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10. After October 7

EXTRACTS FROM THE FOREIGN PRESS

ABC, Spain

There is only one way to dispel suspicions that her murder was planned: to establish the circumstances of the crime, to arrest those responsible, and make them answer in court for it. If Russian society does not demand the maximum penalty for those who were involved intellectually and materially in this crime, it can only be said that Russia is in serious danger.

Having murdered Anna Politkovskaya, they have not only deprived a woman of her life, but have sent a message to the whole country, threatening anybody who is thinking of doing what she did. Politkovskaya has paid with her life, but Russian society will pay with its freedom if it does not now manage to react courageously.

The Chicago Tribune

More than any other Russian reporter, she illuminated the plight of Chechen civilians driven from their homes, tortured and at times summarily executed by Russian troops and pro-Moscow Chechen forces.

Along the way, she received threats from all sides of the conflict – Chechen fighters as well as Russian troops. She fled to Vienna in 2001 after receiving threats from a Russian officer angered when she wrote about his involvement in war crimes.

In 2004, while she was on a flight to Beslan to cover the school hostage crisis there, she became seriously ill after drinking tea on the plane. She and many colleagues believed she was deliberately poisoned.

Igor Yakovenko, General Secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, called the slaying “a kind of new and very black page in Russian history.” “For the first time in several years, Russian journalism has been hit in its very heart,” he told Interfax. “A tragedy has happened in our profession that is impossible to make up for because there is and will be nothing like Anna Politkovskaya.”

El Correo, Spain

Russian institutions should make investigation of the unjustified murder of Anna Politkovskaya an absolute priority if they want to demonstrate to the international community, which demands elucidation of the circumstances of the crime, that Russian justice is capable of rising to the level of the democracy which they claim to defend. It needs to be established who shot this defender of human rights and an independent press and why, at the entrance to her home, when she had warned of threats to her life and was preparing to publish an article about torture in Chechnya.

Le Figaro

Anna Politkovskaya has been murdered. Does this mean that the famous journalist, whose pessimism many of our experts considered exaggerated, bearing in mind the tempo of Russia’s economic growth, was right? It would seem that very important strategic partner, Vladimir Putin, has not succeeded in returning this “great country” to a normal life. Yet again we find that we have taken what we would like to believe for reality.

The Guardian

The fear now is that Russia’s already fragile independent press could crumble without its talisman …

For years Politkovskaya, a mother of two, was a hero to the liberal opposition …

But her main enemy was Putin, the man who gained political capital on the back of the Russian Army’s second bloody charge into Grozny in late 1999, and the man she said she hated “for his cynicism, for his racism, his lies, for the massacre of the innocents that went on throughout his first term as President” …

Yesterday brought an apparent paradox: while Politkovskaya’s death served a bleak warning to the independent press that the price of dissent is death, newspapers were their angriest for many months. Predictably, opposition dailies such as Kommersant and Novaya gazeta were filled with fury about the murder. But the pro-Kremlin press was also in high dudgeon. Rossiyskaya gazeta, the official newspaper of the Russian government, praised Politkovskaya for “standing against war, corruption, demagoguery and social inequality.” Even the usually loyal mass-market tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda was happy to publish a conspiracy theory suggesting