Turning a Blind Eye to Murder
By Jameson Berkow
While many Russians see Oct. 2 as
a day of celebration, to others it
has become a day of bitter
remembrance. On that day in 2006, Anna
Politkovskaya, a veteran reporter with the
Novaya Gazeta newspaper and one of
Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critics, was shot to
death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment
building. It was an unexpected gift for
Putin, who turned 54 that same day, though
likely not at all unwelcome.
Politkovskaya’s work often compared
Putin’s handling of the situation in
Chechnya to that of Stalin’s Great Purges in
the late 1930s; she regularly published
graphic first-hand accounts of torture and
abuse of innocent Chechens at the hands of
Russian soldiers. More than 20 criminal
convictions have been handed down as a
result of her investigations, and fellow journalists
have since described her as “the
conscience of the nation.”
Following her murder, Russia’s prosecutor-
general, Yuri Chaika, took on the investigation
personally. Despite his “best efforts,”
those who masterminded Politkovskaya’s
death have never been found. (Though three
men have been charged in connection with
the murder, the triggerman and those who
initiated the murder remain at large.) That’s
not unusal in Russia: those responsible for
orchestrating the murders of other journalists
in Russia since 1998 have never been
brought to justice.
Even those who attempt to bring these
murderers to justice must risk their own
lives in the process. Karinna Moskalenko,
famous for her courtroom victories against
the Russian state over human rights issues
and one of the lawyers representing the
Politkovskaya family, was stricken with mercury
poisoning just days before the
Politkovskaya murder proceedings were set
to begin this past October. Ironically,
Politkovskaya herself survived a similar
attempted poisoning in 2004 while en route
to a town in North Ossetia where Chechen
fighters had seized hostages at a local elementary
school. Though foul play was suspected
in both cases, no one has ever been
held responsible for either.
Any links to government involvement are
often casually explained away as the work of
“anonymous destructive forces” from outside
of Russia. With an overall 87 per cent
impunity rate in journalist murder cases,
just over one in 10 (13 per cent since 1992 to
be exact) resulted in the perpetrator being
brought to justice.
Politkovskaya was the third journalist to
be killed for doing his or her job that year
alone, the 21st to be killed since Putin
became president in 2000, and the 44th
since the fall of communism in Russia. She
would not be the last.
On March 2, 2007, Ivan Safronov, military
correspondent for the independent business
daily Kommersant and a former colonel in the
Russian space program, fell to his death after
supposedly jumping from the fourth floor
stairway window of his Moscow apartment
building. Despite the facts that Safronov left
no note and had no known debts or nagging
personal problems, investigators immediately
concluded that the case was a suicide. They
ignored the article Safronov had been writing
at the time of his death, an investigation
into alleged plans to sell Russian fighter jets
and anti-aircraft missiles to Syria and Iran, as
a potential reason for murder. The oranges
Safronov had just purchased on his way
home that day were found scattered across
the stairwell, suggesting someone had surprised
the journalist on the stairs to his apartment.
Notwithstanding all this, the official
cause of death remains as suicide. Safronov’s
final piece was never finished.
Turning a blind eye to the murder of
journalists who question official policy is
only part of the Russian government’s passive
attempts to curtail freedom of expression.
Russia’s intentionally vague Sovietesque
anti-extremism laws are also being
used with increasing frequency to silence
any critical or otherwise unfriendly comments
made by those few remaining analytical
journalists.
Aleksei Simonov, head of the Moscowbased
Glasnost Defense Foundation, believes
Russian journalists have not yet been disenfranchised
to the point of being considered
dangerous dissidents. “Not yet, not yet, not
yet,” he told Nina Ognianova in an interview
for CPJ. “But the climate is changing very
rapidly.” When asked toward what, he paused
before answering: “Toward winter.”
Faced with the constant fear of being
arrested or even murdered because of their
work, many Russian journalists have displayed
remarkable courage and conviction
to uphold the tenets of free expression by
continuing to challenge the status quo. After
Politkovskaya’s murder, Novaya Gazeta
Editor Dmitry Muratov tried to close down
the paper. As he explained to documentary
filmmaker Eric Bergkraut, “I told my staff
that no story is worth dying for. But they
wouldn’t let me do it…we had to go on.”
“It is they [the government] who must
fear us, not vice versa,” Novaya military correspondent
Vyacheslav Izmailov told CPJ.
“Only then do we stand a chance at uncovering
the truth.”
Indeed, the desire to present the truth to
the public remains indelible among Russian
journalists. “Would anything have surprised
you about what happened after your assassination?”
Bergkraut asked Politkovskaya
posthumously in his latest documentary,
Letter to Anna: The Story of Journalist
Politkovskaya’s Death which premiered at
Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival earlier this year.
“Maybe the fact that so many people around
the world are moved by your destiny. That
they haven’t forgotten. That they want to
know the truth – just as you did.”
| Number of Journalists Killed in 2008: |
4 |
| Past IPFA Winner: |
none |
| RSF Press Freedom Ranking: |
144 out of 169 |
Jameson Berkow works as a freelance writer in
Toronto. He has interned for Toronto Life and
the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
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