| The writer correctly lionizes Anna Politkovskaya as a genuine, fearless heroine of the press, the kind of person we need more of. He then throws away everything she's worked before with his hand-wringing over what to do about Putin, Russia and injustice (and those three words just seem to go together, don't they?). I think he knows the core problem -- Putin is a thug -- but can't bring himself to say it. Too bad. |
The murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya leaves a terrible silence in Russia and an information void about a dark realm that we need to know more about. No one else reported as she did on the Russian north Caucasus and the abuse of human rights there. Her reports made for difficult reading - and Politkovskaya only got where she did by being one of life's difficult people.
Since 1999 she had made dozens of trips to Chechnya and the surrounding regions, reporting on the bombings, torture camps, abductions and corruption in Moscow's second campaign in Chechnya. With the rest of the Russian media toeing the official line and western journalists as good as banned from the warzone, it felt at times that our news from Chechnya came from a remarkable one-woman reporting operation. It was scant consolation to her that she received a shelf full of western journalism prizes. Politkovskaya seemed mainly interested in the award ceremonies as a forum for reminding westerners to do something about Chechnya - she was generally disappointed.