Outside Anna Politkovskaya's apartment block, 2006. John Martens / Wikipedia. Public Domain. Twelve years ago this week, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment block. Politkovskaya reported extensively on Russia’s war in Chechnya, criticising the policies of Vladimir Putin’s government. The people behind Politkovskaya’s killing have never really been found.
RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in WAR), an international human rights NGO, commemorates Politkovskaya’s work every year, presenting awards to leading women human rights defenders from across the world.
This year, RAW in WAR is giving the Politkovskaya Award to Binalakshmi Nepram and Svetlana Alexievich “for their bravery in speaking out and in defying injustice, violence and extremism in the context of ‘forgotten’ armed conflict in their regions”. Binalakshmi Nepram, a human rights defender from Manipur, northeast India, had to flee the country in 2017 following threats in connection with her activities. Her work has included documenting the sources of arms fuelling the conflict in Manipur, and assisting female survivors of gun violence. Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist, has sought to document the cataclysmic and tragic stories affecting the Soviet Union and its successor states. She has repeatedly criticised the Russian annexation of Crimea and the human rights violations in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, as well as the growing nationalism and the oligarchy in Ukraine, which brought threats against her from both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists. In 2015, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
