April 4, 2007

Frontline/World recently featured a report on journalists who have been killed, harassed or detained in various parts of the globe. Among the victims of governments who don’t appreciate honest coverage was Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow last October.

In a media world enamored with glamorous TV coverage by “imbedded’’ journalists protected by their own military, Anna was an uncommonly courageous reporter who almost solely took responsibility for coverage of her country’s involvement in the remote Caucasus republic of Chechnya, where Russian atrocities spawned an equally vicious terrorist response that was featured all over the world with coverage of the massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan and the occupation of a Moscow movie theater, with tragic consequences for all.

These incidents attracted the attention of a world besotted by terrorist activities yet it seemed that only Anna reported on the plight of the Chechens, whose desire to be independent from Russia was the cause of its ultimate demise.

Disdaining cameras, Anna’s only needed her intelligence and a notebook in which she entered the testimony of the victims of injustice in her part of the world.

I wrote a story once about visiting intellectuals from that region of the world who attended a seminar at Northwestern University. No one wanted to publish the story, either it was badly-written or no one really cared that much about Chechnya.

Anna did and in her memory I am reprinting this story on our Web site.

“There were many guilty parties in this war, and history will put everything in its place,’’ said Mikhail Gorbachev in a foreword to a book on Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society, by Russian ethnologist Valery Tishkov.  “But the human lives lost cannot be brought back, and the destruction is difficult to reverse.’’

Georgi Derluguian, an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, wrote the forward to Anna Politkovskaya’s book “A Small Corner of Hell,’’  in which the Moscow correspondent wrote about the second war in Chechnya.|

At the time, in late 2003, I wrote: “Read Politkovskaya’s book to get a taste of what is happening in the world today outside Iraq and the Middle East, where genocide is not something that can be captured by a definition but consists of continual murder, rape, starvation, of disappearances and missing persons, the distraught mothers and fathers of both sides in the conflict.

Russian mothers searching Chechnya for the remains of their sons.

Politkovskaya’s stark portrayal of life on the ground in Chechnya put her life in danger in both Chechnya and Russia. Truth is not a valued commodity in Moscow or Grozny. There’s too much going on there that some people would kill to prevent from reaching the outside world.

Hell, and the evil associated with hell on earth, can be found in Chechnya as it was in Bosnia.

In fact, see just how much you can read about Chechnya before your mind retreats to a dark hole where today’s Chechens live.’’