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Last Updated: Oct 15, 2008 - 12:08:05 PM |
On the afternoon of October 7, 2006, forty-eight-year-old Russian
journalist Anna Politkovskaya was at the Ramstor Shopping Center on
Frunze Embankment in Moscow. In addition to her usual groceries, she
was buying special food for her daughter, Vera, who was expecting her
first child. Anna and Vera had been talking with each other on their
cell phones throughout the day. The baby would be called Anna, after
her grandmother, but Politkovskaya would not live to see her.
As the shopping center's hidden video camera later revealed,
Politkovskaya was not alone. She was being followed by a man in jeans
and a white turtleneck and a light-haired woman in black. They were
part of a larger group of people who had been tailing her for several
days. At 3:30 PM, Politkovskaya called her son, Ilya, to tell him she
was on her way home. She never made it. At approximately 4 PM, she was
fatally shot in the stairwell of her apartment building on Lesnaya
Street. Her killer, disguising himself only with a baseball cap and
apparently unconcerned by the posted warning of a security camera
inside, knew the code needed to enter the building only moments before.
Like many contract murderers in Moscow, he left the weapon, an Izh
pistol with a silencer, at the scene of the crime.
As Eric Bergkraut's moving and forceful film, Letter to Anna: The Story
of Journalist Politkovskaya's Death, makes clear, Politkovskaya, a
fierce critic of the Kremlin and its policy toward Chechnya, had long
been aware that her life was in danger. Bergkraut, a prominent Swiss
filmmaker, had interviewed Politkovskaya numerous times while working
on Coca: The Dove from Chechnya, his 2005 documentary about the
conflict in Chechnya. Letter to Anna uses footage from those interviews
to great effect. When she first appears in the film, Anna stares into
the camera and says: "Why am I still alive? If I speak seriously about
this I would understand it as a miracle. It really is a miracle."
Politkovskaya was a correspondent for one of Russia's last independent
papers, the biweekly Novaya Gazeta, where she published over five
hundred articles, and the author of several books. An American citizen
by birth (her father was a Soviet diplomat at the UN), she had received
numerous awards and honors, including an OSCE prize for journalism and
democracy and an Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights
Journalism. But all this did not protect her in Russia. She had
survived one attempt to kill her and had received death threats.
Several other journalists who offended the Kremlin had lost their
lives. These included two colleagues from Anna's paper—Igor Domnikov,
who was brutally beaten by a hired thug and later died (the killer is
in prison, but his sponsor was never identified); and Yury
Shchekochikhin, who died in July 2003 of a sudden, mysterious illness,
apparently the result of poisoning.[1] Paul Klebnikov, editor of the
Russian edition of Forbes magazine, who wrote about corruption in
Russia and Chechnya—and published a list of the richest Russians, which
some of them deplored—was gunned down outside his Moscow office in July
2004. Journalists had not been the only victims. Just a month before
Politkovskaya was killed, Andrei Kozlov, first deputy chief of the
Russian Central Bank and a leading force in attempts to stop money
laundering, was murdered as he left a soccer match in Moscow.
Politkovskaya faced the possibility of death with her characteristic
stoicism: "They say that if you talk about a disaster you can cause it
to happen. That is why I never say aloud what I am most afraid of. Just
so it won't happen," she says in the film. She believed that she had a
mission to report on the "dirty war" in Chechnya that the Putin regime
had launched in the autumn of 1999. By the time of her death,
Politkovskaya had made at least fifty trips to Chechnya, a savage and
dangerous place that most other Russian journalists avoided. Her
subjects were the innocent victims of the war—ordinary civilians,
whether Russian or Chechen, whose lives had been ruined by the
conflict. She described maimed bodies, burned corpses, the destruction
of entire villages. She also wrote about hapless Russian soldiers,
conscripted into the army and sent off to Chechnya, where they were
often treated like slaves by their commanders. They witnessed cruelties
that went beyond the bounds of normal warfare and were themselves
treated cruelly by the Chechens when captured.
In early 2000, she wrote in Novaya Gazeta:
I thought that maybe I should not write about everything I see.
Maybe I should spare you all...so that you can continue to enjoy your
life thinking that the army and the new government are doing the right
thing in Northern Caucasus. Maybe. But I know for sure that when we
wake up it will be too late.
