Win One, Lose One
Elif Shafak has been acquitted of "insulting Turkishness" in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul. The judge took all of 90 minutes to dismiss the charges as baseless. Shafak did not bother to attend the trial, as she was giving birth in California at the time.
Go, her.
Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot to death in her apartment building in Moscow, just as she was about to deliver to her publisher a lengthy article on Russian atrocities in Chechnya. She was hit by four shots from a silenced Makarov pistol.
This is the second female Russian investigative dissident journalist to be shot in her apartment building in a couple years.
It is a hazardous undertaking to contradict the Tsar. Who said, by the way, that the government “will take every step to investigate objectively the tragic death of the journalist Politkovskaya.” First step in the investigation was to confiscate all her papers.
Said Salman Rushdie: “Like all great investigative reporters, Anna Politkovskaya brought forward human truths that rewrote the official story. We will continue to read her, and learn from her, for years.”
It has been a bleak year for democracy and human rights.
Go, her.
Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot to death in her apartment building in Moscow, just as she was about to deliver to her publisher a lengthy article on Russian atrocities in Chechnya. She was hit by four shots from a silenced Makarov pistol.
This is the second female Russian investigative dissident journalist to be shot in her apartment building in a couple years.
It is a hazardous undertaking to contradict the Tsar. Who said, by the way, that the government “will take every step to investigate objectively the tragic death of the journalist Politkovskaya.” First step in the investigation was to confiscate all her papers.
Said Salman Rushdie: “Like all great investigative reporters, Anna Politkovskaya brought forward human truths that rewrote the official story. We will continue to read her, and learn from her, for years.”
It has been a bleak year for democracy and human rights.
posted by dubjay at 8:51 PM
3 Comments:
A dreadful year indeed for democracy and human rights. Sometimes it feels as though we're living in one of John Barnes's visions of the future.
Argh.
Love, C.
HJF, that was cool.
Chalk another successful prediction up to me! And for once, this one isn't depressing.
Putin came up through the ranks of the KGB and has a thoroughly "Checkist" mentality.
If you cross him and are within his power he'll kill you with no more compunction than he would for stepping on a cockroach. Incidentally, there are about one-third fewer living Chechens than there were in 1991.
I doubt the assassination will cause much of a ruckus in Russia. Sympathy for the Chechens there is somewhere between zero and nothing, and most Russians heartily wish that Stalin had killed them all, rather than just half of them.
(They were deported to Central Asia in 1944 as a "collaborator nationality".)
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