no support, forging ahead to bring the truth into the open. The International Press Freedom Awards that recognizes courage in journalism is an important event that brings the plight of these journalist to light. But it’s not enough. They deserve encouragement and support because in dangerous situations, they champion everything we hold dear, and often take for granted.

Remember Chechnya?

Back in March 2006 the on-line journal Democratiya carried an important appeal to End the Silence Over Chechnya. The signers, who included several Nobel Peace Prize winners, were Andre Glucksmann, former UN Human Rights Commissioner & Irish President Mary Robinson, former democratic activist and then Czech President Vaclav Havel, democracy-promoting philanthropist George Soros, Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan (the politically influential brother of the former King Hussein), Frederik Willem de Klerk, Yohei Sasakawa, Karel Schwarzenberg, and Desmond Tutu. They correctly argued that the "dreadful and endless war" in Chechnya, marked by enormous suffering and by horrifying brutality on all sides, has been all but ignored by the alleged international community and deserves some serious attention.

Well, I may have missed something, but so far I haven't heard any significant break in this international silence. Meanwhile, the relentlessly courageous Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who insisted on covering the never-ending catastrophe in Chechnya, has been disposed of by assassination. And then earlier this month the Kremlin appointed a notorious thug, Ramzan Kadyrov, as Chechnya's acting president.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday appointed Ramzan Kadyrov, a 30-year-old former rebel and son of a murdered Chechen leader, as acting president of Chechnya, a spokesman for Putin said.

Kadyrov, who was made Chechnya's prime minister last year, is head of a private militia force that human rights groups implicate in murder and kidnap but which he says provides security in the war weary region. (Washington Post - February 15, 2007)

In Chechnya itself, the carnage and atrocities grind on. So this statement issued last March remains all to timely, and it deserves re-reading.

--Jeff Weintraub

[P.S. It would be quite wrong to suggest that Russian troops and their local auxiliaries are the only ones who have been committing atrocities in Chechnya, and I would be unhappy if anyone thought I was implying that. Let me repeat some comments I made at the time of the Beslan massacre in September 2004, when over 300 civilian hostages, including 186 children, were murdered by Chechen terrorists:

To avoid any possible misunderstanding, I want to emphasize some further points as clearly and forcefully as I can. None of this criticism of the Beslan atrocity, and of the kind of terrorism it exemplifies, in any way justifies or excuses the fact that Russia has been fighting an incredibly brutal, destructive, and often appalling war in Chechnya, marked by extensive atrocities (on both sides!), massive civilian deaths, and pervasive violations of the laws of war, including murder, rape and kidnapping of civilians by Russian troops and security services. However, the opposite is also true. Nothing about the Russian war in Chechnya in any way justifies or excuses this kind of terrorist massacre, which ought to be unreservedly condemned whatever one thinks about the Chechen war.]

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End the Silence Over Chechnya

It is extremely difficult for an honest observer to break through the closed doors that separate Chechnya from the rest of the world. Indeed, no one even knows how many civilian casualties there have been in ten years of war.

According to estimates by non-governmental organizations, the figure is between 100,000 (that is, one civilian out of ten) and 300,000 (one out of four). How many voters participated in the November 2005 elections? Between 60 and 80%, according to Russian authorities; around 20%, reckon independent observers. The blackout imposed on Chechnya prevents any precise assessment of the devastating effects of a ruthless conflict.

But censorship cannot completely hide the horror. Under the world’s very eyes, a capital – Grozny, with 400,000 inhabitants – has been razed for the first time since Hitler’s 1944 punishment of Warsaw. Such inhumanity cannot plausibly be described as “anti-terrorism,” as Russian President Vladimir Putin insists. The Russian military leadership claims to be fighting against a party of 700 to 2,000 combatants. What would be said if the British government had bombed Belfast, or if the Spanish government bombed Bilbao, on the pretext of quelling the IRA or the ETA?

And yet the world remains silent in the face of the looting of Grozny and other Chechen towns and villages. Are Chechen women, children and all Chechen civilians less entitled to respect than the rest of mankind? Are they still considered human? Nothing can excuse the seeming indifference displayed by our worldwide silence.

In Chechnya, our basic morality is at stake. Must the world accept the rape of girls who were kidnapped by the occupying forces or their militias? Should we tolerate the murder of children and the abduction of boys to be tortured, broken, and sold back to their families, alive or dead? What about “filtration” camps, or “human firewood”? What about the villages exterminated to set an example? A few NGO’s and some brave Russian and Western reporters have witnessed countless crimes. So we cannot say “we did not know.”

Indeed, the fundamental principle of democracies and civilized states is at issue in Chechnya: civilians’ right to life, including the protection of innocents, widows, and orphans. International agreements and the United Nations Charter are as binding in Chechnya as anywhere else. The right of nations to self-determination does not imply the right of rulers to dispose of their people.

The fight against terrorism is also at stake. Who has not yet realized that the Russian army is actually behaving like a group of pyromaniac firefighters, fanning the fires of terrorism through its behavior? After ten years of a large-scale repression, the fire, far from going out, is spreading, crossing borders, setting Northern Caucasus ablaze and making combatants even more fierce.

How much longer can we ignore the fact that, in raising the bogeyman of “Chechen terrorism,” the Russian government is suppressing the liberties gained when the Soviet empire collapsed? The Chechen war both masks and motivates the reestablishment of a central power in Russia – bringing the media back under state control, passing laws against NGO’s, and reinforcing the “vertical line of power” – leaving no institutions and authorities able to challenge or limit the Kremlin. War, it seems, is hiding a return to autocracy.

Sadly, wars in Chechnya have been going on for 300 years. They were savage colonial conflicts under the Czar and almost genocidal under Stalin, who deported the whole Chechen population, a third of which perished during their transfer to the Gulag.

Because we reject colonial and exterminating ventures, because we love Russian culture and believe that Russia can bloom in a democratic future, and because we believe that terrorism – whether by stateless groups or state armies – should be condemned, we demand that the world’s blackout on the Chechen issue must end. We must help Russia’s authorities escape from the trap they set for themselves and into which they fell, putting not only Chechens and Russians, but the world at risk.

It would be tragic if, during the G8 summit scheduled for St. Petersburg, Russia, in June 2006, the Chechen issue were pushed to the side. This dreadful and endless war needs to be discussed openly if it is to end peacefully.

ANDRE GLUCKSMANN, VACLAV HAVEL, PRINCE HASSAN BIN TALAL, FREDERIK WILLEM DE KLERK, MARY ROBINSON, YOHEI SASAKAWA, KAREL SCHWARZENBERG, GEORGE SOROS AND DESMOND TUTU.