Although Politkovskaya was passionate in her conviction that the
Russians were committing a grave crime, one she even called genocide,
she never romanticized the Chechen rebels or apologized for their own
many acts of brutality. She chronicled the abuses committed on both
sides. As her former husband, Alexander Politkovsky, himself a famous
television journalist during the perestroika and early Yeltsin years,
explained in the film:
Her sense of justice was the focal point of her life. Lying was
forbidden. One must always tell the truth. This was the principle she
always lived by. And it was precisely what took her to Chechnya.
(Politkovskaya and her husband, who met and married when they were
young journalism students, separated in 2001.)
Politkovskaya campaigned relentlessly to bring to justice those
responsible for human rights violations in Chechnya. In an article
published by Novaya Gazeta in March 2000, she documented cases of rapes
and mass killings, including that of an entire Chechen family, by a
Russian military unit. The piece prompted Russian prosecutors to open
an investigation into alleged abuses by Russian soldiers. Although in
the end no one was prosecuted, the case later went to the European
Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which pronounced the Russian
government responsible for the crimes—a decision that the Kremlin
ignored.
In another dispatch, published in September 2001, Politkovskaya
described the alarming number of abductions of Chechen civilians by
Russian forces. Russian troops would conduct "cleansing" operations in
the villages and arrest Chechen men. Most of them would never be heard
of again. As Politkovskaya described it:
Imagine that a group of strangers in uniform bursts into your house
and takes away your loved one. And that is it, the end. First there was
a man. Now he doesn't exist. He is wiped out of life, like a
stick-figure from a school blackboard. You rage, you go mad. You beg
for a piece of information. The ones who are supposed to search advise
you to forget about it.... The most awful tragedy of current Chechnya
is people disappearing without a trace.
It was in this article that Politkovskaya reported on a case of torture
by an officer of the Russian Interior Ministry (MVD), whose victim
later disappeared. Before the officer was finally arrested and
sentenced to prison, he sent Politkovskaya death threats, forcing her
to flee temporarily to Vienna for her safety.
Politkovskaya's reporting on the conflict took its toll on her.
According to her friend the human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina,
"the more Anna got involved in Chechnya, the more her personality
changed."[2] In the documentary, the editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta,
Dmitry Muratov, observes that Anna became different after she began
going to Chechnya in 1999:
Not that she was any less beautiful. But...the naiveté and
cheerfulness disappeared.... She used to be full of laughter and good
humor. But the laughter diminished with every passing year.
In early 2001, Politkovskaya flew to Chechnya to investigate claims
made to her paper by Chechen families that their relatives were being
captured by Russian forces, tortured, and held for ransom in small
underground pits at a detention camp in southern Chechnya. When
Politkovskaya approached Russian officers at the camp, the FSB arrested
her and accused her of spying for Chechen separatists. She was held for
several days in a bunker. Her FSB captors interrogated her repeatedly,
threatened her with rape, and told her that they were going to shoot
her. Only when the press started to report on her disappearance was she
released. Politkovskaya said later, in an interview with Bergkraut,
that her ordeal was worth it because she had finally been able to
experience firsthand what Chechen prisoners went through.[3]
Politkovskaya was widely respected in Chechnya. So when Chechen rebels
took over nine hundred hostages at Moscow's Dubrovka Theater on October
23, 2002, they asked through Novaya Gazeta for Politkovskaya to serve
as a mediator. At the time, Politkovskaya was in California to accept
an award for her journalism. In her book A Small Corner of Hell, she
recalls that her son called her from Moscow to persuade her not to
return: "Please don't do this! We can't take it anymore!" But she flew
to Moscow immediately, entering the theater, with the reluctant
permission of Russian authorities, on the afternoon of October 25.
As Politkovskaya later wrote, her efforts to persuade the Chechen
terrorists to release more of the hostages (some women and children had
been let out earlier) were futile. The guerrillas were demanding an
immediate pull-out of Russian troops from Chechnya—which the Russian
government would never have agreed to—and nothing less. They assured
Politkovskaya that they were ready to die for their cause.
