Posthumous Honour Points to Russia's Muzzled Media
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MOSCOW, May 2 (IPS) - A posthumous award will be presented on Press Freedom Day Thursday in honour of Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative reporter who exposed human rights abuses including rape, abductions, and killings in the breakaway republic Chechnya.
This will be the first time that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) prize is awarded posthumously. The prize, to be presented in Colombia, honours a person or organisation who have made a notable contribution to the defence of press freedom. The award has been instituted in memory of Colombian journalist Guillermo Cano who was killed in 1986 for exposing the country's drug lords. The award this year marks a worrying collapse of press freedom in Russia. "Freedom of the media has been progressively restricted by (President Vladimir) Putin's government," Ronald Koven of the U.S.-based World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC) told IPS. "Glasnost is now a memory for the Russian public. The Putin government has largely destroyed the freedom of expression heritage of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras." The killing of Politkovskaya could have been intended as a message to other reporters with the courage to investigate matters authorities want to hide, Koven said. The World Press Freedom Committee had nominated her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, for the prize "in recognition of its courage in providing an outlet for her work," he said. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) told IPS in an emailed comment that Russian authorities should pay homage to Politkovskaya by bringing her killers to justice. "No one deserves this prize more than our colleague Anna Politkovskaya, who gave her life for the pursuit of truth and the story of the forgotten war in Chechnya," the committee's executive director Joel Simon told IPS. "Her death is a great loss to journalism. This award highlights the terrible price Russian journalists pay for exposing corruption, organised crime, human rights violations, and abuse of power." Politkovskaya, special correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, was well known for her investigative reports on human rights abuses by the Russian military in Chechnya. In seven years of covering the second Chechen war, her reporting repeatedly drew the wrath of Russian authorities. Her murder in October 2006 was the 13th contract-style killing of a journalist in Russia since 2000, according to CPJ research. None of the perpetrators has been convicted. The media watchdog members who visited Moscow earlier this year were told that Russia's prosecutor general has opened a criminal investigation into several police officials in Chechnya in this case. The committee found that Russian police and prosecutors have routinely failed to investigate the murders of journalists thoroughly. "We're dismayed that the investigation into Politkovskaya's murder, while ongoing, has failed to bring justice thus far," said CPJ's Simon. "By failing to solve these murders, the government has contributed to widespread self-censorship among the Russian press corps. As a result, society has been stripped of important news in the public interest." Amnesty International says there seems to be less and less space for independent media in Russia. On the one side there is a wide variety of publications, Internet sites, and radio stations that do represent different views, but on the other, more and more concern is voiced by journalists that they are put under pressure not to give space to dissenting views. "There have been a number of cases recently where journalists and media outlets have come under scrutiny by the authorities for the kind of interviews they have been conducting," Amnesty researcher Friederike Behr told IPS. "Other journalists have reportedly been sacked for reporting dissent, or have been put under pressure by the managers or owners of their media outlets to stick to whatever official line is given out." The Washington-based Freedom House says Russian authorities' tightening of control of both print and electronic media outlets started shortly after Putin assumed office in 2000. "At a minimum, the brutal and tragic death of Anna Politikovskaya is a result of an enabling environment created by the authorities. This environment is extremely dangerous for independent-minded journalists, there is a clear culture of impunity," Christopher Walker from Freedom House told IPS. "Justice has not been served in cases of murdered journalists, many of whom were investigating political or corporate corruption at the time of their deaths." |
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