A crowd of protesters gathered in central Moscow on Sunday to express their anger at the assassination of the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who at the weekend became the 13th Russian journalist to be killed in a contract-style killing since President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.
Politkovskaya (48) had on Monday been due to publish an article on torture and kidnappings by pro-Moscow forces in the restless southern republic of Chechnya, her colleagues said.
The prosecutor general took personal control of the investigation on Sunday, but Putin made no comment on the killing of one of the country’s best-known public figures and his fiercest critic.
Politkovskaya, who won international acclaim for exposing the brutality of Russian forces in Chechnya, was shot dead in the lift of her apartment block in Moscow on Saturday. Police were on Sunday night hunting a man in a white baseball cap who was filmed by a CCTV camera entering the building a few moments before she was shot three times in the chest and once in the head.
The killing immediately threw suspicion on the security services and the pro-Moscow Chechen forces that control Chechnya. ”You just have to look at the subjects of her latest work and there’s your list of chief suspects,” said Viktor Shenderovich, a well-known radio and television commentator, who joined the protest by several hundred people on Pushkin Square. In a reference to the KGB’s successor, the federal security service FSB, Shenderovich said: ”The culprits will never be found, because the people who will be investigating this murder walk down the same corridors as those who ordered it.”
Protesters carried placards reading ”The Kremlin killed freedom of speech”, and ”Anna, great daughter of Russia”.
Flyura Arslanova, a pensioner clutching a photograph of Politkovskaya and dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, said: ”It’s a tragedy. She was killed for being honest.”
Eduard Limonov, a radical opposition figure, said: ”It is Putin who has created this society of hate where journalists are murdered and other nationalities become the victim of Russian race supremacy.”
Politkovskaya, a mother of two, had harried security officers, military men, and Chechnya’s controversial prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, in numerous articles for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta which condemned the cruelty wrought against civilians in the conflict between pro-Moscow forces and separatist rebels.
She was widely admired for her courage and tenacity in uncovering stories that few other reporters dared to touch. Her books — A Dirty War: A Russian reporter in Chechnya; and A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya — brought her worldwide acclaim.
She was once arrested and subjected to a mock execution by security forces in Chechnya, and came close to death on another occasion in an apparent poisoning attempt. Yet she denied being particularly brave, saying in one interview: ”The duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer to sing, and the duty of the journalist is to write what this journalist sees in reality.”
A spokesperson for Russia’s prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, told NTV that all motives for the killing were being examined, but ”of course the main one we are looking at is the professional activity of the journalist”.
In Washington, the United States State Department said Politkovskaya was ”personally courageous and committed to seeking justice even in the face of previous death threats”, but the Kremlin was silent. Putin held a routine meeting of his security council, but did not mention the murder. The European Union said Russian authorities should launch ”a thorough investigation” into the ”heinous crime” of her murder.
Novaya Gazeta placed a portrait of Politkovskaya trimmed with black on its website and announced a 25m-rouble reward for information leading to the capture of the people who ordered her killing. Its deputy editor, Andrei Lipsky, told the Guardian that Politkovskaya had been preparing an article for Monday’s edition exposing torture of opponents by officials of the Chechen prime minister, but she did not manage to complete it before she was shot. ”We are trying to piece together the fragments [from her notes],” he said.
Kadyrov was asked on Sunday to comment on accusations that his men carried out the killing. He replied: ”Making assumptions without any basis or serious evidence means arguing on the level of rumours and gossip, and that flatters neither journalists nor politicians.” He told the Itar-Tass news agency: ”I want to underline that although Politkovskaya’s material about Chechnya was not always objective, as a human being I am sincerely sorry for the journalist.”
Outside Politkovskaya’s apartment block on Lesnaya Street, mourners left carnations and candles close to a portrait of her placed on top of a post box.
Svetlana Khokhlova (60) who uses a wheelchair, said she had travelled from the outskirts of the city to pay her respects. ”She wrote about the forgotten people like me,” she said. ”She was sharp and intelligent and she wrote the truth. I’m ashamed of my country today.”
Inside the building, the doors of the lift where Politskovaya was shot stood open, a single bullet hole just below head-height puncturing the steel back wall of the lift. Detectives went from floor to floor questioning the block’s residents.
What she wrote
Anna Politkovskaya regularly commented on brutality by pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya. Here are some of her latest thoughts
21.09.06
In Chechnya there is a sharp lack of people who question themselves. They are mostly single-minded amoebas. For them to kill is like having a sip of tea. For such amoebas to understand a person presented to them as an enemy is impossible. And what does it mean ”to understand” in Chechnya? To understand is to preserve somebody’s life. That’s the price of tolerance: there is no other. And many people still think that this game with an amnesty [for rebel fighters] is some kind of story about [Chechen PM Ramzan] Kadyrov’s tolerance, about how he’s saving the fighters and preserving the nation. It’s lies. In fact, the fighters are tied in to yet more bloodshed — in order to keep them on his side.
11.09.06
What is Kadyrov syndrome? Its main characteristics are insolence, boorishness and cruelty masquerading as courage and manliness. In Chechnya the Kadyrovtsy [forces loyal to Kadyrov] beat men and women whenever they think it’s necessary. They cut off the heads of their enemies in the same way as the Wahabis [Islamic militants] did. And all this is allowed by the appropriate authorities and is even called officially ”specifics of raising national awareness as a result of the final choice of the Chechen people in favour of Russia”.
11.09.06
The world is afraid of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction — I’m afraid of hatred. Uncontrolled and building up. The world somehow came up with mechanisms to control the leaders of Iraq and North Korea but nobody can foresee how personal revenge works. And the world is defenceless against it. In our country there is now a rare and irresponsible stupidity. Hundreds of people are deliberately forced to keep their storage of hatred. What do we want from the Chechens sitting in prison for so-called terrorism? There are hundreds of people with long jail sentences ahead of them. They are hated and all the ”special methods” [of torture] that come in to the heads of both their fellow inmates and the administers are tested out on them. – Guardian Unlimited Â