Politkovskaya succeeded only in getting juice and water to the hostages
before she left the scene. In the early hours of October 26, the
authorities pumped a highly potent opium-like substance (intended for
animal use only) into the theater, killing 125 hostages, along with
many of the terrorists. (The others were shot by FSB special forces.)
Politkovskaya pointed out in Novaya Gazeta that the deaths in the
theater left many questions unanswered. Why was there no effort to keep
at least some of the terrorists alive in order to ascertain who was
behind the plot and how it was organized? Why did the security police
not reveal the substance they pumped into the theater so that doctors
could better treat the victims? Why were there not adequate medical
emergency preparations?
As part of her own investigation, Politkovskaya discovered a Chechen
journalist named Khanpash Terkibaev, whose name had appeared on a list
of the terrorists at the theater that was published in a Moscow
newspaper some time after the attack. Politkovskaya managed to
interview Terkibaev, who was living in Moscow. He admitted to her that
he had entered the theater with the hostage-takers, and said that he
had managed to escape before the gas was pumped in. He claimed to have
special connections with the Kremlin and the FSB, which led
Politkovskaya to conclude that he was a provocateur and that the FSB
had known that a terrorist act was being planned. Terkibaev later
denied what he told Politkovskaya. He was killed in mysterious
circumstances in a car crash in Baku in December 2003.
An even more devastating act of terrorism took place in September 2004
in the North Ossetian town of Beslan. Just as children were returning
to classes, a group of between thirty and fifty masked terrorists armed
with guns and explosives entered the elementary school and took more
than a thousand hostages. The Kremlin responded by sending the same FSB
general—Vladimir Pronichev—who had mismanaged the crisis at Moscow's
Dubrovka Theater. Rather than pursuing negotiations with the
hostage-takers, Pronichev immediately made plans to storm the school.
Predictably, the attack, which took place on the third day of the
standoff, ended in disaster: 333 hostages—children, parents, and their
teachers—died. Instead of being fired, Pronichev was promoted to army
general, the highest military rank.
As with the Dubrovka siege, there were many strange circumstances
surrounding the Beslan crisis. No one could explain how such a large,
heavily armed group of terrorists managed to enter the town and get
into the school unnoticed, or why the authorities insisted that they
had killed all but one hostage-taker, who was captured, when
eyewitnesses saw several escape. Also disturbing was what happened to
Politkovskaya after she decided to fly to Beslan and intervene in the
crisis. She was trying to reach Chechen resistance leader and former
president of Chechnya Aslan Maskhadov—whom she had interviewed in the
past—and urge him to come to Beslan so that he could persuade the
hostage-takers to give up their siege.
But just minutes after she took off in a plane from Moscow, she was
offered a cup of tea. After drinking it, she fell ill, went into a
coma, and hovered between life and death in a hospital for several
days. (According to several sources, she never fully recovered her
health after this happened.) Politkovskaya assumed that she had been
poisoned by the FSB officers whom she had seen on the plane with her.
The FSB, it seemed, did not want her interfering in the Beslan crisis
especially given her efforts to enlist Maskhadov, whom the Kremlin had
denounced as a terrorist.
Not surprisingly, Politkovskaya's experiences hardened her attitude
toward the Kremlin. She believed Putin was manipulating the Chechen
problem to justify his campaign against terrorism and that he was using
that campaign to clamp down on democratic rights in Russia. In her book
Putin's Russia (published abroad in 2004 but not in Russia until after
her death, when it appeared on Novaya Gazeta's Web site), she wrote:
Why do I so dislike Putin? This is precisely why. I dislike him for
a matter-of-factness worse than felony, for his cynicism, for his
racism, for his lies, for the gas he used in the Nord-Ost [Dubrovka]
siege, for the massacre of the innocents which went on throughout his
first term as President.
Politkovskaya was a shrewd observer of Russian politics, chronicling
the death of parliamentary democracy as the Russian Duma increasingly
came under Kremlin control. She saw Putin's reelection in 2004 as a
farce because the Kremlin had managed, through its control of the media
and its introduction of undemocratic election laws, to render
opposition parties completely ineffective. In Putin's Russia she
compared Putin to Stalin and mocked the cult of personality he had
built around himself:
In a few hours Putin, a typical lieutenant-colonel of the Soviet
KGB...will ascend the throne of Russia once again. His outlook is the
narrow, provincial one his rank would suggest; he has the
unprepossessing personality of a lieutenant-colonel who never made it
to colonel, the manner of a Soviet secret policeman who habitually
snoops on his own colleagues.
