Friday, February 20, 2009
Are You Fucking Kidding Me?
The Russian government has sent a clear message to the world: criticize us and we will murder you. Furthermore, we will acquit the people who murdered you, despite the fact that witnesses saw you do it. Read the story here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The articles in Western Press don't begin to cover the complexity of what is going on.
ReplyDeleteIf the Russian government didn't want an investigation of this murder the security services would have never caught anyone and there would be no trial.
The fact that there was a trial shows that there was a green light from the Kremlin to get somebody for the murder. In other words, they wanted to say to the west, "see these two guys in prison! We actually punish people for killing journalists."
The Kremlin can control the Security Services that caught the right people and they can control the judge but they can't control the jury and jury gave a non-guilty verdict.
I don't think that Politkovskaya was killed on Putin's orders. She was killed by either
A) renegade ultra-nationalist elements in Russia's vase security apparatus.
or
B) on the orders of the 30-something president of Chechnya who runs a semi-autonomous pro-Kremlin dictatorship in that ravished republic of the Russian federation.
So the Kremlin didn't want to investigate this case to its conclusion because that would prove embarrassing because it would show that there are murderous elements in the regime that it cannot control. But the Kremlin did want to punish someone for the murder for international reputation. So they caught two low-level people who monitored Politkovskaya's activities but didn't acually pull the trigger.
They expected a quick trial, a quick guilty verdict and a quick move on to other matters.
Instead a Russian jury acquitted these guys.
"The judge, Yevgeni Zubov, ordered the Russian Investigative Committee to reopen the case and told the Interfax news agency that he would give investigators material evidence."
This means Kremlin still wants to lock them up. The judge would never reopen the case if the Kremlin really wanted to leave it as is.
The whole thing is very Byzantine. But the press just runs with a simpler narrative of people getting way with murder. Which is true but not completely true. Somebody is getting away with murder but not in the simple way it has been described.
I was really hoping that you would comment on this, because I know that my knowledge of Russian politics is minimal at best. Your comment was probably the most informative on my site since its conception. Thank you.
ReplyDelete