Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [154]
“But what about Norwegians?”
“No Norwegians have come either.”
“Død Tsjetsjenia.” Norway, Molde, Russia. I say goodbye to Sigrid Foss. Do you still think the world is vast? That if there is a conflagration in one place it does not have a bearing on another, and that you can sit it out in peace on your veranda admiring your absurd petunias?
Our greatest problem today is that this most basic and long-established truth has to be reiterated as if it had just come into existence. Neither that modest grave in Molde, nor the thousands of graves all over Chechnya, have acted as a wake-up call for Europe, which continues to slumber as if the war being fought within its bounds was not already in its twenty-third successive month; as if Chechnya were as far from Norway as it is from the Antarctic.
For all that, Chechnya is no less a part of the Old World than any of its other territories. Mr Kruse, a correspondent for Norwegian state television who has worked in Russia for many years, exclaimed in some surprise during our conversation to the effect that, “Oh, but Russia is a different part of Europe. You can’t apply the usual criteria. Even war criminals in Russia are not really war criminals. You can hardly blame the present fate of Miloŝevic on Russia’s leaders, given its great spiritual heritage and sheer geographical scale.”
Alas, this is an all too typical European attitude. Russia has today been categorised as a maverick territory where, with the tacit agreement of the heads of the European states, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and the OSCE all lumped together, it is apparently acceptable for citizens to live under laws quite different from those which apply to the rest of the European continent, laws which the rest of Europe couldn’t imagine living under in its worst nightmare.
That is why I gave Mr Kruse a hard time. I asked him why he thought it was all right for a Chechen woman to be killed for no reason, just because passing soldiers were in a bad mood, but not for the same fate to befall a Norwegian, or Swedish or Belgian woman. How was a French woman any different from a Chechen woman, or a Russian woman who happened to belong to a “great power”?
It isn’t all right, of course, but many people in Norway are taken aback by questions like that. It is obvious that Chechen women are no different, but that does not square with Europe’s self-contradictory desire not to fall out with Putin while retaining a semblance of civilised values.
All my conversations, meetings and interviews – in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, with reporters, at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, with the future Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, even in the Norwegian Human Rights Center (there really is such an office block in Oslo, where most of the human rights organizations operating in Norway are accommodated under one roof) – only served to further persuade me of something I already knew: Europe has no stomach for opposing the war in Chechnya. Europe is mired in double standards when it comes to human rights. One standard applies to most of Europe; it is distilled, splendid, civilised and tidy. For Russia, where democracy was born only a decade ago, there is another, naturally less distilled and pure. For the rebellious enclave of Chechnya, however, there is no standard at all, a void. Europe effectively condones the existence of a territory where atrocities go unpunished, and pretends that the war being waged there does not concern Europeans. There are few protests, no sanctions are imposed on Russian officials, and crimes that would never be tolerated in the rest of Europe – killings, extra-judicial persecution and executions