Another target of Politkovskaya's journalism was Ramzan Kadyrov, the
violent and corrupt young Chechen whom Putin and the FSB installed in
the Chechen government—he eventually became president in early 2007
after reaching the requisite age of thirty—following the assassination
of his father, the Chechen president Akhmed Kadyrov, in 2004. In that
year pro-Moscow Chechen paramilitary forces began taking over the war
against Chechen separatists, while Russian forces provided logistical
support. As Politkovskaya reported, Kadyrov's militia, the so-called
kadyrovtsy, was (and still is) notoriously brutal against the
resistance, kidnapping, torturing, and killing innocent civilians by
the hundreds.[4]
When Politkovskaya interviewed the Chechen leader in June 2004, her
meeting with him ended badly. Her questions were too probing,
especially when she asked him about other Chechen warlords and
resistance fighters, who were his enemies. Surrounded by his
bodyguards, Kadyrov lost his temper, accusing her of being an enemy of
Chechens and threatening her: "I am not a criminal. I will hold you
here. I won't let you go." Politkovskaya was shaken: "I couldn't bear
it anymore. I stood up and walked away. My tears choked me. Of course I
expected a bullet in my back." She concluded from her meeting with
Kadyrov that "a little dragon has been raised by the Kremlin. Now they
need to feed it. Otherwise it will spit fire."
Just two days before her murder, Politkovskaya was interviewed on Radio
Liberty about her ongoing investigation of Kadyrov and the crimes
committed by his militia, which she had documented with videotapes and
photographs given to her by eyewitnesses. The date of the interview,
October 5, was also Kadyrov's thirtieth birthday. Politkovskaya told
Radio Liberty: "Personally, I only have one dream for Kadyrov's
birthday: I dream of him someday sitting in the dock, in a trial that
meets the strictest legal standards, with all of his crimes listed and
investigated." Politkovskaya was courting danger. Her editor was so
worried about her that he had even forbidden her to go to Chechnya. But
she had her own agenda.
Politkovskaya was killed on Vladimir Putin's birthday, October 7. The
President said nothing publicly about the killing until October 10,
when, just before leaving for a visit to Germany, he told the German
paper Süddeutsche Zeitung that his government would do everything to
bring her assassins to justice. But he insisted that Politkovskaya's
influence inside Russia was no more than "negligible" and that
"Politkovskaya's murder has caused much more damage to the current
authorities [in Moscow], and to the Chechen authorities in particular,
than her reporting did." Later that day he repeated the same views at a
press conference in Dresden with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Putin's apparent purpose in making these comments was to show that
neither the Kremlin, nor its puppet regime in Chechnya, had any motive
for killing Politkovskaya. Why would his government or the Chechen
leadership risk their reputations by murdering a journalist who was
insignificant? To deflect any speculation about Kremlin involvement,
Putin implied that the killer must have been an enemy of the government.
There was an official silence on the Politkovskaya investigation until
late August 2007, when Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, whose
office investigates most major crimes, held a press conference on the
murder. It was remarkable for its sheer audacity, if nothing else. In
the press conference, which is shown in Bergkraut's film, Chaika
announced that ten people had been arrested for taking part in the
murder and that they would soon be brought to trial. The actual
killers, he said, were Chechen thugs, members of a Moscow criminal
group that specialized in contract murders. But Chaika added that
"unfortunately," officers from the FSB and the regular police had
provided the killers with operational support, which included
surveillance of the victim, with two groups tailing her alternately. As
for who masterminded the crime, Chaika said, "The investigations have
revealed that only people from outside the Russian Federation [to which
Chechnya belongs] could have had any interest in eliminating
Politkovskaya." The murder was useful, he said, to people who were "out
to destabilize the situation in Russia...those who are trying to stir
up a crisis and want, not only to return to the old system, where money
and oligarchs ruled, but also who want to discredit Russian leaders."
