Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [204]
The Union of Journalists of Russia
The dozens of assignments in the North Caucasus she survived, but now, in the entrance to her home, in the lift … A person of extraordinary courage and inflexible will, she was and remained to the end an example of the fact that in all circumstances a journalist can (and should, as she herself believed and demanded of her colleagues) write at the dictate solely of their conscience, with no nod to prevailing circumstances and no submission to them. She, just like her colleague Shchekochikhin, “was careless about the enemies she chose,” and the more powerful, shameful and vengeful those enemies proved, the more heedlessly and furiously she attacked them. She brooked no compromises in the struggle for what she considered the truth, and tried to demonstrate that truth to all who read or heard her. For this she was hated, threatened and hunted, on one occasion in the most literal sense of the word.
And today, when we must try to ensure that the killers and those who ordered the killing are found and punished, let us remember what Politkovskaya wrote about: Nord-Ost; Beslan; abductions and torture of people in Chechnya; violations of human rights; despotism and government crimes. Let us say straight out: there could have been no other reason why she was killed. That is why it is so important that the answer to the question of who did it should be obtained by society, to enable it to decide how to react.
Sergey Uralsky, Consultant in Jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and Retired Federal Judge
I express my profound condolences in connection with the murder of Anna Politkovskaya … We are losing so many people. The state authorities promise to detect, to track down, to bring to court, to give a proper assessment, but on their faces what we see is not real grief, only a mask. There are a lot of these masks. Now yet again no less a person than the Prosecutor-General of the Russian Federation has taken the investigation under his absolutely and completely personal control. What does “personal” mean in this context? Why “control” and not “supervision”? Why not individual, collective, corporate, or some other kind of nonsensical “control”? What help has it been in the past? What help is it going to be now? Why should Mr Yury Chaika feel the need to faff about, to control, to involve himself in the detail of conducting a murder inquiry? He does not need to “control” the investigation, but to find the killers. Some hope there is of that. It is really all just too much trouble for them.
Torture. They are no longer capable of doing anything without torture. How could they possibly conduct an investigation or bring a case to court without torture? And when the accused protest that they have been tortured – physically, with cold, and hunger and vile forms of degradation – they reply that this is just criminals slandering our agencies, trying, together with journalists, to discredit the system.
They could not believe that this frail woman would stand up and say torture in their torture chambers was unacceptable. They couldn’t conceive that there were still people in Russia who cared about that sort of thing! And so they killed her.
The Voice of Beslan Association
It is difficult, intolerable to have to say of her, she is dead. We grieve together with the whole world. The life of a writer has been cut off, a journalist at the very peak of her talent. Courageous, brave, Anna lived a special life without compromise, and for the people of the Caucasus there was still hope. Frail and seemingly defenceless, by the power of her limitless courage she was the hope of many living here, ordinary people who wanted to live in peace. She was a spokesman, from whom society learned about the monstrous misconduct of the state authorities towards their own citizens.
Anna was not only