My following article appears in today’s Crikey newsletter:
The recent murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya has triggered, albeit briefly, an unprecedented interest in life under Vladimir Putin.
The Sydney Morning Herald has provided particularly decent coverage of Politkovskaya’s death, but perhaps unsurprisingly failed to continue interest beyond the requisite few days. There is much of this story that remains untold here.
The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum reminded us that despite not being “charismatic” – though I disagree with this assessment, as Politkovskaya was highly engaging during our time together in Sydney earlier in the year – “she was proof… that there is nothing quite so powerful as the written word.”
The Russian author was murdered just days before her newspaper was to run an expose into Russian-controlled Chechnya. Its leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, is alleged to be torturing an entire generation of young Chechens, causing unprecedented levels of abuse, killing and intimidation. Her final unfinished article paints a grim picture of Putin’s war against terrorism:
Dozens of files cross my desk every day. They are copies of criminal cases against people jailed for “terrorism” or refer to people who are still being investigated. Why have I put the word “terrorism” in quotation marks here?
Because the overwhelming majority of these people have been “fitted up” as terrorists by the authorities. In 2006 the practice of “fitting up” people as terrorists has supplanted any genuine anti-terrorist struggle. And it has allowed people who are revenge-minded to have their revenge – on so-called potential terrorists.
The latest reports suggest that Politkovskaya obtained video evidence that allegedly showed Kadyrov kidnapping two civilians. Was this the reason behind her murder?
Putin’s response to her death was muted, although the Russian public are still enraged. Putin expressed regret, but claimed she had “minimal influence on Russian political life” and her assassination had caused more grief to Russia than her journalism. It was a typically cynical statement. This response caused a leading Russian human rights campaigner this week to resign his post as a Kremlin advisor.
The most moving discovery since Politkovskaya’s death has been the publication of an essay for an English PEN compilation, due in 2007, and written in August. “I am a pariah”, she begins. She accurately predicts that her life is likely to be extinguished because the Russian establishment hates her vehemently. Until the end, she remained resolute in the face of such threats:
So what is the crime that has earned me this label of not being “one of us”? I have merely reported what I have witnessed, no more than that… I am not an investigating magistrate but somebody who describes the life around us for those who cannot see it for themselves, because what is shown on television and written about in the overwhelming majority of newspapers is emasculated and doused with ideology. People know very little about life in other parts of their own country, and sometimes even in their own region.
I was very moved reading several examples of Anna P’s writing on Chechnya in John Pilger’s Tell Me No Lies. A picture emerged of a highly motivated journalist, possibly even an obsessive one, unflinching in her portrayal of topics that were unpopular with the government in Russia. Importantly, she wrote revealingly about Russia’s murderous campaign in Chechnya, its heartbreaking impact on ordinary people, the stories that we never really heard here. Whilst the siege of the Moscow theatre and of the school in Beslan were big news here, we didn’t get the background, the Russian atrocities that drove these ordinary Chechnyans to such horrible and desperate acts. Instead it was presented as just another mad, murderous terrorist act without any sort of justification. Maybe they just “don’t know how good we are” to quote Bush? Like Israel in Palestine, Russia seamlessly dovetailed their murder, torture and repression in Chechnya into the broader bogus War on Terror, with the willing connivance of Bush, Blair, and co. This War on Terror thing, it’s whatever you want to be, whatever atrocities you want to commit, as long as you’re on the right side.
In the end there was a horrible inevitability to Anna P’s death, may it not be completely in vain.
I was told quite a long time ago, that no media are permitted any access when Russians were fighting Chechnyans. Media are kept well away. I assumed that Australians were aware of this, but no write-ups condemning this in the various media, that I am aware about, occurred. I am more surprised at the Austraiian public’s shock at what happened, than surprised at the murder of Anna Politkovskaya herself. But we tend to be a parochial lot don’t we. If we are not involved in some way, it doesn’t really exist.