Everyone needs a hero. Anna Politkovskaya was mine. And others’. In addition to the 2005 Civil Courage Prize, she received the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation in 2002, as well as prizes from the Overseas Press Club and Amnesty International. In 2004, she was a joint winner of the Olof Palme Prize for her human rights work.
I met Anna in November, 2000, at Women Waging Peace, a network of about 450 leaders within the Initiative for Inclusive Security, which advocates for the full inclusion of women in peace processes around the world. That initiative was incubated at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We try to protect and support women peace experts in part by bringing them to the attention of policy makers at the State Department, World Bank, White House, and other halls of power.
This past Saturday Anna was executed: shot point blank in the head with a revolver outside her apartment. The gun was placed by her side, indicating a contract-killing. She was 48.
Born in 1958, Anna graduated from
She told me once that because she was female, she was considered less
threatening and could get behind the lines, where she reported on abuses the
army was perpetrating against Muslim communities under cover of fighting
terrorism. She described how, to avoid a military checkpoint, she’d made her way
down to a river, then trekked through deep snow all night.
Another time, she posed as a farm wife sitting on a pile of hay in a
wagon; she smiled that without her wire-rims she couldn’t see a thing. Another
time she was apprehended by Russian forces but freed as night fell by a
sympathetic major. In February 2000, the FSB (former KGB) confined her in a pit
in
Despite those dangers, like many of the women we have sponsored, Anna Politkovskaya kept working to expose the injustices around her. Fearless, but not naïve, she knew her life was on the line as she described the moral decay of 100,000 security forces, whose abuses only spawn more terrorism. Still, she continued to document zachistka ("mop-up"), where young men, or any others considered suspicious, are rounded up from their homes, sometimes tortured, and often executed.
Because of her standing with the Chechens, Politkovskaya acted as a
mediator during the Dubrovka Theater siege in
I last saw Anna in December. She and a small group were discussing the role of women in the security sector, as protectors of human rights, journalists, politicians, and leaders of civil society. They called for women’s solidarity internationally to ensure peace and stability. Anna spoke about freedom of speech and how crucial it is for NGOs to challenge the government. Her words then bear the weight of her sacrifice now.
That day I took two pictures of Anna: the first, somber; the second, her head back, laughing. I think of those two images of her as we mourn her murder and celebrate her life. She understood that with freedom comes responsibility to work for those denied such freedom. As we grieve her death, forty years too soon, we must redouble our efforts and carry forward her legacy.
Swanee Hunt, former