Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (30 August 1958 – 7 October 2006) was a Russian journalist, author, and human rights activist known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and then-President of Russia Vladimir Putin. On 7 October 2006 she was shot and killed in the lift of her block of flats, an unsolved assassination that continues to attract international attention.
Politkovskaya made her reputation reporting from Chechnya.Her post-1999 articles about conditions in Chechnya were turned into several books; Russian readers’ main access to her investigations and publications was through Novaya gazeta, a Russian newspaper known for its often-critical investigative coverage of Russian political and social affairs. From 2000 onwards, she received numerous international awards for her work. In 2004, she published a personal account: Putin’s Russia.
Benazir Bhutto (21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007) was a Pakistani democratic socialist who served as the 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan. She was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan and the founder of the Pakistan People’s Party, which she led.
In 1982, at age 29, Benazir Bhutto became the chairwoman of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)—a democratic socialist, centre-left party, making her the first woman in Pakistan to head a major political party. In 1988, she became the first woman elected to lead a Muslim state and was also Pakistan’s first (and thus far, only) female prime minister. Noted for her charismatic authority and political astuteness, Benazir Bhutto drove initiatives for Pakistan’s economy and national security, and she implemented social capitalist policies for industrial development and growth. In addition, her political philosophy and economic policies emphasized deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), flexible labor markets, the denationalization of state-owned corporations, and the withdrawal of subsidies to others. Benazir Bhutto’s popularity waned amid recession, corruption, and high unemployment which later led to the dismissal of her government by conservative President Ghulam Ishaq Khan.
In 1993, Benazir Bhutto was re-elected for a second term after the 1993 parliamentary elections. She survived an attempted coup d’état in 1995, and her hard line against the trade unions and tough rhetoric opposition to her domestic political rivals and to neighboring India earned her the nickname “Iron Lady”; she is also respectfully referred to as B.B. In 1996, the charges of corruption leveled against her led to the final dismissal of her government by President Farooq Leghari. Benazir Bhutto conceded her defeat in the 1997 Parliamentary elections and went into self-imposed exile in Dubai, United Arab Emirates in 1998.
After nine years of self-exile, she returned to Pakistan on 18 October 2007, after having reached an understanding with Military President General Pervez Musharraf, by which she was granted amnesty and all corruption charges were withdrawn. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a bombing on 27 December 2007, after leaving PPP’s last rally in the city of Rawalpindi, two weeks before the scheduled Pakistani general election of 2008 in which she was a leading opposition candidate. The following year, she was named one of seven winners of the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights.
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