Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [162]
So why is Europe so inactive in Chechnya? The number of humanitarian organizations working in the zone is nothing like what there was, for example, in the Balkans.
The world context is that Europe sees Muslims as terrorists. There are friendly nations and enemy nations. All that matters is the global “war on terror,” an idiotic concept, but in that context no practical politician can do anything at the moment: only cover his ears and wait.
It is strange to hear you say that. After all, in a past, far worse time you did not by any means sit around covering your ears, waiting for something to happen.
I’m not talking about myself but about the world. I am not covering my ears. In Europe I am currently in conflict with the Establishment. I am one of those who oppose the European Union, and I am trying to organise a large coalition to put an end to it. From my viewpoint, the European Union is little different from the Soviet Union; they don’t yet have a Gulag but there are already signs of one. The first arrests for political jokes have been made. For example, in Britain one well-known television presenter joked at a country fête that he would like to have the same civil rights as a pregnant, one-legged Negro woman with a drugs problem. Political correctness here has reached absurd heights; he was arrested. At least Parliament threw out a law on hate speech because comedians rebelled and said that if they couldn’t make jokes they would be out of a job. But the European Union plans to have this law adopted throughout Europe! We are entering a totalitarian period. Many of my old friends are laughing now and say I’ve been settled for too long and am getting fretful, that I’ve decided to take up the cudgels again. Believe me, I have no wish to do that at all. I am an old man, I would like to live out my life with my cat, in my garden. I have done everything I wanted to do, but you can’t live the way we are asked to live.
How, in your view, should a decent person live in today’s Russia?
It is impossible for a decent person to live in Russia today. All the decent people are doing everything they can to get out as soon as possible. Those who remain do so because they can’t leave. But there are still a few people capable of protesting: Andrey Derevyankin is in prison and has been forgotten, but this man went to the military base in his native town of Engels in Saratov Province and held up a placard reading “End the War in Chechnya!” For this he was given several years in jail. I understand where he is coming from. I also recognised when I was living in Russia that, under a dishonorable regime, my place was in prison. So when I was arrested I was happy.
BEREZOVSKY
January 20, 2003
Boris Berezovsky is the other magnetic pole, along with Bukovsky, of the new Russian political émigré community in Britain. Here he is straightforward, friends with everyone. Back in Russia, his reputation remains that of a demonic genius. Not here. What Boris most resembles here, in his cream jacket, is a perky sparrow with light-colored plumage.
It is easy to insult an oligarch in exile but far less easy to understand one. Consider what he was in the past. The man who manipulated Yeltsin, the Mr Fix-it of Chechnya, the man who made a fortune out of oil, Zhiguli cars, and Aeroflot. And then it was the turn of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Berezovsky’s most ambitious project. It was Berezovsky who backed Putin as the future of Russia, and so far he has lost hands down, which, admittedly, takes some of the sheen off his image as a demonic genius. It also makes him seem more human, what with the creature of his “Second President of Russia” project sitting comfortably in the Kremlin while Berezovsky is banished to the Lanesborough Hotel. Of course, this is a high-end hotel, in a top-of-the-range city, with Hyde