Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [124]
In view of this, I will have to persist with my reminders to Mr Kalchuk. Firstly, negotiations needed to be conducted during the siege, which I did. Secondly, the person I chose to help me was indeed my son, Ilya Politkovsky, and help me he did, courageously, conscientiously and openly trying to save, among others, the life of his close friend, Ilya Lysak, a musician in the Nord-Ost orchestra. Lysak was inside the occupied auditorium and used his personal connection with my family in order – equally courageously and heedless of the possible consequences – to facilitate negotiations. It was he, who today is still extremely ill, who handed his mobile telephone to the terrorists, and they used it to talk to me and my son, to agree the exact time I would enter the occupied building. They also used it to talk to Sergey Yastrzhembsky, the President’s Aide.
I am sure the overwhelming majority of people would have done the same in the circumstances. Apparently the individual entrusted with leading the inquiry into the Nord-Ost tragedy would not.
* Date of posting on the Novaya gazeta website.
* A Tsarist police spy who organised deadly terrorist acts, even assassinating the Tsar’s uncle to entrap his colleagues in the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
Anna, starting out
Raisa and Stepan Mazepa with daughters Anna and Elena, New York, 1962
At Moscow School No. 33, 1971
The three schoolfriends: Masha, Anna, and Elena
Anna graduates from secondary school, 1975
Marriage, April 1978
A family: Alexander, Ilya, Anna and Vera, summer 1980
The children. Anna’s favourite photograph
At a party with her husband Alexander, early 1990s
With Alexander and Martyn the Doberman, late 1990s
With her sister Elena, London, 2002
On the flight to Tura, where a small delegation from Novaya gazeta unveiled a monument at the geographical centre of Russia, December 2000
Vnukovo Airport, Moscow, February 2001, returning after her detention by Russian troops
The Nord-Ost siege. Anna and others take water and juice to the hostages, Moscow, 25 October 2002
Presentation of the Global Award for Human Rights Journalism by Amnesty International, London, July 2001
Olof Palme Prize ‘For Courage and Composure While Working in Difficult and Dangerous Conditions’, Stockholm, January 2005
The last image of Anna Politkovskaya, captured by a supermarket CCTV camera, 7 October 2006
March 2002
5. Beslan
One of the most appalling atrocities in the course of the Second Chechen War was the taking hostage in Beslan, North Ossetia, on September 1, 2004 of up to 1,200 people, including 770 children, on the first day of the school year. Russian government troops stormed the school on September 3: 331 hostages died, including 186 children. Here too it seemed that the regime’s primary concern was to manipulate the situation for its own political advantage. A Russian Diary contains more of Anna Politkovskaya’s writing on this tragedy.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO POLITKOVSKAYA?
September 6, 2004
By Dmitriy Muratov and Sergey Sokolov (Novaya gazeta’s special correspondents in Rostov-on-Don and Moscow)
As the Beslan tragedy has unfolded, hundreds of our journalist colleagues, state officials and readers have been asking what has happened to Novaya gazeta’s columnist, Anna Politkovskaya. They believe that her presence in Beslan might have been of value, but Politkovskaya never reached Beslan.
On the evening of September 1, Politkovskaya was sent in Novaya gazeta’s car to Vnukovo Airport. Before that she had contacted a number of Russian politicians and Maskhadov’s representative in London, Akhmed Zakayev. The basis of her proposals was that everybody who could get in touch with the terrorists should do so promptly, without considering the consequences, in order to save the children. “Let Maskhadov go and reach agreement with them,” she urged. Zakayev reported that Maskhadov was prepared to do that