You may not know who Anna Politkovskaya is ? If you have the time please read my notes - If politics and international affairs offend you - sorry ..
Anna Politkovskaya, the daughter of Soviet UN diplomats, was born in New York in 1958. She studied Journalism at Moscow University and worked for various newspapers such as "Izvestia" and after the fall of Communism for independent papers, among them "Obchtchaya Gazeta". Most recently she was a special correspondent for the small opposition paper "Novaya Gazeta".
Politkovskaya had been working for this newspaper since 1999, when Putin became Prime Minister and the so-called second Chechen war began: two closely-tied events which would trigger a disastrous chain of developments, as Politkovskaya demonstrated in her articles and books such as "A Small Corner of Hell" and "Putin's Russia". The North Caucasus mountain region of Chechnya proclaimed its independence from Russia in 1991, and finally obtained it through the peace treaty set up after the first war (during which the media could still report freely). From the Russian side, the independence of the secessionist Kazakhs was perceived as a defeat, if not as a bitter dishonor.
In 1999, when a Chechen commando led by the rivals of the then president Maskhadov fell in Dagestan, in Russian territory, the Russian rule of the North Caucasus seemed imperiled. Shortly afterwards two bloody bomb attacks were carried out in Moscow. The Chechens were immediately accused as the perpetrators – a suspicion which to this day has yet to be confirmed. Putin, then the head of the KGB's succeeding organization the FSB, reacted with an "Anti-Terror Operation": the start of the second Chechen war. As response to Russia's humiliation and with the pledge to bring back former greatness, Putin used the war for his own political advancement. In 2000 he was elected as President of the Russian Federation. Since then organizations such as Reporters Without Borders have observed a growing dissolution of free and independent media in Russia.
Economic networks with ties to the Kremlin exercising tremendous influence, bureaucratic obstructions and a general climate of menace have seen to it that Russia numbers 140 (from 167) on the "RWB ranking list of worldwide positions of freedom of the press". Now as before, no freedom of coverage from Chechnya is possible.
Ever since the attacks on New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 Putin has felt part of an international alliance. He associated himself with Bush's propagandized "War on Terror". That same year the war in Chechnya was declared officially over. "Putin's begun to try to prove on the world stage," claimed Anna Politkovskaya in an interview in The Guardian, "that he's just a part of a fashionable war. And he's been successful. When, after Beslan, he began to state that we were seeing virtually the hand of Bin Laden, it was appalling. What's Bin Laden got to do with it?"
With all her reporting Politkovskaya tried to show how the war was far from over, but rather how acts of violence and human rights violations continued unabated.
Politkovskay所有的报道都在试图去展示战争是如何那样的难以结束，而不是在展示暴力行为与人权侵害怎样的不减弱。
She focused above all on the civil population which was slowly being torn between the two warring parties, and described self-perpetuating cycles of violence. Her depictions shed light on the perverse mechanisms of war, exposing the terms on which they operate, while condemning the beneficiaries. She ends her final book with a critique directed towards both deceptive political groups and society: "They always say only 'Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda'. A cursed slogan. It is the easiest thing to say, the answer with which to brush aside every new bloody tragedy. It is also the most primitive, with which one can lull the consciousness of a society, one which dreams of being lulled." (from "Putin's Russia") Politkovskaya was awarded many foreign prizes for her work. In 2003 she received the first "Lettre Ulysses Award" for best reportage as well as the Hermann Kesten Medal. In 2004 she was given the Olaf Palme Prize, and one year later the Prize for Freedom and Future of the Press. In Russia she was awarded the Prize of the Journalists Union in 2001. In her native country, however, she also faced threats and intimidation. Yet she refused to have a bodyguard in the same way she refused to go into exile. In 2004 she was the victim of a poisoning attempt. On October 7, 2006 she was shot by an unknown gunman in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment block. The documents used for her last article have gone missing. Anna Politkovskaya left behind two children.
No justice
Feb 20th 2009From Economist.com
Russia is still no closer to finding those who murdered Anna Politkovskaya
AP
WHO killed Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s best and bravest campaigning journalist? Who organised it? Who were the shadowy figures seen on CCTV footage, tailing her in the days leading up to her murder? And who gave the order? By the time the sometimes-farcical trial of four men charged in connection with the killing ended in an acquittal on Thursday February 19th, few believed that the answer to any of these questions would emerge. The story of Ms Politkovskaya’s death in 2006 and the bungling, evasive behaviour of the Russian authorities in dealing with it was just the sort of topic suited for her own fiery pen.
The jury acquitted two brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, who were charged with acting as accomplices in the murder. A former police officer, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, was found not guilty of organising it. Pavel Ryaguzov, a former agent with the FSB, Russia’s domestic-security service, was acquitted of a related extortion charge. But that bare summary does not do justice to the baroque mixture of intrigue, incompetence and official secrecy that followed Ms Politkovskaya’s murder.
