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PRESS FREEDOM DAY-RUSSIA: Posthumous Honour Points to Muzzled Media
By Kester Kenn Klomegah
MOSCOW, May 2, 2007 (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 for the Protection of 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 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 which 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." (END)
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