I have nothing complex to say for the moment, except I just needed to vent - the last thing a war journalist should have to fear is someone with ties to her own government.
Fuckers. And will the U.S. ever consider Chechnya or freedom of expression to be any sort of human rights issues with consequences for the Russian administration, or will we roll over, as usual?
(Apologies for any typos; I am on a foreign keyboard and without my glasses.)
Putin mighta had nothing to do with it. How do we know? Might have just been a Putin zealout. Hell, from what I’ve heard of Russia these days, mighta been a drug crazed lunatic looking for drugs or a Russian Mafia miss.
Not a chance, sorry. This isn’t 1995; what you’ve heard of Russia is a decade out of date. What happened was a deliberate murder; two shots to the chest, then a kontrolny vystrel [“control shot”] to the head. This was no junkie.
Putin almost certainly had nothing to do with it directly, probably not even in a “who will rid me of this turbulent journalist?” kind of way. He’s got bigger fish to fry, and already has sufficiently strong control over the electronic media that he’s not going to lose any sleep over a small bi-weekly newspaper, however critical.
Informed speculation is mostly about people associated with Ramzan Kadyrov, the thuggish “pro-Russian” Chechen leader.
Then again, there are a lot of people she pissed off over the years, for very good reasons.
It’s a very sad day for journalism in general and Russian journalism in particular. Politkovskaya’s articles in Novaya Gazeta were the only easily available source of information for much of what she was reporting about. She was a bright light in the increasingly meretricious and venal world of Russian journalism.
Unfortunately, the chances of the murder ever being solved are vanishingly small, judging by previous such cases.
For anyone interested in more detailed news about Chechnya than you will ever see published elsewhere in English, I highly recommend this Yahoo group. Volunteers translate and post all sorts of stories from the global press. The consensus the past 24 hours is definitely that this was a political murder, and I’d be shocked to discover that it was anything else; and for that matter, the M.O. is exactly like what happened to Galina Starovoitova, one of the most amazing people I ever had the privilege to meet in person.
Russia is not a happy place for anyone who believes in defending the human rights of others - what can I say?
Good obituary in The Economist, for anyone who wants a succinct description of why she mattered, and also hinting at Britboy’s characterization of divaness, for all that matters.
I don’t know - maybe you have to be self-important bitch to get things done, sometimes. God knows there aren’t many who had the ovaries to do what she did.
And after four days of being conspicuously silent, Putin finds himself in a situation where he can’t avoid comment, in a press conference in a foreign country. And what does he say?
