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Written by Gurinder  , on 29-06-2012 04:12
during a meeting of his genrenmovt that he had had enough, and that Politkovskaya was a condemned woman. I was told about it by members of the genrenmovt.What for? For not writing the way Kadyrov wanted? "Anybody who is not one of us is an enemy." Surkov said so, and Surkov is Ramzan Kadyrov's main supporter in Putin's entourage."Ramzan told me, 'She is so stupid she doesn't know the value of money. I offered her money but she didn't take it,'" an old acquaintance, a senior officer in militia special forces, told me that same day. I met him secretly. He is "one of us", unlike me, and would face difficulties if we were caught conferring. When it was time for me to leave it was already evening, and he urged me to stay in this secure location. He was afraid I would be killed."You mustn't go out," he told me. "Ramzan is very angry with you."I decided to leave nevertheless. Someone else was waiting for me in Grozny and we needed to talk through the night, also in secret. He offered to have me taken there in a militia car, but that struck me as even more risky. I would be a target for the fighters."Do they at least have guns in the house you are going to?" he continued anxiously. Throughout the war I have been caught in the middle. When some are threatening to kill you, you are protected by their enemies, but tomorrow the threat will come from somebody else.Why am I going on at such length about this? Only in order to explain that people in Chechnya are afraid for me, and I find that very touching. They fear for me more than I fear for myself, and that is how I survive.Why has Ramzan vowed to kill me? I once interviewed him and printed the interview just as he gave it, complete with all his characteristic moronic stupidity, ignorance, and satanic inclinations. Ramzan was sure I would completely rewrite the interview, and present him as intelligent and honourable. That is, after all, how the majority of journalists behave now, those who are "on our side".Is that enough to make someone vow to kill you? The answer is as simple as the morality encouraged personally by Putin. "We are merciless to enemies of the Reich." "Who is not with us is against us." "Those who are against us must be destroyed.""Why have you got such a bee in your bonnet about this severed head?" VasiliyPanchenkov asks me back in Moscow. He is director of the press office for the Interior Ministry troops, but a decent man. "Have you nothing better to worry about?" I am asking him to comment on the events in Kurchaloy for our newspaper. "Just forget it. Pretend it never happened. I'm asking you for your own good!"But how can I forget it, when it did happen?I loathe the Kremlin's line, elaborated by Surkov, dividing people into those who are "on our side", "not on our side", or even "on the other side". If a journalist is "on our side", he or she will get awards, respect, perhaps be invited to become a deputy in the Duma.If a journalist is "not on our side", however, he or she will be deemed a supporter of the European democracies, of European values, and automatically become a pariah. That is the fate of all who oppose our "sovereign democracy", our "traditional Russian democracy". (What on earth that is supposed to be, nobody knows; but they swear allegiance to it nevertheless: "We are for sovereign democracy!")I am not really a political animal. I have never joined any party and would consider it a mistake for a journalist, in Russia at least, to do so. I have never felt the urge to stand for the Duma, although there were years when I was invited to.So what is the crime that has earned me this label of not being "one of us"? I have merely reported what I have witnessed, no more than that. I have written and, less frequently, I have spoken. I am even reluctant to comment, because it reminds me too much of the imposed opinions of my Soviet childhood and youth. It seems to me our readers are capable of interpreting what they read for themselves. That is why my principal genre is reportage, sometimes, admittedly, with my own interjections. I am not an investigating magistrate, but somebody who describes the life around us for those who cannot see it for themselves, because what is shown on television and written about in the overwhelming majority of newspapers is emasculated and doused with ideology. People know very little about life in other parts of their own country, and sometimes even in their own region.The Kremlin responds by trying to block my access to information, its ideologists supposing that this is the best way to make my writing ineffectual. It is impossible, however, to stop someone fanatically dedicated to this profession of reporting the world around us. My life can be difficult, more often humiliating. I am not, after all, so young at 47 to keep encountering rejection and having my own pariah status rubbed in my face, but I can live with it.I will not go into the other joys of the path I have chosen, the poisoning, the arrests, the threats in letters and over the internet, the telephoned death threats, the weekly summonses to the procurator-general's office to sign statements about practically every article I write (the first question being "How and where did you obtain this information?"). Of course I don't like the constant derisive articles about me which appear in other newspapers and on websites that have long presented me as the madwoman of Moscow. I find it disgusting to live this way; I would like a bit more understanding.The main thing, however, is to get on with my job, to describe the life I see, to receive visitors every day in our editorial office who have nowhere else to bring their troubles, because the Kremlin finds their stories off-message, so that the only place they can be aired is in our newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Translated by Arch Tait. This piece will be included in Another Sky, an English PEN anthology to be published by Profile Books in spring 2007. For more information, visit www.englishpen.org. Anna Politkovskaya's books include A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya (2001) and Putin's Russia (2004). Read her session at the 2005 Hay festival at www.hayfestival.com/archive/results.aspx?eventid=63 Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 |
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