September 1 was the 13th anniversary of the Beslan school tragedy in Russia. In 2004, hours after Chechen rebels laid siege on a school, a Russian journalist scrambled to get on a plane to reach the spot. She managed to get a seat, and asked for tea. By her own account, she had tea at 21:50, and by 22:00 was losing consciousness. When she woke up she found herself in hospital, with a nurse whispering that she had been poisoned. The Beslan book didn’t get written. In the tragedy, 334 had died, including 186 children. Two years later, on October 7, Anna Politkovskaya was dead. She was 48.
Investigative journalists have been threatened the world over, with Syria, Iraq, Mexico and Russia often dubbed dangerous places to work. Politkovskaya, who had fearlessly written about the horrors of the Chechnya war, and other misdemeanours of Vladimir Putin’s reign, was killed by an unknown assailant in Moscow. Her final despatches, perhaps the reason she was killed, and the work of her last few years were published posthumously in a collection, Is Journalism Worth Dying For ? The opening essay found in her computer was a scathing one on the state of journalism in her country. She describes some Russian journalists as “kovernys” or clowns who only want to keep the “public entertained”. But any journalist who dared to dissent, she writes, was subjected to distress. “I will not go into all the joys of the path I have chosen: the poisoning, the arrests, the menacing by mail and over the Internet, the telephoned death threats.” At the end is this heart-stopping admission: “I hate this way of life.” Politkovskaya wrote several books ( A Dirty War , A Small Corner of Hell,Putin’s Russia, A Russian Diary ), but her reports from Chechnya in the journal Novaya Gazeta angered the establishment. They are just as she describes them: “appalling stories” documenting rape, mass executions, and men and women burnt alive.
After the deaths of Politkovskaya and other journalists, the Russian media has often settled for self-censorship. Elsewhere too journalists have paid a price for saying “no to silence”. At the launch of his book Narcoperiodismo last year, prize-winning Mexican journalist Javier Valdez said being a journalist “is like being on a blacklist”; the gangs “will decide what day they are going to kill you.” This May, Valdez, who reported extensively on drug cartels, including in TheTaken: True Stories of the Sinaloa Drug War , was gunned down. Sometimes, words alone can put you in grave danger.
