Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [193]
The Independent
Anna had more courage than most of us can begin to imagine, and her death is a reminder of the violent state she exposed so vividly in Putin’s Russia.
International, France
Anna Politkovskaya was the conscience of Russia. In a country which increasingly is being enslaved by fear, self-censorship and cynicism, this journalist succeeded in retaining her civic courage. At a time when most of the Russian media prefer to remain silent, Novaya gazeta became, thanks to her, one of the last bastions of free speech. The principled position which she maintained to the last raises her to the ranks of such Soviet dissidents as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov.
Libération, France
The impunity which the murderers of journalists enjoy, the protection which is extended to the tormentors of the Chechens, have as their aim to train the Russian people once again in the ways of silence and fear.
Anna Politkovskaya wanted to compel to think those people whose wish to know was greater than their fear. It is time to ask European politicians whose messages they are prepared to listen to: those of Vladimir Putin or of Anna Politkovskaya.
The New York Times
Her murder has made her a symbol of what Russia has become, but it was only the latest in a series of them. She was 48; the freedoms that she used to make her post-Soviet career, to write openly and critically about the deeds of a new Russian power, are much younger. And, it would seem, equally fragile …
Ms Politkovskaya’s funeral, in fact, displayed the deep divisions in today’s Russia between those in power and those not. The mourners included her family and friends, colleagues and politicians, though almost all from outside the center of power, and several foreign diplomats, including Ambassador William J. Burns of the United States, whose governments have denounced her killing far more forcefully than Mr Putin or any other senior government leaders here.
Le Nouvel Observateur
Her caustic position was something the Kremlin never liked, but she was one of the most respected journalists in the country, who moreover was given innumerable foreign awards.
Oleg Panfilov, Director of the Centre for Extreme Journalism: “Every time people asked if there was an honest journalist in Russia, the first name to come to mind was almost invariably that of Politkovskaya.”
The Observer
Politkovskaya, 48, was a constant critic of the Kremlin and her murder will throw suspicion on the security services and the pro-Moscow regime in Chechnya …
In an anthology Another Sky, due to be published next year by English PEN, a writers’ group campaigning against political oppression, Politkovskaya chillingly predicted yesterday’s events: “Some time ago Vladislav Surkov, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, explained that there were people who were enemies but whom you could talk sense into, and there were incorrigible enemies to whom you couldn’t and who simply needed to be “cleansed” from the political arena. So they are trying to cleanse it of me and others like me.”
On a visit to Chechnya she alleged that the former President of the Chechen Republic Akhmad Kadyrov vowed to assassinate her …
She remained defiant in the face of repeated threats but admitted she felt shaken by what she was convinced was a poisoning on a flight to cover the Beslan school hostage crisis in 2004 …
Toby Eady, her London literary agent, told The Observer he had recently tried to persuade Politkovskaya to leave Russia because of the threats. “She said she would not leave Russia until Putin was gone. She actually asked, with deeply dark humor, what would happen to her advance if she was killed.”
There seemed little doubt that the journalist was killed for her cutting reportage from Chechnya …
El Pais, Spain
Anna Politkovskaya, like all journalists criticising the Government in Russia (and there are very few of them left), was subjected to intimidation by all