Although Chaika did not make a direct accusation, he was clearly
referring to Putin's archenemy, Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian
tycoon and former oligarch now living in London. Kremlin sources had
already hinted strongly that Berezovsky was behind the fatal radiation
poisoning of London-based exile and former KGB officer Alexander
Litvinenko, which had occurred a month after the Politkovskaya murder.
By the time of Chaika's announcement—over ten months after the
murder—the investigation of the Politkovskaya killing was falling
apart. The names of the suspects had already been leaked to the press,
thus hampering efforts to successfully prosecute them. More
importantly, Chaika himself was no longer in charge of the case; it had
been handed over to a new "investigative committee," which was part of
the prosecutor's office, but not under Chaika's jurisdiction. The
committee had been formed as the result of a bitter feud between
Putin's two main security chiefs, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev and
Viktor Cherkesov, the head of the Drug Control Agency.
Both men were Putin loyalists from the St. Petersurg KGB, but
competition for power and Kremlin riches, as well as the uncertainty
over what would happen when Putin stepped down as president, fueled a
conflict involving these and other powerful Putin deputies. Putin
reportedly had long been trying to balance the powers of the two
security chiefs, to prevent either from prevailing, but the conflict
became more intense. The feud emerged publicly just around the time of
Politkovskaya's murder in the fall of 2006, when, with Chaika's
approval, a group of Patrushev's FSB officers were arrested on
corruption charges by agents from Cherkesov's Drug Control Agency. In
retaliation, Patrushev and his Kremlin allies managed later to undercut
the Cherkesov–Chaika group by establishing the investigative committee,
with their handpicked candidate, a prosecutor named Aleksander
Bastrykin, as its head.
With the support of the Patrushev group, Bastrykin's investigative
committee wrested control of the Politkovskaya case (along with the
Klebnikov, Kozlov, and Litvinenko cases) from Prosecutor General
Chaika. In early September 2007, Chaika's main investigator on the
Politkovskaya case was demoted, and several new investigators were
brought in. Nine months later, in June 2008, a representative from the
investigative committee announced that the case was ready to go to
court. But after numerous arrests and reports that a large group of
criminals were involved in various aspects of the murder, the
government ended up with only four men still in custody. Three were
charged as accomplices to the killing: a former MVD officer and two
brothers of Chechen nationality. The fourth detainee, FSB Lieutenant
Colonel Pavel Ryaguzov, was being held on lesser charges—abuse of
office and extortion in connection with the case. A brother of the two
Chechens in custody, Rustam Makhmudov, said to have been the one who
shot Politkovskaya, was still at large. In early July, Bastrykin
announced that the killer was somewhere in Western Europe but gave no
explanation about how he had managed to escape Russia.
As for who gave the order to have Politkovskaya killed—the most
important question—the investigative committee offered no answers,
leaving others to speculate. Ramzan Kadyrov, the ruthless warlord of
Chechnya—shown in Berkgraut's film celebrating his birthday last year
with elaborate fanfare like a mini-Stalin—might seem an obvious
suspect. In an apparent effort to end speculation about his involvement
in the murder, Kadyrov boasted that "if she [Politkovskaya] had
bothered us, we would have done it long ago." But because he rules
under the command of the Kremlin, he would never have dared to embark
on such a bold venture on his own, either in Chechnya or Moscow. As a
Chechen who now lives in exile told me, Kadyrov is authorized to kill
only his own people. It is unlikely that Moscow would have given
Kadyrov approval to murder Politkovskaya, or to have enlisted his
assistance in the crime, because Putin and his colleagues view him as
reckless and untrustworthy. (That doesn't exclude the possibility that
some of Kadyrov's henchmen were involved, however.[5])
Russian exiles in the West, including Berezovsky, insist that President
Putin was the mastermind. Putin certainly had reason to want
Politkovskaya silenced. She was his most persistent and outspoken
critic, even insulting him personally in her writings, which she must
have known would arouse his anger. Despite Putin's claim that
Politkovskaya had little influence on political life in Russia, we can
be sure that what she wrote, even in the English-language press, caused
a huge stir in the Kremlin.[6] But even if Putin wanted Politkovskaya
killed, it is unlikely that he, as president of Russia, would have
given direct orders for the murder. He would probably have left the
initiative to the FSB, only to find out about it afterward.
