Natalia Estemirova knew she would be murdered one day. Among the
many threats she received came a personal one from Chechen
President Ramsan Kadyrov. She had seen many of her friends and
colleagues murdered, those who like her investigated crimes in
Chechnya. Just last January human rights lawyer and journalist
Stanislav Markelov was slain, gunned down a few blocks from the
Kremlin, as was journalist Anastasia Barburova who had rushed to
Markelov’s aid. In 2006, investigative journalist Anna
Politkovskaya was murdered, shot dead in the elevator of her
apartment in central Moscow. No one has been convicted in these
murders. (A complete list of journalists killed in Russia is
here.) Still Estemirova, a 50-year-old single mother and head
of the Grozny branch of Russia’s oldest human rights group,
Memorial, continued to work even as the bodies piled high, for
she was working on “something very important,” she told friends.
Of course, these are just the more prominent dead. Anyone who
speaks against the Chechen president or his security forces and
government-backed militias (nicknamed the kadyrovtsy) is
more or less signing his own death warrant. As Human Rights Watch
Director Kenneth Roth noted, “[it] seems to be open season on
anyone trying to highlight the appalling human rights abuses in
Chechnya.” Nor does it matter where you go or where you hide. The
Chechen president’s security forces have long arms. Just last
March a Kadyrov opponent, Umar Israilov, was shot dead in Vienna.
That same month Kadyrov’s foremost rival, former military
commander Sulim Yamadayev, was gunned down in Dubai. (Dubai
police accused Kadyrov’s cousin and Russia Duma member Adam
Delimkhanov of ordering the assassination.)
Estemirova was murdered as she investigated hundreds of reports
of kidnapping, torture and murder in her homeland. That’s a drop
in the bucket compared to the official tally of 5,000 people
missing in Chechnya, but enough to get the attention of the
Chechen high command. At the time of her death Estemirova was
investigating a campaign of house-burnings by government-backed
militiamen, just like last November she investigated the
execution-style murders of seven local women, who were somehow
connected to the commander of the Chechen security forces, and
who witnesses say were abducted by masked men in paramilitary
uniforms.
Eyewitnesses say that on the morning of July 15, several men were
spotted waiting in a white van outside Estemirova’s home in
Grozny. As she left her house at 8:30 a.m. and made her way on
foot to the nearby bus stop, several men grabbed her and forced
her into the van. At one point she managed to cry out that she
was being kidnapped. Eight hours later her body was found dumped
along a main road in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia. She
too had been shot execution-style in the head and chest.
Suspicion immediately fell upon President Kadyrov, a former rebel
commander, who has managed to keep an uneasy peace in Chechnya by
following a similar line taken by all despots: silencing all
opposition. What has Kadyrov to be so paranoid about? Kadyrov’s
“security forces” are charged with rooting out separatist rebels,
that is, scattered bands of Islamic militants and Islamic
terrorists still fighting the Second Chechen War, still
battling for independence from Russia. To accomplish this Kadyrov
has relied on what the London Guardian calls “wholesale
terror against its civilian population” many of whose members his
government suspects of backing the rebels. In a very telling
comparison, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group Ludmilla
Alexeyeva said the “number of people who fear Kadyrov is similar
to Stalin in Soviet times.”
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Dmitry Medvedev straight away rejected claims
by human rights groups that Kadyrov ordered the hit on
Estemirova. And both Medvedev and Kadyrov have promised to bring
the murderers to justice (rather like Stalin promising to punish
those responsible for the Katyn
Massacre). To that end Medvedev has concocted a bizarre
conspiracy theory for the press that Estemirova’s murder was
“committed to discredit the Kremlin.” Meanwhile, Memorial’s
director Oleg Orlov remains convinced the Chechen president
ordered Estemirova’s assassination. Kadyrov responded by filing
charges against Orlov.
We know what kind of despot kills human rights workers and
investigative journalists, Indeed, there is even a name for the
disorder:
narcissistic personality disorder. More difficult to
understand is what drives people like Estemirova, Markelov,
Barburova, and Politkovskaya to sacrifice their lives to battle
injustice. A colleague, Elena Milashina, of the newspaper
Novayagazeta, explained it best: “When you defend others
you cease to fear. Those today who are fearful are the people who
keep out of trouble, trying to survive these bad times, when the
bad times (for some reason) never seem to end.”
For those who insist there is no such thing as good and evil, the
life and death of Natalia Estemirova proves them so very wrong.
