Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [125]
At Vnukovo, flights to Vladikavkaz had been cancelled. Those to nearby towns had also been cancelled. Three times Politkovskaya checked in and three times she was unable to fly. The newspaper ordered her to go to Rostov, and from there to travel onwards by car. The Karat airline allowed her to board.
Politkovskaya had had no time to eat all day. In the plane – and she is an experienced person – she refused food, having taken an oat biscuit with her. She felt fine and asked only for tea from the stewardess. Ten minutes after drinking it, she lost consciousness, having just had time to summon the stewardess back.
Thereafter she remembers only fragments. Valiant efforts were made by the doctors at the Rostov Airport Medical Center to get her out of a coma. They succeeded. The work of the doctors from the Fifth Infectious Diseases Department of Rostov City Hospital No. 1 was irreproachable. In underfunded conditions they revived her by all the means at their disposal, even surrounding her with plastic bottles full of hot water, administering a drip feed, giving injections. By morning she had recovered consciousness.
Grigoriy Yavlinsky, our colleagues from Izvestiya, and friends in the Army made every effort to help the medics in what, in the doctors’ opinion, was an almost hopeless task. Many thanks to them.
On the evening of September 3, with the assistance of other friends (thank you, bankers!), Anna was transferred by private plane to one of the Moscow clinics. The Rostov laboratory analysis has not yet been completed. For some incomprehensible reason the first analyses, taken at the airport, were destroyed. The Moscow doctors said openly that they could not yet identify the toxin, but that a poison had entered her body.
Until these circumstances have been clarified, we do not want to engage in conspiracy theories. However, both the situation with Andrey Babitsky, a journalist with Radio Liberty, removed from a flight to the North Caucasus at Vnukovo Airport on suspicion of having explosives in his baggage (!) – needless to say, they found nothing – and the incident with Politkovskaya oblige us to think that attempts were being made to keep a number of authoritative journalists respected in Chechnya from reporting on the tragedy in Beslan.
Politkovskaya is now at home under medical supervision. Her kidneys, liver and endocrinal system have been seriously affected by an unidentified toxin. It is not known how long she will need to convalesce.
Why on earth don’t those officials so exercised by Politkovskaya’s activity just get on with doing their jobs? Averting terrorist acts, for example.
THE HUTS NEED PEACE, THE PALACES NEED WAR
September 13, 2004
The first three days of September 2004 have demonstrated once again that the moral and intellectual level of the Kremlin’s current occupants gives no grounds to hope there will never be another Beslan. The days since the tragedy have demonstrated, moreover, that they have no intention of learning any lessons from the school massacre. They persist with their lies and evasions, and insist that black is white. This leaves our children and grandchildren in danger.
Our state authorities operate out of sight and, during times of national tragedy, they hide. We need people who at the very least will not hide themselves away. The crucial question in the light of recent events is, how have the state authorities responded to the Beslan tragedy? What have they done to improve their citizens’ security?
There has been only one visible response: an administrative “anti-terrorist” reorganization in the South of Russia. In each region a senior “anti-terrorist” officer has been appointed from the ranks of the Interior Ministry’s troops. They rank as second in command to those with overall responsibility for the region. In the current bureaucratic structure, which existed before Beslan, each region has an Anti-Terrorist Commission headed by Presidents Zyazikov, Alkhanov, Dzasokhov, Kokoyev, et al., and they bear full responsibility for terrorist acts