Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [216]
One day they came to Anna to tell her about their son, what kind of boy he was, what he liked, what books he read, the kind of smile he had.
Anna wrote about all that. Later they came to see her again, to thank her. The only thing they had left of their son was Anna’s note in the newspaper, and now it hangs on their wall behind glass in a picture frame. “It’s important to have something to hold on to, even if it is only in newsprint,” his parents told her.
She did more than her duty.
Who Killed Anna and Why? Vyacheslav Izmailov, Military Correspondent for Novaya gazeta
Thousands of people have died in Chechnya in extra-judicial killings. Not in battle: many of those killed had no involvement at all with the resistance fighters.
The victims of Major Lapin and his accomplices from the Khanty-Mansiysk Combined Militia Unit, assigned to the October District Interior Affairs Office in Grozny, died under torture; the GRU agents in Captain Ulman’s gang shot and burned teachers from the Chechen village of Dai; Colonel Budanov, the Commanding Officer of 160 Tank Regiment, raped and murdered a 17-year-old Chechen girl.
The criminal charges brought against these scum in uniform were brought not as a result of facts revealed in Anna Politkovskaya’s publications, but mainly as a result of the publicity she gave them by writing about them in Novaya gazeta. I have no doubt that, given the chance, these Lapins, Budanovs and Ulmans, and also some of their supporters, might well have settled scores with Anna Politkovskaya. Only, however, if they had the opportunity, and I do not believe that such an opportunity presented itself. Nevertheless, these possibilities, even though they have been looked at to some extent by Novaya gazeta’s inquiry, should not be dismissed.
Anna wrote about torture, murder, and abductions in Chechnya. These monstrous deeds were perpetrated by representatives of all the security agencies: the Interior Ministry, the FSB, the Central Intelligence Directorate (GRU), and also the Kadyrovites, Baisarovites (Movladi Baisarov’s men were operationally under the command of the FSB), the Yamadayevites (Suleyman Yamadayev is the Commander of the East Special Operations Battalion of the Central Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence, the Kakievites (Said-Mahomed Kakiev is the Commander of the West Battalion), and resistance fighters.
Moreover, in order to divert suspicion from themselves, any of these organizations might employ the methods of their rivals and even enemies. All these kidnappers and murderers have so covered their tracks and so mimicked one another that sometimes they themselves could not tell who had abducted or murdered a particular person.
Sometimes, however, Anna’s revelations were completely exclusive and presented, moreover, in the form of brilliant journalism. They discredited newly proclaimed “Heroes of Russia,” and struck one living “Hero,” Ramzan Kadyrov, who was making good money through criminal business dealings out of the memory of that dead “Hero,” his deified dad, hitting him, as they say, not on the eyebrow but smack in the eye.
Until May 9, 2004 the Kadyrov family’s opportunities for self-enrichment were relatively limited. In those days Ramzan’s immediate entourage drove around not in Mercedes and Ferraris, as they do today, but in far more modest Zhiguli-99s and Zhiguli-10s.
After the death of Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, his son Ramzan found he had considerably greater scope. In the first place, he was immediately promoted to the position of First Deputy Prime Minister, in effect crushing the Prime Minister, Sergey Abramov. In the second place, he set up the Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov Foundation, an organization for the laundering and uninhibited exploitation of resources amounting to many