On October 4, 2007, Natalia Estemirova was honored with the inaugural Anna Politkovskaya Award. Anna, a courageous journalist for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was murdered on October 7, 2006, in her apartment building in Moscow. She had worked tirelessly with Natalia to uncover the truth of the atrocities being committed in Chechnya, and made them known to the world, despite seven years of threats against her life.
They met in November 2003—the famous journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the policeman Sergey Lapin—in a tumbledown court building in Grozny. He was accompanied by an escort of several armored personnel carriers (APCs), which surrounded the building. She was with several of her friends, each of whom had suffered in one way or another at the hands of Lapin and his associates. He was on trial, and the very fact that this had actually happened was largely due to Anna.
Two years earlier, Anna had met the Murdalov family, whose only son, Zelimkhan, had disappeared.
At the time, Chechen police were considered incapable of maintaining law and order in Chechnya and police had been brought in from Khanty-Mansijsk, in the north of Russia. The "Khantys" has moved into a building that housed a boarding school for deaf children. In January 2001, they dragged 26-year-old Zelimkhan Murdalov there. He was tortured and tormented for several hours in an attempt to turn him into an informant. Then, when he was semi-conscious, he was thrown into a cell. The following morning, the dying Murdalov was dragged out again. That was the last time anyone saw him.
How many other corpses they had taken out of the building that year the Khantys themselves would probably find it difficult to recall. But it is clear that dozens disappeared in the boarding school and its vicinity.
Shocked by the despair of Zelimkhan's mother and impressed by his father's resolve, Anna wrote an article, titled "The Disappearance," in which she named Sergey Lapin as one of the culprits for the first time. When witnesses began to "talk" in her articles, the horrific details of what Lapin had done to various detainees sent shivers down many readers' spines.
Although Anna’s newspaper received a letter threatening her, Anna turned her attention to the Murdalov family, who were in obvious danger. The family lived in the two rooms still standing in the ruins of their house. From the street you could see through the bullet and shell holes right into the Murdalovs' house. It was in that house that Anna stayed on her several visits to Chechnya.
No, she was not reckless. She was well aware of the gravity of the situation. When the situation became too dangerous, Anna succeeded in getting Zelimkhan's mother, Rukiyat, and his sister, Zalina, out of Russia. By then, they had managed to achieve the unimaginable. The main suspect in their son’s disappearance, Sergey Lapin, who had done his best to intimidate Anna as well, had been detained and brought to Grozny.
After that, she stayed only with friends. I was always afraid when complete strangers approached her in the street to talk to her. But she was not afraid to stay with me in my flat, even though there was no glass in the windows and the door had been broken down several times by the Russian army and looters, and was no thicker than an eggshell.
Lapin did not spend long in detention. The prosecutor found him to be a low-risk case, and he was released into his own custody. Immediately afterwards, the thirty most important documents relating to his case mysteriously disappeared. Had it not been for Anna's angry articles, the case would have been lost. But Anna managed to publish copies of the disappeared papers, and then several of them oddly turned up later in the prosecutor's office.
So time passed, and it was in that courtroom in autumn 2003 when Anna and Lapin finally looked each other in the eye. She looked straight at him, but he kept averting his eyes, unsure of himself in her presence, even when protected by armed bodyguards.
Yet when the judge finally ordered the officers of the court to put handcuffs on him a year and a half later, at one of the hearings, Anna was not there. The situation in Chechnya had become too dangerous for her, and her friends had asked her to stay away. Her editor also forbade her from going there. She had worked so hard on this case. She had found Stanislav Markelov, the only lawyer in Moscow who would agree to go to Grozny. She had persuaded Amnesty International to pay his fees because the Murdalovs did not have the money. She had even gotten all the Russian TV channels to broadcast the trial. Finally, the judge pronounced the sentence - eleven years for torture and humiliation—but Anna only learned about it from Stas, the lawyer.
Anna was murdered on October 7, 2006. On October 26, the Supreme Court overturned Lapin’s conviction.
A new trial is now going on in Grozny. Once again we hear witness statements about the events in the cells of the boarding school that make our hearts miss a beat, and once again we have to persuade witnesses to come forward despite possible repercussions. So who are the winners? There are none. Yet thousands of young people's lives have been saved, even though they may never get to know it.
The building where people were maimed and murdered is no longer there. They pulled it down, allegedly to build a new boarding school for the deaf. This was over a year ago. The deaf children are still making do with a few small rooms in a private house, while the wasteland that was once the boarding house is overgrown with weeds. There are those with a vested interest in keeping this Russian Abu Ghraib forgotten—so that they can once again kidnap and torture. Our task, however, is to uncover their deeds and to fight them. Anna was at the forefront of this work for many years.
She is no more. Now it is up to us to continue her work. |
Listen to audio of the reading
