REVENGE KILLINGS.

In a chilling development, the well-known Russian war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya and Zeinap Gashaeva, the leader of a human rights group based in Ingushetia, have announced that at least twenty-three civilians living in mountain villages in the Vedeno District of Chechnya have been murdered during the period April-June of this year by Russian paratroopers taking revenge for their having provided the journalist and the human rights representative with information concerning kidnappings for ransom and killings by the airborne troops. Two of the victims, Akhyad Khugaev and Rinat Semeev, were 17-year-old boys. “How am I supposed to live with this?” Politkovskaya asks her readers (Novaya Gazeta, no. 45, July 2-4; Moscow Times, July 4).