Sydney Morning Herald
July 18 2004

Editor’s murder adds to slaughter of journalists in Russia

Moscow: The editor of a Russian arts magazine has been found stabbed
to death, police said at the weekend.

“The body of journalist Pail Peloyan, with knife wounds to his chest
and bruises on his face, was found on Saturday,” the RIA Novosti news
agency quoted a police spokesman as saying.

He was found on the side of the MKAD highway that encircles the
Russian capital, police said.

Peloyan was the editor of Armyanski Pereulok (Armenian Lane), a
Russian-language magazine of literature and the arts.

His death follows that of Paul Klebnikov, an American citizen and
editor of the Russian Forbes magazine, who was shot dead as he left
his northern Moscow office on July 9.

Following that murder, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists
called on President Vladimir Putin to move against a “climate of
lawlessness” in which 15 journalists have been killed in Russia
during the past four years.

“Klebnikov is the 15th journalist killed in connection with his work
during your tenure,” the committee said in a statement.

“No one has been brought to justice in any of the slayings, creating
a sense of impunity that endangers all journalists and undermines
your democracy.”

The failure to solve any of the journalists’ murders over the past
four years is “a testament to the ongoing lawlessness in Russia and
your failure to reform the country’s weak and politicised criminal
justice system”, it added.

Klebnikov, 41, had arrived in Moscow with a spirit of civic reform.
His killing has raised troubling questions for Russia.

“The country can build skyscrapers and solve international conflicts
and even win tennis tournaments,” said Peter Klebnikov, one of his
brothers. “But so long as it’s considered completely normal to
resolve disputes and kill a person who is interfering with the way
you want to live, this country is ailing.”

Klebnikov’s work – informed and sometimes brazen – inserted him
squarely into the worlds of Russian business, crime, power and
wealth.

A foreign investor interviewed for two stories by Klebnikov, William
Browder, said: “If somebody feels safe enough to kill the editor of a
major Western magazine, we have anarchy in Russia.

“It makes Putin look like a weak man,” he added.