Time USA - August 19, 2019

(Nancy Kaufman) #1

37


Dark My son’s father was killed while reporting


on Russian hired

guns. I’m still

waiting for justice

By Irina Gordienko

O


<


The author
in the Novaya
Gazeta office
in Moscow
on July 15

ne year ago, on july 30, 2018,
three Russian journalists were
shot to death and their bodies
left on the side of a road near
a conflict zone in central Africa. Their
names were Orkhan Dzhemal, a renowned
war correspondent; Alexander Rastorguev,
an award- winning filmmaker; and Kirill
Radchenko, their cameraman. The purpose
of their trip to the Central African Republic
was to film a documentary about the Wagner
Group, a Russian private military company
that has been active in several African coun-
tries in recent years and is believed to have
ties to the Russian military and the state.
Authorities in Moscow say the reporters
were killed in a random act of violence. It

was a robbery gone wrong, goes the offi-
cial line. But the colleagues of the victims
have investigated the murders indepen-
dently over the past year and have con-
cluded that known associates of the Wag-
ner Group were involved in the killings.
The victims’ friends and families have
pleaded with the authorities in Russia to
consider this evidence. Among the most
vocal has been Dzhemal’s ex-wife Irina
Gordienko, one of Russia’s best-known re-
porters. Ahead of the first anniversary of
the murders, Gordienko described her expe-
rience of dealing with Russian authorities
over the past year, not as a journalist but as
a person bereaved and looking for justice.
A version of her account was first pub-
lished in Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s
last independent newspapers, where Gor-
dienko is a correspondent. With her per-
mission and support, TIME is publishing
an edited translation of the piece as part of
its Guardians series on the escalating war
against the freedom of the press worldwide.

mosT of my 17 years as a journalisT
have been spent reporting on the tougher
parts of Russia, around the region known
as the Caucasus, which has lived through
many wars. I have seen dead bodies there,
and the signs of inhuman torture that the
heroes of my articles endured. I have writ-
ten a lot about prisons, some of which still
haunt me in my dreams. I’ve had to deal
with just about every sort of police officer,
investigator and prosecutor. But nothing
quite prepared me for that day one year
ago when Russian authorities summoned
me in relation to the murder of my former
husband, the journalist Orkhan Dzhemal.
Under the rules of Russian criminal
procedure, they had classified me as a vic-
tim in the case. I wasn’t the only one. Kirill
and Alexander both left behind grieving
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