Dmitry Medvedev's assumption of the Russian presidency in May of this
year has done nothing to change the atmosphere of violence and
lawlessness that prevails in Russia, especially since Putin, as prime
minister, is still in charge. Putin's close friend Patrushev—who was
head of the FSB during many of the mysterious recent killings—has
stepped down. But his replacement, Alexander Bortnikov, worked for many
years with both Patrushev and Putin in the KGB and is closely allied to
them. The security services, for all their internal rivalries and
corruption, are deeply entrenched at all levels of the government and
make up what amounts to a new ruling class.
Under these conditions, Russian journalists have been under more
pressure than ever to follow the official line. Since the beginning of
September, two journalists who have reported critically on government
actions in the Caucasus have been murdered. In the North Caucasus
republic of Ingushetia, Magomed Yevloyev, who owned an influential
opposition Web site that was strongly critical of Ingushetia's
Kremlin-backed governor, was shot in the head after being arrested by
the police; in Dagestan, Telman Alishayev, a television reporter, was
killed by unidentified gunmen. And a third journalist was left with a
fractured skull after an assault outside his home in the city of
Nalchik, also in the North Caucasus.
Elena Tregubova, a former correspondent for the Moscow paper Kommersant
who has written a book about her investigative reporting on the
Kremlin, was forced to seek asylum in Britain because of death threats
against her. In Bergkraut's film she observes: "To be honest, when
things are like this, none of us can blame [journalists] for either
lying or keeping quiet." But Politkovskaya's former colleagues at
Novaya Gazeta refuse to be intimidated. As Letter to Anna recounts,
just after her death, the editor, Dmitry Muratov, decided to shut down
the paper, saying "no newspaper was worth such sacrifices." He was
overruled by his staff, which has continued ever since to pursue the
courageous reporting for which it has become known.
With the help of Politkovskaya's son, Ilya Politkovsky, Novaya Gazeta's
staff has been conducting its own investigation into her murder.[7]
Politkovsky, who has been given access to the forty-eight volumes of
court documents in the case, told me that the trial, which could begin
quite soon, will likely be held behind closed doors in a military
court, with the family present but prohibited from speaking about the
proceedings publicly. This constraint will make it even more difficult
for Novaya Gazeta's journalists to uncover the truth about the killing.
Nonetheless, Anna would have wanted them to try.
Notes
[1]At the time of his death, Shchekochikhin was investigating
allegations that the FSB (successor to the KGB) was behind the 1999
apartment bombings in Russia, in which more than three hundred people
were killed. Blamed on Chechens, the bombings served as a pretext for
the Kremlin to invade Chechnya.
[2]As quoted in a film entitled Anna: sem' let na linii fronta (Anna:
Seven Years on the Front Line), directed by Masha Novikova, 2008. The
film, in Russian with English subtitles, received an award from Amnesty
International.
[3]Politkovskaya recounted this experience in "How the Heroes of Russia
Turned into the Tormentors of Chechnya," an article that appeared in
English in The Guardian, February 27, 2001.
[4]A recent example of such brutality is the campaign (reportedly
condoned by Kadyrov) to stamp out Chechen resistance by burning the
homes of families of rebels. See C.J. Chivers, "To Smother Rebels,
Arson Campaign in Chechnya," The New York Times, September 28, 2008.
[5]There has been speculation in the Russian press that Kadyrov's men
were behind the murder in Moscow on September 24, 2008, of former Duma
deputy Russian Yamadaev, a wealthy Chechen who is said to have been an
enemy of Kadyrov. Yamadaev was shot to death in his Mercedes as it
stopped for a red light on a major Moscow street.
[6]Putin implied that Politkovskaya was not well known in Russia. But,
according to a poll conducted by Moscow's Levada Center two weeks after
the murder, almost half of the respondents knew who Politkovskaya was
before she was killed and over a third said they had either read
Politkovskaya's articles or heard her speak on radio and television
(www.levada.ru/press/2006101901 .html).
[7]Dmitry Muratov and the staff at Novaya Gazeta were unhappy with the
results of the official investigation. In Muratov's words: "You cannot
say the case is closed when the zakazchik [the person who ordered the
murder] is unknown and the killer has not been caught."
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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