The shadows from the p(E)ast

Putin is back in Dresden. The place he learned his early KGB style. Along with his visit is another round of the "Petersburger Dialog" sessions, which had been initiated in 2001 to foster a dialogue on civic societies & rights, politics and press.


(Ah,.... it's good being back in the "Middle East" where it all began.")

Quite coincidently the dialogue had a huge subject, the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. Just 500 forlorn people gathered in Moscow to mourn her killing on the weekend. The press attendance at the Dresden meeting might be just as high.
Journalists on both sides are still not sure what the brutal assasination will mean. The West is more and more disappointed about the poor political and civic track record of the Putin Gang in the Kremlin, the East is lamenting the West's bias to an unfair and one-dimensional coverage of the killing. One is fore sure, she was pressing the pain points of Russia, and one of these is still Chechnya and the human rights violations there.
In one of her last interviews with Radio Liberty she spoke about her final project, Kadyrow in Chechnya:

"Kadyrov is a Stalin of our times. This is true for the Chechen people. Many of our colleagues have gone out of their way to make us believe that this is a small percentage, that absolute evil can triumph today so that in some hypothetical future this evil can become good. This is absolutely not true. As for the admiration felt for Kadyrov, you know, the situation is as it was under Stalin. If you [hear someone] speaking officially, publicly, openly, there is admiration. As soon as you [hear someone] speak secretly, softly, confidentially, you're told: 'We hate him intensely.' This split is absolute in people's souls. This is a very dangerous thing."

Kadyrow Junior might be a big topic. He is just about to apply fully to become the president of Chechnya. He hands out bribes openly to religious leaders (who he says, he wants to get back out of the Wahabbist in the country), he builds water parks and huge landscape parks around his residency, all sponsored out of a "foundation" of his May 2004 killed father. Is this ever going to change? We think no,....

Sooner or later for Politkovskaya

Are we surprised? No. Actually we are, but in a different way. We wonder why it took the greedy undercurrents so long to get a hold of one of Russia's most brilliant political journalists. Now the mourning is big and people are asking themselves why and how this could happen.


(As always Russia is too late; Courtesy of TheStandard)

The answer lies within Russia, as always. In a country where murky business, state-authored is to be the norm, where journalists are always with one foot in jail or in the coffin, in such a country it was just sooner or later for Politkovskaja. In her book "In Putin's Russia" she gave impressive testimony on killings in Chechnya, or ridiculous legal systems and court behaviours in Russia. Albeit, no one inside Russia was really listening. Everyone was, as usual, busy in struggling on the individual daily fight. Just like everyday. The few people in Russia who actually read the book, I guess you must have looked pretty long in Dom Knigi on Novie Arbat to find it anyway (if it was ever translated in Russian at all), might just have said that, yes it is a pitty with the system and that Russia needs a strong hand to get things right. Just the ordinary nationlistic lines. This weekend Russia has not lost anything actually. It barely has anything to loose anyway anymore.