Tribute by Swanee Hunt to Slain Russian Woman Journalist, Anna Politkovskaya
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: October 30, 2006
JOURNALIST
By Swanee Hunt
October 10,
2006
Everyone needs a hero. Anna Politkovskaya was mine. And others’. In
addition to the 2005 Civil Courage Prize, she received the Courage in Journalism
Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation in 2002, as well as prizes
from the Overseas Press Club and Amnesty International. In 2004, she was a joint
winner of the Olof Palme Prize for her human rights work.
I met Anna in November, 2000, at Women Waging Peace, a network of about
450 leaders within the Initiative for Inclusive Security,
which advocates for the full inclusion of women in peace processes around the
world. That initiative was incubated at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government. We try to protect and support women
peace experts in part by bringing them to the attention of policy makers at the
State Department, World Bank, White House, and other halls of power.
This past Saturday Anna was executed: shot point blank in the head with
a revolver outside her apartment. The gun was placed by her
side, indicating a contract-killing. She was 48.
Born in 1958, Anna graduated from
the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya for
more than a decade. In 1999, she joined Novaya Gazeta, one of the few newspapers
to take on the Kremlin. She maintained a critical stance against President Putin
even as the Russian media became more and more suppressed by the government.
Politkovskaya authored several books, including Putin’s Russia and The
Dirty War. For more than six years, she was the strongest
voice in the world describing the plight of
military assault by the Russian government since 1994.
She told me once that because she was female, she was considered less
threatening and could get behind the lines, where she reported on abuses the
army was perpetrating against Muslim communities under cover of fighting
terrorism. She described how, to avoid a military checkpoint, she’d made her way
down to a river, then trekked through deep snow all night.
Another time, she posed as a farm wife sitting on a pile of hay in a
wagon; she smiled that without her wire-rims she couldn’t see a thing. Another
time she was apprehended by Russian forces but freed as night fell by a
sympathetic major. In February 2000, the FSB (former KGB) confined her in a pit
in
three days.
Despite those dangers, like many of the women we have sponsored, Anna
Politkovskaya kept working to expose the injustices around her. Fearless, but
not naïve, she knew her life was on the line as she described the moral decay of
100,000 security forces, whose abuses only spawn more terrorism.
Still, she continued to document zachistka (“mop-up”), where young
men, or any others considered suspicious, are rounded up from their homes,
sometimes tortured, and often executed.
Because of her standing with the Chechens, Politkovskaya acted as a
mediator during the Dubrovka Theater siege in
put an end to the two-day stand off when they gassed the theater, killing not
only 40 Chechen terrorists but also 129 hostages. Then in
September 2004, she was in flight to
crisis when she lost consciousness after drinking a cup of tea.
Just before she passed out, a flight attendant whispered to
her that she had been poisoned by Russian agents on the plane. Doctors at the
hospital in
results. She believed the FSB was trying to prevent her from reporting on the
siege, which resulted in 344 deaths, half of them children.
Anna’s suspicions were well-founded: Since 2000, at least twelve Russian
journalists have been murdered in contract-style killings.
I last saw Anna in December. She and a small group were
discussing the role of women in the security sector, as protectors of human
rights, journalists, politicians, and leaders of civil society.
They called for women’s solidarity internationally to ensure peace and
stability. Anna spoke about freedom of speech and how crucial
it is for NGOs to challenge the government. Her words then
bear the weight of her sacrifice now.
That day I took two pictures of Anna: the first, somber; the second, her head
back, laughing. I think of those two images of her as we
mourn her murder and celebrate her life. She understood that
with freedom comes responsibility to work for those denied such
freedom. As we grieve her death, forty years too soon, we
must redouble our efforts and carry forward her legacy.
Swanee Hunt, former
Policy Program at Harvard’s
Initiative for Inclusive Security.
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