In an exclusive posting on ZheZhe[dot]us, Julia Svetlichnaja, the Russian PhD student who was the last person to interview Alexander Litvinenko responds to her critics:
When Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned we realised we were sitting on his last interview, having talked to him as research for an academic paper. But in telling the truth about the former Russian security agent we were drawn unwittingly into a New Cold War.
The Alexander Litvinenko who talked to us in April and May was not the martyr to the Kremlin that he has been painted as since his death. Instead he was a little unstable, even threatening to blackmail his one-time associates for money.
Read the full article at ZheZhe[dot]us.
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Here we’ve got an example of the trouble blogs can get into. Not only do we have to take ZheZhe’s word for the authorship (maybe they’re connected to her and can be sure, but then they should make disclosure), but the author doesn’t say one single word about the actual point, AFTENPOSTEN’s discovery of her ties to the Kremlin. Apparently, ZheZhe didn’t demand that she address this issue and allowed her to essentially spew forth an unsourced propaganda attack on her critics. That’s disappointing. If the British government makes a formal conclusion that the Kremlin was involved in Litvinenko’s killing, this is going to get ugly. Tred carefully.
I don’t really see that ZheZhe has done much different to what many mainsteam newspapers would do. I’ve regularly seen people offered a right of reply in a column – usually in a newspaper’s comment & analysis pages. It’s up to the person doing the replying to reply in whatever way they choose, and for readers to make their own judgement based on their words – as you have done.
I don’t have any reason to doubt the authenticity of the authorship. ZheZhe has provided a copy of an email which contains the full contact details of a University of Westminster press officer. If you continue to have doubts, you could contact him for confirmation.
First of all it’s highly suspicious (in fact, it’s just plain weird) that this young lady would choose to make her reply in a forum as obscure as ZheZhe. It implies that she was rejected elsewhere, but we don’t know why.
In a mainstream newspaper, there would be fact checking before the article went to print, and there would be a demand made that the main substance of the charges be dealt with. Here, nothing of the kind occurred. The main point is not whether it was Svetlichnaya but whether ZheZhe is in bed with her and whether a reader is put into a position to fairly judge her statements. As I’ve exposed on my blog, I think not. I think we have a duty to warn lay readers about the content of posts like this and to do what we can to make them accurate if they attempt to make attacks on others rather than just give opinions on policy. I don’t believe any effort of this kind was made. My post is here:
http://russophobe.blogspot.com/2006/12/annals-of-blogosphere-svetlichnaya-saga.html
Quite frankly, I find the unsubstantiated accusation that a respected journalist knew he was making false statements when he went to print to be outrageous, and it’s certainly libelous if it’s not true.
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