Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (56 page)

“As soon as they had done that, they attached wires to the little fingers of both my hands. A couple of seconds later they turned on the current and started beating me with rubber truncheons wherever they could. I couldn’t stand the pain and started yelling, calling out the name of the Almighty and begging them to stop. In response, so as not to have to listen to my shouting, they put a black hood over my head. How long this went on I can’t accurately remember, but I began to lose consciousness from the pain. When they saw that, they took the hood off and asked if I would talk. I said I would, although I did not know what to say to them. I said whatever they wanted so as to avoid the torture at least for a while.

“They unhooked me, removed the pipe, and threw me on the floor. They said, ‘Talk.’ In reply I said I had nothing to tell them. In response they hit me with the pipe I had been hanging from, again on my right eye. I fell sideways and, almost unconscious, felt them again beating me wherever they could. They hung me up once more and repeated what they had done before. How long it went on I do not remember. They kept drenching me with water.

“The following day they bathed me and rubbed something on my face and body. At about dinner time an officer in civilian clothes entered and told me some journalists had come and that I was to admit responsibility for three murders and robbery with violence. He threatened that if I did not agree they would do it all again, and also would shame me by degrading me in a sexual manner. I agreed. After I had given the journalists the interview, they threatened me with the same degrading treatment if I didn’t testify that all the beating I had had, which they had inflicted on me, had occurred while I was supposedly attempting to escape.”

Zaur Zakriev, the lawyer defending Beslan Gadayev, informed the members of the Memorial Human Rights Center that this physical and psychological duress had been inflicted on his client in the Grozny Rural District Office of the Interior Ministry. According to the lawyer,
the defendant did indeed admit to committing robbery with violence in 2004 against members of the law enforcement agencies. However, the agents decided to obtain further confessions relating to a number of crimes he had not committed in the village of Starye Atagi in their district.

The lawyer states that the brutal violence inflicted on the defendant left visible signs of physical injury on his body. The Medical Section of Pre-Trial Detention Facility No. 1 in Grozny, where Gadayev is currently held under Article 209 of the Russian Criminal Code on a charge of robbery with violence, has issued an official medical certificate listing evidence of systematic beating, physical injury in the form of welts, scratches, bruises, broken ribs, and damage to internal organs.

The defence lawyer has lodged a formal complaint about these gross violations of human rights with the Prosecutor’s Office of the Chechen Republic. […]

Politkovskaya’s text breaks off here, incomplete. The editors are seeking to establish what further episodes were to be included
.

*   *   *

A video shows what appear to be members of one of the Chechen security agencies who have apprehended and are torturing two young men. One of those detained is sitting in a car, bleeding. A knife can be seen stuck in the region of the victim’s ear. The other seems to have been thrown out of the car on to the tarmac. The torturers are not themselves visible, and only Chechen speech (Melkhi dialect) can be heard, interspersed with swearing:

Verbatim text:

“Putin said it. ‘View it from every angle,’ he said.”

“He should know!” (Addresses the victim insultingly) “This bitch just won’t die, […] fucking goat, bastard …, fucked up queer. Doesn’t he look handsome? I couldn’t live without you.”

“Croak, pal, croak, you shit! For God’s sake, know what I’m saying? Do it …”

“Is he done? Is he done now?”

“Yeah.”

“OK, we’re leaving. Over here!”

“Hey, move your asses, take up positions, take up positions. Close observation of the surrounding terrain.”

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 Politkovskaya was killed as part of a complex plan to lever Putin into the presidency for an anti-constitutional third term.

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 the state institutions, official and semi-official, and was constantly called an enemy, particularly by the puppet government established by Putin in Chechnya. There are only two credible explanations of her murder: either it was committed on the orders of the Russian state authorities, in their central or Chechen hypostases, through the agency of the security services (which is most probable); or it may have been the work of people infected by the nationalist discourse encouraged by the state authorities.

Putin sought legitimacy through the blood of Chechnya, on the basis of which he built his neo-authoritarian regime, and now all the threads of power (executive, judicial, legislative, and also of the economy
and mass media) run not only back to the Kremlin, but directly to the President’s Office.

That is the Russia which Putin is building with the aid of oil as a strategic weapon, in order to enforce respect for his enormous country, with the connivance of Western leaders who whitewash all his crimes in exchange for energy supplies …

The cause, which European political figures both of the left and of the right have mentioned to me in private conversation, is quite objective – it is fear of Russia. The Soviet Union was a time bomb which, if it had exploded, could have turned the whole world upside-down. Putin proved capable of bringing order and avoiding chaos.

 … But what is more dangerous for the West – the chaos which it is said Putin has succeeded in avoiding, or the authoritarian regime which he has built and which, as the world already knows, has at its disposal oil and weapons of mass destruction?