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The official reaction to the killing left many feeling outraged. Vladimir Putin, then the Russian president, issued condolences but described her as a “marginal” figure: that was true, but only in the sense that Russia’s slavishly pro-Kremlin mainstream media no longer gave her airtime. Abroad, she was the country’s best-known journalist, a prolific author and columnist. It took two years to mount even the most lackadaisical investigation of her murder. The case put by prosecutors was riddled with holes and inconsistencies. For reasons that remain unclear, the case was heard by a military court, where the judge tried to hold the trial in private, claiming that the jury was afraid of being seen on television. One brave juror phoned Russia’s main surviving independent radio station to say that this was a lie. The rest of the trial proceeded mostly in public.
Only a handful of the people that prosecutors believe were involved in the crime were put on trial. They include a rum, and now squabbling, mix of serving and retired law-enforcement officers and organised criminals. The evidence against those in the dock was largely circumstantial and packed full of inconsistencies. The man said by police to have been the assassin, Rustam Makhmudov (brother to the other Makhmudovs), was not found. The prosecution tiptoed round the clear evidence of FSB involvement—for example in supplying the alleged murderers with Ms Politkovskaya’s address and other details from official databases, or providing fake papers for the alleged assassin himself. That may have been the result of corrupt, freelance behaviour by rogue officers, or it may reflect sinister official backing for the murder. Neither hypothesis is comforting. The only glimmer of hope is that the jury refused to accept the shambolic official version of events at face value, and threw it out.
How much the events of the past months represent a cover-up, and how much is genuine confusion, is impossible to work out. It is abundantly clear that the FSB obstructed attempts to shed light on its own connection with the murder. The details of what happened on October 7th 2006 are reasonably clear: Ms Politkovskaya was shot in her apartment building, as she returned home, bringing shopping for her pregnant daughter. But the much bigger question is who ordered the killing. Among the suspects—all of whom vehemently deny involvement—are pro-Kremlin politicians in Chechnya, who were the subject of some of Ms Politkovskaya’s most damning reporting. The Kremlin line is that she was murdered by people trying to discredit the Russian authorities. Anyone following the trial might feel that they were doing a pretty good job of discrediting themselves.
Feb 20th 2009From Economist.com
Russia is still no closer to finding those who murdered Anna Politkovskaya
AP
WHO killed Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s best and bravest campaigning journalist? Who organised it? Who were the shadowy figures seen on CCTV footage, tailing her in the days leading up to her murder? And who gave the order? By the time the sometimes-farcical trial of four men charged in connection with the killing ended in an acquittal on Thursday February 19th, few believed that the answer to any of these questions would emerge. The story of Ms Politkovskaya’s death in 2006 and the bungling, evasive behaviour of the Russian authorities in dealing with it was just the sort of topic suited for her own fiery pen.
The jury acquitted two brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, who were charged with acting as accomplices in the murder. A former police officer, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, was found not guilty of organising it. Pavel Ryaguzov, a former agent with the FSB, Russia’s domestic-security service, was acquitted of a related extortion charge. But that bare summary does not do justice to the baroque mixture of intrigue, incompetence and official secrecy that followed Ms Politkovskaya’s murder.
document.write('');
The official reaction to the killing left many feeling outraged. Vladimir Putin, then the Russian president, issued condolences but described her as a “marginal” figure: that was true, but only in the sense that Russia’s slavishly pro-Kremlin mainstream media no longer gave her airtime. Abroad, she was the country’s best-known journalist, a prolific author and columnist. It took two years to mount even the most lackadaisical investigation of her murder. The case put by prosecutors was riddled with holes and inconsistencies. For reasons that remain unclear, the case was heard by a military court, where the judge tried to hold the trial in private, claiming that the jury was afraid of being seen on television. One brave juror phoned Russia’s main surviving independent radio station to say that this was a lie. The rest of the trial proceeded mostly in public.
Only a handful of the people that prosecutors believe were involved in the crime were put on trial. They include a rum, and now squabbling, mix of serving and retired law-enforcement officers and organised criminals. The evidence against those in the dock was largely circumstantial and packed full of inconsistencies. The man said by police to have been the assassin, Rustam Makhmudov (brother to the other Makhmudovs), was not found. The prosecution tiptoed round the clear evidence of FSB involvement—for example in supplying the alleged murderers with Ms Politkovskaya’s address and other details from official databases, or providing fake papers for the alleged assassin himself. That may have been the result of corrupt, freelance behaviour by rogue officers, or it may reflect sinister official backing for the murder. Neither hypothesis is comforting. The only glimmer of hope is that the jury refused to accept the shambolic official version of events at face value, and threw it out.
How much the events of the past months represent a cover-up, and how much is genuine confusion, is impossible to work out. It is abundantly clear that the FSB obstructed attempts to shed light on its own connection with the murder. The details of what happened on October 7th 2006 are reasonably clear: Ms Politkovskaya was shot in her apartment building, as she returned home, bringing shopping for her pregnant daughter. But the much bigger question is who ordered the killing. Among the suspects—all of whom vehemently deny involvement—are pro-Kremlin politicians in Chechnya, who were the subject of some of Ms Politkovskaya’s most damning reporting. The Kremlin line is that she was murdered by people trying to discredit the Russian authorities. Anyone following the trial might feel that they were doing a pretty good job of discrediting themselves.
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