You see, I love visiting Paris and especially just getting lost in the old bits of town. The insane disrespect for right angles, the narrow streets and the stacked buildings remind me a bit of Boston, only 800 years older still.
One thing certain is that, if you must be alert on Monday morning, you'd best not fly across the pond on Sunday. So it was that I arrived Saturday morning, having slept some on the flight and was well enough rested to venture out Sunday for Mass at Le Cathedral de Notre Dame de Paris. It's a nice change from the services I attend maybe monthly at a less rigorous Parish in North Carolina. At least I am fearless in Paris that the assertion, "The Body of Christ" may be answered with "Dude! Word!" as has been reported in Chapel Hill.
Inside Notre Dame is very old and dark and gray and really, really tall. When mass has ended, once the money's been collected and congregation begins to exit the Maestro pulls most of the stops out on 7800 pipes and punctuates the 1/8th mile walk to the door with organ blasts so profoundly spiritual and just plain loud they remind me most of front row, center at a Blue Oyster Cult show somewhere in upstate New York sometime last century.
But I digress... The first relevant bit of the trip was actually on my way in to the cathedral, or rather just in the front of the church, to the right, where there's this amazing statue of Charlemagne. I've always liked this monument. He's up on his horse, with a couple of pike-wielding footsoldiers at either side. If the pikemen are life-size at about 5 feet tall, then Charlie is represented as having been about 11 feet and 600 pounds of Holy Roman Dynamite with the facial hair that inspired ZZ-Top. Usually, the base of the monument is mobbed with pigeons and resting tourists. This sunday, the pigeons were there, but the tourists on the step around the monument were replaced with a mess of posters, candles and flowers--the aftermath, I guessed, of a midnight candle vigil.
So, the posters told the story pretty well. They were pictures of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist recently assassinated in Moscow, presumably because of her outspoken objection to some of the thuggish activities of the Russian Military and "Advisors" in Chechnya and to President Putin.
Now, I don't live in a cave (it's more of a dank, dark basement with no windows and a killer broadband connection). I'd heard of Mrs. Politkovskaya in some reports I'd trolled off Drudge or RealClear. I knew about her murder and a series of other contract killings of journalists and dissidents that have tended to become commonplace in free Russia lately. It's just that it was still kind of a footnote for me. It was Russia and their economic and political problems. It seemed to me odd that apparently so many people had been moved to demonstrate on the steps of Notre Dame in Paris about a murder 3000 miles away. But I was alone at the time, so I filed it.
A few days later I met a friend for lunch at the base of the Arc de Triomphe. Now at the base of the Arch there's a memorial with an Eternal Flame and there are always lots of Red and White Flower Arrangements placed by government. The gendarme patrolling the arch never seem to be the jovial sort and they carry impressive machine guns, so as you'd expect there aren't many demonstration posters lying about. Still--enough reminder that I commented to my friend about the odd little demonstration I'd discovered on Sunday. My friend has a clever way of pointing out that I am the ultimate self-obsessed American with a myopic worldview without actually saying the words. "Of course! Anna Politkovskaya has become a hero to all Europe and the demonstrations are meant to be taking place all over the world." Ouch. Embecile! I need a little steak tartare to put on that new shiner. Time to do a little research...
Here's what we knew: the late 80's saw Perestroika became Katastroyka and Boris Yeltsin became the first Russian President after Gorbachev wound down the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin immediately reinvested much of the Russian treasury into alcohol and prostitution for his personal consumption. Former KGB official and the latest in a series of short-lived prime ministers, Vladimir Putin inherited the job upon Yeltzin's quite sudden resignation from office. During the 90's, while the US foreign policy could be best described as "Trust but mollify", Putin changed the character of Russian Democracy, imposing strict limitations on, for instance, the Press and the Chechens.
During this same period, Ms. Politkovskaya was solidifying her reputation as an anti-government journalist corresponding from 2 Chechen conflicts and commenting extensively on the atrocities in Chechnya and the abuses of power back home in Moscow. So, to your abusive government in the hands of former Communist loyalists and apologists, add a big mouth reporter with a knack for popular criticism. Fold in two measures of an economy so bad that contract killers commonly work for the price of a decent cell phone in Western Europe and it's not hard to see how life can be hard on an uppity journalist.
So, there's been a handful of journalists in Russia that have criticized the government and subsequently been on the losing end of a series of well publicized contract killings. Mrs. Politkovskaya has been the latest and perhaps bravest. She was clearly aware of the attention she received. A number of her colleagues had been perforated over the past several years. Still, she dug in for details and she wrote. They threatened her and she wrote. They blacklisted her and she wrote more. They poisoned her and she kept writing. In August, she foretold her own murder.
She was reportedly working on an investigation of Government torture in Chechnya and was ready to name names. Somebody followed her home from the supermarket and shot her at close range in the chest. This was to send a message. It hurts a lot and isn't instantly fatal. I suspect while she lay there knowing what was happening, the killer walked up and shot her in the head. Mr. Putin has sworn to spare no effort in tracking down the real killer. The killing occurred on October 7, Mr. Putin's birthday.
The demonstrations began on October 8. From her wikipedia entry:
The bits of her writing that I was able to find on the web are fascinating. She was not afraid to mix it up with the big dogs. She calls out Mr. Putin. She identifies officers in charge of war crimes and atrocities by name. It's easy to see why some folks would probably like to have her silenced. It's probably not too hard to narrow down the list of folks who might have called the shots on this one. Their names are in her articles.On 8 October, 2006, hundreds rallied in downtown Moscow to protest the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and the recent crackdown on ethnic Georgians.[33] The demonstration was described by the Moscow-based liberal Echo of Moscow radio station as "the largest protest rally of the opposition recently held in Russia."[34]
During the day following information about Politkovskaya's death, there was a demonstration and memorial consisting of 500 people in Moscow, as well as 300 people gathering in St. Petersburg.
A day after the murder more than one thousand people gathered at the Russian embassy in Helsinki, Finland to pay their respects to Politkovskaya (according to Helsingin Sanomat article published on 22.Octoberr, there were about 3000 people). The demonstration was silent, with people holding candles. Two of Politkovskaya's books have been published in Finland as translated editions.[35]
On 10 October, 2,000 demonstrators called Putin a "murderer" during his visit to Dresden, Germany.[36][37][38]
It's quite obvious that she was passionate about her work, that she understood the impact she had in life (perhaps not the explosive impact of her death) and that she remained stoic about the consequences:
"My life can be difficult; more often, humiliating. I am not, after all, that young at 47 to keep encountering rejection and having my own pariah status rubbed in my face. But I can live with it."
Do svidaniya, Mrs. Politkovskaya. God keep you. And now that you've left the race, may there always be men and women courageous enough to carry the baton.
Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya
1958 - 2006
RIP
DT
