She tried to tell the truth

It is extremely difficult to understand what is happening in Russia today, not only for foreigners, but also for many Russian citizens, due to the false and fragmentary image of the country given by the mass media. That’s why it is very important to have journalists who try to offer a true image of the situation, and who try to understand the causes of events and their motivations. Anna Politkovskaya, 48 years old, assassinated in the lift of the apartment block where she lived in Moscow on 7 October 2006, was the special correspondent of the paper Novaya Gazeta and the author of books that documented Russian criminality. She was a journalist who challenged the system and the authorities. She had been banned from Russian television – but, paradoxically, her face was familiar to everyone. I did not know Anna personally, but we met several times during press conferences at Amnesty International: I as one of the reporters, she as one of the speakers. She tried to tell the world the truth about the crimes committed in Chechnya, about the violations of human rights that were being registered throughout Russia, about the abuses of power, and about the corruption that exists in all strata and corners of society. And I had seen how saddened she had been after the aggressive questions of fellow-reporters who supported the government, and who had no interest in the truth. Anna felt shame that those persons, who called themselves “journalists”, could be so disloyal, so little objective and ignorant… Just as Andrei Sakharov or Alexander Solzhenitsyn were “the conscience of the nation”, so Anna Politkovskaya was “the conscience of journalism” in Russia. After her death, the head of the Faculty of Journalism at the University of Moscow, Yassen Zassoursky, remarked: “They have shot at our conscience”. Teaching students at the same university and trying to arouse their consciences in evaluating reality, I have often cited Anna’s texts and in many practical cases asked students to imagine what approach Anna would have to particular situations. I admire her profoundly for not having emigrated from Russia despite the death threats she had often received. The most notorious case was the attempt to poison her on the plane in which she was flying south to Beslan to investigate the tragedy of the school hostages. On that occasion, the doctors had saved her life, but this time they failed to stop the bullets. Over 40 journalists have been assassinated in Russia since 1993, but not even one assassin has yet been jailed. For example, over two years after the killing in Moscow of the American journalist Paul Khlebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes Magazine, the instigator of the crime has still not been identified. At the time she was killed, Anna Politkovskaya was working on an article that spoke of the tortures inflicted on Chechen civilians by the security forces faithful to the prime minister of the region, a puppet of the Russian government. Her reportage had been published in the main Russian paper of the opposition, Novaya Gazeta , one of the few independent organs of the press to survive among the mass media increasingly subject to State control. Anna was assassinated on the twentieth anniversary of the announcement of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost – which rapidly led to growing press freedom in Russia. Gorbachev called her killing “a grave crime against the country, against us all… [and] a blow for the democratic and independent press as a whole”.Anna Politkovskaya had repeatedly condemned also the culpable indifference of Western society to what was happening in Russia. The Western media wrote mainly of civil rights; in many cases I too felt the indifference of Western Catholics for what was happening to Catholics in Russia… In life as in death, Anna gave proof of her ability to expose the dark side of modern Russia. All her publications had an ideal, an objective: that of serving the common good, bringing nearer the time of solidarity and subsidiarity, and making society more human and hence more Christian. That’s why so many people are praying for her and for a cross to be placed on her tomb. Her whole life could be described as an appeal to all of us – journalists and readers, Russians and foreigners, Christians and non-Christians, believers and non-believers – to put out into the deep, duc in altum ! It’s an eternal appeal, but, as you will recall, it’s one that Pope John Paul II in his Apostolic Letter Tertio Millenio Ineunte especially recommended to the people of the Third Millennium. Anna Politkovskaya made this appeal ring out loud and clear in Russia.Let us pray for Anna. Let us courageously put out into the deep and spur all those who surround us!