A sad first anniversary

It is hard to believe that it is 12 months ago, today, that Ana Politkovskaya was brutally murdered. She was undoubtedly a beacon in an otherwise bleak press in Russia. Although some men have now been arrested in relation to the murder the whole episode surrounding her death is mired in controversy.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, in her Editor's Cut in The Nation, "Anna Politkovskaya's Legacy", remembers Politkovskaya and pays tribute to her:

"One year ago, the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered. The fearless, crusading journalist for Russia's leading opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, was just 48 years old when she was found in her Moscow apartment building, shot in the head.

Her unflinching investigative reporting on the brutality and corruption of the Chechen war, as well as other abuses of official power, had made her the target of numerous death threats. On one of her many reporting trips to Chechnya, she was detained and beaten by Russian troops who threw her into a pit, threatened to rape her and performed a mock execution. But, as one of her colleagues wrote soon after her murder, "Anna believed that fate had given her a mission: to tell people the truth about what was actually going on in Chechnya." When she was killed, Politkovskaya was working on an article claiming Chechen civilians were being tortured by security forces loyal to the region's pro-Moscow Consul and now President Ramzan Kadyrov.

In an editorial published immediately after Politkovskaya's assassination, the paper's staff pledged, "While there is a Novaya Gazeta, her killers won't sleep soundly." Four days after her death, the newspaper published her unfinished article, along with photos of the torture victims."

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