SoloJourno

Journalist Natalya Estemirova was a prominent human rights advocate, and for a decade, she dared to report on the brutality of Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed regime. For that bravery, the 50 year old single mother was kidnapped in front of her home on the morning of July 15th - witnesses on a nearby balcony heard her shouting that she was being abducted - and murdered (two bullets to the head) in Grozny, the Chechen capital. A few hours later, her body was found about 50 miles away by the side of a highway in the neighbouring repulic of Ingushetia. Her purse, passport and other papers were found lying nearby.

From Human Rights Watch:

As a researcher with the leading Russian human rights group Memorial, Estemirova had been at the forefront of efforts to investigate human rights abuses and seek justice for their victims for close to a decade. She worked closely with Human Rights Watch, including on its recent investigations into the punitive killings and house burnings against people suspected by Chechen authorities of having links to rebels.

She was honored by Human Rights Watch as a recipient of our Human Rights Defender Award in 2007, and received many other international prizes in recognition of her important human rights work, including the European Parliament’s Robert Schuman medal in 2005, and the “Right to Life” award from the Swedish Parliament in 2004. She was the first recipient of the Anna Politkovskaya prize, in honor of the slain Russian journalist.

Natasha is not the first Russian human rights defender murdered this year. In January, a friend of ours, Stanislav Markelov, a prominent human rights lawyer who helped many victims of abuse in Chechnya, was shot in central Moscow. Natasha came to town for his funeral. We sat at my kitchen table talking into the wee hours about Markelov and Politkovskaya and speculating about who would be next.

Questions and Answers [from HRW] about Natalia Estemirova murder: A Killing’s Prelude and Aftermath. The Q & A also lists other human rights activists and journalists recently killed in Russia.

C. J. Chivers writing in the New York Times:

Ms. Estemirova was an essential member of a tiny circle of the premier human rights investigators in the entire Caucasus — a woman of immeasurable courage, precision and calm. She was a researcher for Memorial, the human rights organization, in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. She was compassionate, meticulous, gritty, patient and driven at once, possessed of a strong stomach and light touch, a counselor and a hunter, someone who knew what she knew and understood what she could not prove.

To the families whose pain she worked to relieve and whose stories she forced the world to see, she was a resolute champion. To the men whose crimes she exposed, case by case, with a quiet composure, she was a confounding enemy, a feminine nemesis they could neither fathom nor dissuade. Over the years, and again recently, Ms. Estemirova and her co-workers were summoned to official meetings to hear blistering complaints about their work. The message was crude and clear: Stop. It is difficult for an outsider to grasp how awful these meetings must have been.

She was called before President Kadyrov, head of a government that ran torture centers where, as her records showed, detainees were subjected to beatings, stompings, electric shocks, mock executions, sodomy, burnings by gas torch and, in the end, for some, execution. Mr. Kadyrov, survivors said, participated in these crimes with delight. Many victims have not been seen since. Mutilated remains of others turned up — limbs broken, faces smashed, skin charred, heads and torsos shattered by bullets fired at close range — the characteristic human refuse of Chechnya’s wars and its governing style.

Almost inevitably these cases were documented by Ms. Estemirova. Almost no one was ever charged. And now Ms. Estemirova, the lead investigator, who refused to quit when told it was time to be silent, is gone, taken from life — and from Russia — the same way. (Read the full NYT article)

Additional NYT coverage: Chechen Rights Campaigner Is Killed (July 15, 2009), Chorus of Blame Follows Rights Worker’s Death (July 16, 2009), The Grimmest Waiting List in Russia (July 19, 2009).

Telegraph.co.uk coverage: Russian activist Natalya Estemirova found dead (July 15, 2009), A very Russian murder (July 15, 2000), Chechen president denies involvement in murder of Russian human rights investigator (July 16, 2009), Chechen president takes charge of activist’s murder inquiry (July 16, 2009), The murder of Natalia Estemirova is a dire warning (July 16, 2009), Natalya Estemirova’s heirs: The women who risk all to expose Chechnya’s horrors (July 19, 2009).

BBC coverage: BBC obituary (July 15, 2009), Russian activist found murdered (July 15, 2009).

From Glenn Greenwald’s “Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did.” (a great read, by the way, with some very interesting comments), I learned that Cronkite revealed some regrets in a 1996, during an interview with Newseum: “What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn’t make them stick. We couldn’t find a way to pass them on to another generation.”