By Maryann Bird
“No Photography,” the signs read outside the Russian Embassy in London. A clutch of press photographers and a lone TV cameraman ignored them on Saturday afternoon, however, as they recorded a short, poignant memorial protest against the 7 October assassination of the courageous Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Led by Jeremy Dear, general secretary of Britain’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ), a few dozen journalists turned up at the embassy to present the Russian ambassador, Yuri Fedotov, with a petition demanding justice for Politkovskaya. When Russian-speaking David Crouch of the Financial Times buzzed the embassy’s intercom, though, a voice responded that no one would come outside to accept the petition.
Someone did emerge several minutes after the protesters had moved away from the embassy gate, though -- to remove the funeral wreath (in pink lilies and roses) hung on the fence, along with several placards bearing Politkovskaya’s face and a smattering of messages. “The pen is mightier than the gun,” read one. “Whose finger on the trigger?” asked another. “Don’t shoot.” “Stop killing the journalists.” And the simple plea, “Justice for Anna Politkovskaya.”
(Curiously, the embassy’s man left the wreath and the placards inside a vehicle checkpoint on the street outside the building, giving the journalists a second chance to make their protest. Seizing the opportunity, the demonstrators reclaimed the items and, taking the friendly suggestion of a London policeman, turned the corner and stuck the wreath and placards on the gate of the Russian Consulate.)
The NUJ’s petition, signed over the past few days by hundreds of journalists, called for “a thorough independent investigation” into the deaths of Politkovskaya and 12 other journalists murdered since President Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia in 1999, and the prosecution of those alleged to be responsible for the killings. The petition also called for “open and unhindered access by all journalists, Russian and international, to report the Chechen conflict”, and an end to the harassment and killing of journalists.
“There are times when journalists are reviled and times when they are revered,” Jeremy Dear commented, “and those times are usually for the same stories.” Politkovskaya, he said, was reviled by Putin’s Kremlin, but “justly revered by our profession” because “she spoke the universal language of justice”. Her murder was the latest in Russia’s catalogue of crimes against justice, Dear noted, and particularly chilling because, in her dogged work for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, “Anna was a star”, a high-profile figure among Russia’s political reporters.
John Owen, the former European director of the now-defunct Freedom Forum, recalled Politkovskaya’s participation in a panel discussion in London in May 2001, marking World Press Freedom Day. The programme was dubbed “The Big Chill: Journalists Who Refuse to Be Silenced.” In her remarks on that day, shortly after her 21st trip to Chechnya, Politkovskaya declared: “The most important thing is not to show any weakness. The path of resistance is the only way open to us at the moment. If we now go off into the shadows and keep our heads down until there are better times, we will end up going back to the ideological sort of journalism we had in Soviet times.”
That seems to be Putin’s preference. It took the Russian leader three days to react to Politkovskaya’s murder, finally declaring it “an unacceptable crime which cannot be allowed to go unpunished”. He further commented: “I have to say that her political influence (and I think that the experts will agree with me) was insignificant inside the country, and, most likely, she was more noticeable in the human rights and mass media circles in the West. Hence, I think -- and one of our newspapers has stated this correctly today -- that to the current government in general and to the Chechen authorities in particular, Politkovskaya’s murder has done much more harm than her publications.” “Insignificant inside the country”? Then why was Anna Politkovskaya killed, following years of threats to both herself and her newspaper?
“The assassins may believe they have silenced her,” said Dear, “but she will speak louder and longer as a result of this heinous crime against her.”
