The Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR) has two articles dedicated to the murdered Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. In the first, Tom de Waal remembers the “defender of ordinary people’s rights.”

Some people who work in conflict zones have walked with death for so long that they seem untouched by it and only more alive. Not just their work, but their sheer survival in a hell of human suffering becomes an example to others.

Anna Politkovskaya had that aura - until she was murdered in her apartment block in Moscow last Saturday. What adds to the grief and anger at her death is disbelief. Anna had defied death so often that she had come to seem untouchable.

Anna’s faults were also her shining strengths. Her compassion went beyond politeness. She had a deep emotional sympathy for the persecuted that filled her journalism. She was extraordinarily tough.

[…]

A forty-something mother of two teenager children, she had no interest in the thrills of a front-line reporter, but began a painstaking chronicle of how the Russian war machine was crushing people who were supposedly its citizens. With the rest of the Russian media kowtowing to the official line or keeping quiet and western journalists as good as banned from the war-zone, it felt at times that it was just one woman against the entire state.

If the officials began to loathe her and most of the media shunned her, ordinary people knew what kind of person she was. In her tiny office in Moscow, I saw her collect that day’s sheaf of letters from people with a story to tell, believing that she was the only person in Russia who could speak up for them.

In the second, IWPR Chechen Coordinator Timur Aliev remembers his first contact with Politkovskaya. He also talks of the legacy and precedent she set for reporting from Chechnya.

Politkovskaya herself won a huge number of human rights and journalistic awards both at home and abroad. She often travelled to other countries to speak as an expert on Chechen and Caucasian affairs – and used every such occasion to talk about the problems facing Chechnya, not as a free trip to Europe, as her detractors sometimes said.

“It’s very, very important. Opportunities to be heard by important people in Europe come up only rarely, so one can’t miss them – one needs to get the most out of them,” she said.

For people in Chechnya, Politkovskaya was tantamount to a miracle-worker.

[…]

Tlisova believes the murder of Politkovskaya was designed to intimidate Russian journalists in the most public way possible, and she fears the tactic may work. “They’re saying that her murder will awaken the public’s social conscience, but I am worried that the opposite will happen – her passing will make journalists censor themselves,” she said.

[…]

“Anna’s reporting was uncompromising, with nothing left out, and it gave her almost iconic status among readers in Chechnya, Russia and abroad,” said Lokshina. “The possibility that she could be killed off in casual fashion seemed unthinkable – it would have been a monstrous, crazy, inhuman crime and would have created a scandal the Russian authorities just couldn’t afford.

“But we were wrong to think that. Anna’s been murdered.”

So what happens now? According to Lokshina, western journalists and politicians are suggesting that there is almost no one left to tell the truth about Chechnya and the rest of the North Caucasus – “the torture, the abductions, and other monstrous crimes against civilians”.

But she insists they are wrong.

“To fall silent now would be to play into the hands of Anna’s killers, to bury her a second time, and to allow her life to be dismissed,” said Lokshina. “That cannot be allowed to happen. One can’t allow oneself to be afraid.”