Peace and Justice Post

The alleged assassins of Russian war journalist Anna Politkovskaya are on trial. So too is the reputation of Vladimir Putin

The main news from the trial of Anna Politkovskaya’s alleged assassins, which began in Moscow yesterday, is the fact that the process is open to the media and the public.

The case is being heard by the Moscow district military court, most probably because one of the defendants is Pavel Ryaguzov, lieutenant colonel of Russia’s Federal Security Service.

It is for this reason too that Polikovskaia’s children, Ilia and Vera, were sure that the judge would close the proceedings as the prosecution demanded. But he did not – perhaps because this is one of very few cases of multiple political assassinations in Russia in which the prosecution is truly interested in achieving a convincing conviction and in proving to the world that Russian courts are independent and fair.

The prosecution needs a conviction, and a conviction that at least looks cogent, because Prime Minister Putin, Russia’s president at the time of the assassination wants it.

After Politkovskaya was killed he said that her death did much more harm to Russia than her writing. This was certainly true: Politkovskaya’s assassination resulted in an avalanche of unfavourable publicity for Putin’s Russia abroad, while her publications, particularly about the realities of Russia’s second Chechen war and its outcomes, were not at all popular among the majority of the Russian population.

She was outspoken about the methods the Russian forces used in Chechnya, about the methods of their allies among the local population and about the order that they created and maintained in the wake of the war. These were not pretty stories, and few Russians wanted to be bothered with them.

But facing the barrage of criticism abroad, Putin promised that Politkovskaya’s assassins would be found. He may have created the Russia in which more journalists have been killed in the last 10 years than anywhere else in the world, except Iraq, but he certainly did not need Politkovskaya to die.

There could be any number of others who did. She received death threats from different quarters, from Chechnya, to Moscow, to Khanty-Mansiisk.

According to the chief editor of the Novaya Gazeta for which she worked (and which lost several other of its journalists to killers) at the time of her death she was working on an article which outlined the involvement of Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s pro–Russian prime minister, in the kidnapping of his political opponents.

The four accused in the trial are Ryaguzov, who is said to have provided Politkovskaya’s home address to the killers; two Chechens, the brothers of Rustam Makmudov who is said to have actually pulled the trigger but who has not been found; and Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a police investigator from the organised crime unit of the Moscow police.

It is not impossible that these people will be found in this or that way guilty, although the absence of the main accused is beyond irony. But Ramzan Kadyrov, whose name comes up in the investigation materials, has not been asked to testify.

Anna Politkovskaya lived a difficult life. From 1999 onwards she often went to the war zones and refugee camps in Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya. In December 1999 she organised the evacuation of 89 people from an old people’s home in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, bombed by the Russian forces, and then found accommodation for them in Russia.

Later she initiated charitable action to provide food, medicines and clothing for those who returned to Chechnya and found themselves destitute. She personally accompanied three tons of collected goods to Chechnya. In October 2002, when Chechen terrorists took hostage several hundred people in a Moscow theatre, she was one of the people with whom the terrorists agreed to speak.

She went into the building accompanied by only one other person in an attempt – it proved futile – to negotiate. In 2004 she survived an attempt to poison her. She investigated corruption in the defence ministry and among the high command of the Russian army contingent in Chechnya. She was certainly not loved for all that.

Her trial is not going to be an easy matter, either – that is if the court really wants to find out who ordered her death.