Memorial party "Two years without Politkovskaya" held in Moscow

On October 6, on the eve of the second anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya's murder, the conference hall of the International Society "Memorial" hosted a party in memory of the journalist. The hall was packed. Anna's big portrait was decorated by three roses - two red and a white ones, as if she was still alive.

The organizers of the event were the Society "Memorial" and the "Caucasian Knot".

The party was opened by Arseniy Roginskiy, Chairman of the Board of the International "Memorial". He invited the audience to commemorate Anna with a minute of silence. "On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was killed. It's a meaningful day for the country and, probably, for each of us. We've named the today's event 'Two years without Politkovskaya'. We thought a lot how to hold it and decided that the best way to show the grandeur of her personality is to speak not so much about her, but about fates of the people, about whom she wrote, and about the problems, which she raised, about her topics and subjects."

All the participants of the party stuck to this format.

Svetlana Gannushkina, leader of the Committee "Civil Assistance", told about her first meeting with Politkovskaya. Anna telephoned to the "Civil Assistance" in August 1996 with a romantic idea to write about the Chechen children who would go to Moscow schools. Gannushkina then told the journalist that under the order of Mayor Luzhkov only those children could study in the capital, whose parents had registration ("propiska") in Moscow. "But their parents not only lacked any registration in Moscow - they had no idea where to get food for their children. Troops are storming Grozny, people run from there, and nobody meets them in Moscow or in any other cities."

On the following day Anna came to the "Civil Assistance" with money for the Chechen children raised at the editorial board of the "Obschaya Gazeta", where she had worked then, and soon her first article on this topic appeared. "This was the start of our cooperation, and this was the start of Politkovskaya's Chechnya."

Then, there were pretty plenty of common topics - destiny of Baku refugees, first accommodated at a Moscow hotel and then evicted nobody knows where; execution of 20 boys in Khasavyurt, which were violently redressed, and in whose hands cartridges were put, to make them look like young "militants"; fate of Mukhodiev brothers; human rights activists Osman Boliev and Zaurbek Talkhigov, and many others, in which Svetlana Gannushkina and her Committee are engaged till now.

Alexander Cherkasov, employee of the Human Rights Centre "Memorial", spoke about kidnappings committed by power agents in Chechnya and Ingushetia. In the second Chechen war this theme became the main one for Politkovskaya - her rubric was entitled directly: "People Are Disappearing".

"Anna had done actually a lot to eradicate the terrible practice of kidnappings in Northern Caucasus," Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, representative of the HRC "Memorial" in Ingushetia, continued the topic. "The truth about violent disappearances was such a blow to the image of Russia, that they had preferred to give it up gradually."

The heyday for fabricating of criminal cases was in 2005-2006, the conveyor was launched in Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria, and Anna Politkovskaya took the topic with all her passion. She wrote quite a lot about the Operative and Search Bureau - the so-called ORB-2 in Grozny, about the notorious investigatory group of the State Office of Public Prosecutor in charge of investigating the attack on Nazran under command of Konstantin Krivorotov - dozens and maybe hundreds of people had passed through this group and were terribly tortured there at falsification of criminal cases on terrorism.

Shortly before Anna's death this Konstantin Krivorotov, "the unsinkable aircraft carrier of Russian Prosecutor's Office", as Politkovskaya called him, was dismissed from his position, and a service investigation was at last started on facts of falsification. This service investigation resulted in nothing; however, the work of the said investigatory group was stopped.

They no longer torture people at ORB-2. Probably, this news would have pleased Anna Politkovskaya.

Olga Trusevich, employee of the Human Rights Centre "Memorial", spoke about Anna Politkovskaya's participation in establishing truth about the victims of the operation to release refuges at the "Nord-Ost" performance and the current status of the case. Politkovskaya wrote articles about each of the casualties: name, surname, row and seat in the hall, and what happened with the person. She had a long list of relatives to visit and talk, however, it remained unfinished.

The topic of Christina Gorelik, journalist of Radio Liberty, who worked with Anna Politkovskaya on air on many topics, was Vladimir Bukreev's case - the judge who had passed a verdict of guilty to Colonel Yuri Budanov for murdering Elza Kungaeva, a Chechen girl of 18.

"With Anna, we prepared several broadcasts on the topic, and literally a week before her death she met Bukreev to take a copy of the case file from him. They agreed a meeting on Sunday, October 7, to take his interview. However, the big material intended for 'Novaya Gazeta' never appeared. But I hope that media will come back to this case - it deserves much more attention."

"What she did was not just journalism," said Sergey Kovalyov, chairman of the Russian "Memorial". "It was her sacred war on everything she hated."