15/10/2013 00:00
TW
0

by RAY FLEMING
ANNA Politkovskaya, who was assassinated in her Moscow apartment last Saturday, was the twelfth journalist in Russia to be killed in this way in recent years. Although these men and women worked for different kinds of newspapers and took different approaches to their profession they had one thing in common: they all had a record of being severely critical of aspects of Vladimir Putin's Russia. In Ms Politkovskaya's case, Chechnya was her cause; she wrote frequently about the brutal way in which Russia had imposed its will there, the atrocities that had become routine and the total disregard for human rights.

At the time of her death she was putting the finishing touches to a report on the use of torture in Chechnya which would have appeared in yesterday's Novaya Gazetta; instead the whole paper was devoted to the life, work, and death of one of its bravest and most distinguished journalists.

Politkovskaya was also scathingly critical of President Putin, believing him to be a second-rate KGB officer who still hankered after the kind of shackled press that existed in Soviet Union days.

Whether or not that is true, it is certainly surprising that no word of condemnation of the killing of journalists has ever come from the Kremlin. In only one case has there been an arrest, for the 2004 shooting of Paul Klebnikov the editor of Forbes Russia, but the two men accused were found not guilty.