· Sergei Lapin, Policeman, accused of torture in the Chechen Republic.
· Prilepina and V. Minina, high rank officials from the Special Forces, accused of ‘disappearances’ in the Chechen Republic.
· Jurii Budanov, Colonel, accused of rape and murder of an 18 year old girl.
HRH-F´s Project Manager for the Russian Federation Ane Tusvik Bonde, right, mourns the loss of Anna Politkovskaya. (16-OCT-06)

Written by HRH-F’s Ane Tusvik Bonde, this obituary was published in the 14 October issue of the Norwegian weekly Dag og Tid. It has been translated for rpublication here by HRH / Niels Jacob Harbitz.

Time after time, in article after article, Anna Politkovskaya named the perpetrators by their full names. While Russian courts passed papers back and forth between different offices, she hammered down their names, ranks and titles. She wrote in anger about the Colonel sentenced for murder who still received a honorary medal for his efforts in the war in the Chechen Republic. She reminded that the men who gave the orders to chop off the ears of a young Chechen in Grozny in 2001, still worked as policemen in Siberia.

In Putin’s time in office, 13 journalists, Politkovskaya included, have been killed in the Russian Federation. Others have ‘disappeared’ or been threatened with death. Journalists writing critically are hit by Russia’s Anti-Terror Legislation, accused of undermining the interests of the nation state. So what particular article was Politkovskaya killed for? It is hard to tell. Last Sunday’s special edition of her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, gives an overview of some of the approximately 100 articles she wrote over the last year. Many of them covered the violations in the Chechen Republic.

Politkovskaya never gave up, but carried on providing updates in Novaya Gazeta, even when court cases were postponed for several years. Many of the cases she covered shared the feature of not in themselves qualifying as news.  It was, instead, Politkovskaya herself who gave these stories their urgency. By way of highlighting the destinies of individuals, she also managed to describe the systematic abuses that take place in the Russian Federation. By way of focussing on the injuries of one particular soldier, she uncovered the gross violations taking place in the Army. Brought together, the different destinies in her articles show a picture of a Russian regime that lets its concern for the State come before its care for the individual. Politkovskaya’s angle was subjective, but she described the atrocities on both sides of the conflict. Her style of writing was both narrative and morally educational. Thorough, the Russian way, she went into all details of a case. But even though it had taken months of research to uncover the events she described, it still seemed as if she had put it all down in a rage, and at tremendous pace. There was always an urgency about her writing, only interrupted by rhetorical-polemic questions that never left a moment’s doubt as to what Politkovskaya herself thought about the case: What are the results of the independent investigation of the Beslan tragedy? Who benefits from the war in the Chechen Republic continuing? For many, this was too much. “But it wasn’t too much,” Novaya Gazeta writes in their memorial issue. “She always wrote the truth. It is a different thing that the truth was often so terrible that people chose not to know about it”.

Anna Politkovskaya went beyond the journalist’s role. She was a human rights defender who managed to secure protection for victims, updated lawyers and rallied support for a home for the elderly in Grozny. She was dismayed with the apathy in Russian society. “When a society passively accepts suffering, it is a sign that it won’t be long until this society collapses,” she wrote in her book A journey in hell. Accordingly, she was equally irritated with the West’s shying away from the Chechen Republic. After a visit to Norway in 2002, she wrote in a commentary in Novaya Gazeta that the conflict was no longer fashionable in Europe. She ridicules a Norwegian journalist’s problem to take in her message. “Is it my fault that the situation in the Chechen Republic doesn’t suit the Sunday edition? she dryly asks.

Anna Politkovskaya’s engagement was burning. She made demands to everyone and was not easy to cooperate with. She criticised human rights organisations like Amnesty International, not for the work it did, but for not doing more. At the same time, she highlighted Amnesty’s actions, when she thought they had been of importance. Marked by the reality she witnessed, she sometimes took innocent questions to be attacks. She could come across as paranoid. Alas, she had her reasons. her fear was proven right. Now that she is no more, all journalists has a duty to ask the question, time and time again, in article after article:

-Who was responsible for the murder of Anna Polikovskaya 7 October 2006?
-Who was responsible for the murder of Anna Polikovskaya 7 October 2006?