Tonight:
4°c
We are all concerned about freedom of speech and of the press. We journalists fret that libel suits are curtailing our ability to expose corruption and wrongdoing.
It's a worry. Still, in most Western countries, the worst that can happen is that a story gets spiked or a journalist has a hard time in court.
It is sobering to remember that there are places where troublesome reporters can fall prey to paid assassins.
I was reminded of this yesterday at a third-anniversary memorial service for the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
The mother of two was gunned down in the lift of her Moscow apartment block in October 2006, after years of trenchant reporting on human rights abuses in Chechnya and elsewhere for the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta, co-owned by Alexander Lebedev.
She was shot four times at point-blank range by a professional assassin; no one has been convicted of her murder, although the Russian security service, the FSB, has been implicated.
Earlier this year, her lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, was assassinated in Moscow; no one has been charged with his murder either.
Her family is still trying to get justice for Anna but the authorities are unable, unwilling or both to track down her killers.
Yesterday's memorial service was held at the journalists' church, St Brides in Fleet Street.
The chapel provided an excellent backcloth to the music, which was all Russian apart from the hymns, and movingly sung by the superb choir.
Sadly, there were only two or three dozen people there; the only camera crews were from Reuters and - oddly - Al Jazeera.
The address by Lord Judd, the former Labour MP for Portsmouth who was tasked with investigating the Chechen conflict for the Council of Europe, moved me the most. He painted a picture of a woman who was driven by her vocation.
While others - and he singled out the BBC for criticism - reported the Chechen conflict "out of context" and failed to note that in his war on extremist Islam President Putin was using the terrorists' own methods, Politkovskaya had "a compulsion to share with the public what she had seen, felt and believed".
The date of her execution happens to be the birthday of Vladimir Putin, who was and remains the most powerful man in Russia and whose ruthless tactics in Chechnya she had successfully exposed, to his certain displeasure.
In 2004, she wrote that on her flight to Beslan, the Chechen town where dozens of children were killed in a school siege, she was given a cup of tea poisoned, she said, by the FSB, the renamed KGB.
This may have seemed far-fetched at the time but now, after the Litvinenko affair and its aftermath, it makes sense.
When poison failed, bullets followed: many suspected that whoever was behind the murder may have thought it a considerate birthday present for the president to rid him of this turbulent reporter.
There are, sadly, many places where journalists now go in fear for their lives - Zimbabwe, China or even southern Italy: Roberto Saviano, whose book Gomorrah exposed the full horrors of the Naples mafia, the Camorra, is a marked man who has been forced into hiding and is protected round the clock by eight state-paid bodyguards.
But in this league of shame is the new Russia, where the state is not the protector but seen as the persecutor.
Dozens of journalists who refused to toe the line have been killed in recent years.
It was Politkovskaya's uncompromising integrity that proved fatal. How lucky that we in London don't have to die to hang on to it.
Reader views (2)
Thank you, Mira Bar-Hillel, for your fine article - I admired Anna Polikovskaya more than I can say.
Yours, Robert Chandler
- Robert Chandler, London, 08/10/2009 17:52
Report abuse
Mira Bar-Hillel's very moving article on the commemoration of the life of a brave journalist was interesting-not just because she rightly reminds us of the vital role played by journalism in combating corruption, but also the fact that Standard's new owner has kept his promise of editorial freedom for his journalists.
I hope that Mira will write much more on issues beyond her specialism; her tribute to Anna Politkovskaya
was very moving
- Justin Downes, Lndon, 08/10/2009 10:12
Report abuse
