Entertainment

Sycophants such as we find everywhere may be Anna's murderers

February 28, 2010 Edition 1

Maureen Isaacson

In a recent series of online discussions hosted by the UN Department of Public Information, Women and the Media was under discussion as one of 12 critical areas of concern identified in the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995.

Violence against women journalists has, in many parts of the world, increased over the past years. Last November, after the massacre of at least four women journalists in the Philippines, there were calls for an International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

Namono Daisy Anne, a board director of Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, wrote that women journalists were exposed in the course of work to "emotional/psychological violence".

She described this "subtle form of violence", which she said worked directly to undermine the capacity of women journalists to perform.

In South Africa, where it is often assumed that women who bring lead stories to their newsdesks have earned these titbits through pillow talk, a similar psychological pressure is at play. This week Julius Malema, the ANC Youth League president, accused some journalists of sleeping with sources to solicit what he called inaccurate evidence about tenders he had procured in Limpopo province.

We are nonetheless a long way away from the kind of dangers faced by Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who wrote nothing but the truth and died for it. Was it worth it?

Her detailed reports about corruption and her courageous coverage of the horrors of Chechnya earned her several awards and international fame. Her reports in Putin's Russia, where she said civil liberties suffered the same casualties that they did under Stalin, earned her terror and harassment and a final, untimely end.

A mother of two, the daughter of Russian diplomats, Politkovskaya was born in America but lived in the Russia she adored, and was shot dead on October 7, 2006.

Politkovskaya's murder has not yet been resolved. It is believed to have been possibly related to an article about torture that she was preparing, and which she had announced on Radio Liberty two days before her death.

The fragments from eyewitness accounts of torture, in this newly published collection, Nothing But the Truth; Selected Dispatches (Random House), are difficult to countenance, as is much of the violence she stares down, clear-eyed.

To those unfamiliar with the Russian political landscape, the bigger picture is not always immediately accessible.

But the fact that she homes in on the minutiae, and is able to humanise the inhuman and often unendurable world Putin oversees, is her overwhelming strength. It made, and makes, her project worthwhile, albeit posthumously.

In Millenium Celebrations Caused This Tragedy, she writes, "I hate battle-pieces. In paintings, as in life, detail is what matters most. How we react to the tragedy of the small person accurately reflects our attitude to a whole nationality. Little Liana Shamsudinova was born in 1994 in Martan Chu, Urus Martan District, and the recent details of her life are entirely typical of today's Chechnya."

She reports that Liana's family, having fled the bombing, lived in a refugee camp from October to December in 1999. Returning home when there was no military engagement in Martan Chu, Liana's house was targeted by soldiers just for the hell of it on New Year's Eve.

"Her mother, 28, was breast-feeding her youngest son, Zalimkhan, The shrapnel split her head in two, and the neighbours found her body cooling, her breast exposed and Zalimkhan pressed to it."

The story deteriorates. There were more deaths. Liana's father had disappeared a year before. She has not spoken since the death. Contagion from the "Chechen wounds" that Liana had contracted had made her a carrier of infection and hospital wards were cramped and overcrowded.

Politkovskaya asks: "How can people survive when the Empire, sweeping aside all in its path, declines to rest its baleful gaze on those who happen to be in its way?"

In So What Am I Guilty Of?, addressed to readers abroad, she laments the fact that virtually all Russian journalists constitute "a Big Top" of kovernys, clowns whose job is to entertain. She said their job was also to laud "the Pyramid of Power", which Putin constructed with the aid of his officials, who cherry-pick those who are "on-side".

This band of political sycophants universally united in defence against the liberal-minded is to be found everywhere.

As an outsider to "this circus performance", Politkovskaya had pariah status thrust upon her. She was no political in-fighter; because she was not on-side, she was an outcast.

For this status, she had endured poisoning, arrests and death threats.

"What am I guilty of? I have merely reported what I witnessed. Nothing but the truth."

This truth proved too much for her killers. It left too few clues for those who would avenge her death. Her writings survive her, with great strength.