THEY buried the murdered Anna Politkovskaya yesterday, described by colleagues as one of Russia’s last investigative journalists. A fearless critic of Putin’s Kremlin, Politkovskaya covered Chechnya with the dispassion and lack of bias that is the hallmark of good journalism. She told it as it was and was unconcerned which powerful toes she trod on in the process. On Saturday she paid the price when a hit man gunned her down outside her Moscow home.
Politkovskaya was the 12th Russian journalist to be assassinated since Vladimir Putin became president in 2000 and the 42nd since the collapse of Communism in 1991. None of these Putin-era politically motivated crimes have been solved. As Politkovskaya’s mourners gathered, Putin himself was meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Dresden. In this city he was once a senior KGB officer and, as Germans demonstrated for freedom, heard with dismay that Gorbachev ordered that no action should be taken against the will of the German people. Putin told his German hosts yesterday that Politkovskaya’s killer would be tracked down. Moscow’s chief prosecutor had taken personal charge of the investigation.
This murder was meant to intimidate all other Russian journalists. No government welcomes close scrutiny and criticism from the Fourth Estate. Even the Americans, who enshrine press freedom in their constitution have twice bombed Al-Jazeera offices in Iraq and encouraged the Iraqi government to ban the TV station and other media outlets from operating in the country. The Americans acted against Al-Jazeera because it was prepared to broadcast pictures and sound recordings sent to it by Al-Qaeda. In Pakistan, journalist Hayat Ullah Khan paid the ultimate price last December for revealing that a bomb explosion in North Waziristan was caused by a targeted strike from a US-made Hellfire missile and not, as officials claimed, an accidental explosion that killed a suspected senior Al-Qaeda operative. Khan was found eight days after his abduction, shot five times in the back of the head with his hands still bound in government-issue handcuffs. The British and the French have prosecuted and imprisoned journalists who ran foul of secrecy laws. If democracies with their much-vaunted freedoms can behave thus, is it surprising that dictatorships seek to crush free expression and keep from publication truths that for one reason or another will embarrass or expose them?
In essence shooting the messenger is never the answer. If Washington is sure it is fighting the war on terrorism justly, then it ought to be proof against taunts from Al-Qaeda. It does not need to blow Al-Jazeera journalists to bits. Politkovskaya should be alive today. If the Kremlin and its Chechen government are comfortable with their policies, they do not need to order the murder of a journalist who says they are wrong and seeks to prove her case with evidence. Governments who behave thus never seem to learn that while they can always crush journalists they can never murder the truth.
