| POLITICAL killings in Russia are rarely political.
Ten members of the Duma,
the lower house of parliament, have been murdered in the past ten
years,
plus a host of sundry other officials. Though the cases are rarely
solved,
most carry a strong whiff of corruption or business disputes. But
Sergei
Yushenkov, a Duma member shot dead on April 17th outside his home,
was--so
everyone says--clean.
Compare his murder with that of another Duma member, Vladimir
Golovlyov,
co-chairman with him of the small Liberal Russia party. Colleagues
at first
denounced that killing last August, a few months after the party
was
founded, as an attempt to intimidate the opposition. But a consensus
quickly grew that Mr Golovlyov might well have died for murkier
reasons: as
the head of a privatisation scheme in the early 1990s, he was
alleged to
have embezzled large sums of money from people whose power later
grew as
his did not.
After Mr Yushenkov's death, in contrast, politicians of all stripes
lined
up to attest to his honesty and lack of interest in business,
and to hint
at political motives. He had a history as a dissident: first as
a Soviet
army colonel who publicly argued for military reform, then as
a legislator
who criticised authoritarian tendencies in post-Soviet governments.
He had lobbied against the military campaigns in Chechnya. After
a series
of apartment-block bombings in 1999 that killed 300 people, Mr
Yushenkov
and a handful of other deputies began investigating allegations
that they
were not, as claimed, the work of Chechen terrorists, but of the
authorities themselves, eager to stoke popular support for the
second
campaign in Chechnya, which began shortly afterwards. Mr Yushenkov
kept
plugging away at the theory, and last year he helped Boris Berezovsky,
an
exiled business magnate and Liberal Russia's main financial backer,
to
distribute a film about it.
That connection means that even if business or personal reasons
were not
behind Mr Yushenkov's death, there is no shortage of conceivable
political
ones. Supporters of the bombing conspiracy theory think he was
getting too
close to the truth. Others point to his public falling-out with
Mr
Berezovsky, whom he expelled from Liberal Russia after the tycoon
voiced
support for the Communists. Mr Berezovsky, himself an arch-enemy
of the
Kremlin, claimed that the rift between the two men was exaggerated,
to
allow Liberal Russia to win official approval as a party, which
it had
trouble getting because of its links with himself. Some devious
minds think
Mr Yushenkov was killed specifically to cast suspicion on Mr Berezovsky.
There are more pedestrian theories. On April 23rd police arrested
a young
man fitting the killer's description, whose father had been jailed
a few
years previously for making threats against Mr Yushenkov. Revenge,
they
said, could be the motive.
Few people, however, doubt that the murder was indeed a contract
killing:
mainly because, as in many such cases, the killer left the gun
behind.
While contract hits are not as frequent as in the wild days of
the early
1990s, a steady trickle of fairly high-ranking officials, along
with many
smaller fry who do not make the news, are still shot to order
every year.
And the gunmen are hardly ever caught, probably because whoever
ordered the
hit has the power to thwart the investigation.
The only other victim to match both Mr Yushenkov's level of respect
and his
reputation for cleanliness was Galina Starovoitova, an MP who
championed
human rights and was shot dead in 1998; only last year were six
men
arrested for the murder, and whoever ordered it is still free.
The chances
of Mr Yushenkov's killers being caught, let alone the man or men
behind the
murder, are probably no greater.
See also:
Human
Rights
|
