Murder

Earlier this month President Barack Obama  attended a civil society summit in Moscow.  Present at that summit was Memorial, a human rights group that came to fruition during the perestroika years and whose main tasks is to collect the facts, shed light on the past, and find a path to the future without giving any lessons on morality. 

It is this kind of drive and determination among individuals in the face of threats, physical and emotional, that the underbelly of any society rooted in corruption and fear will do its best to silence.

This Wednesday, Natalya Estemirova was found dead, lying on the side of a highway 50 miles away from her home town of Grozny.  She was a journalist and had been working for Memorial since the 90s.

Natalya, was tackling the most dangerous of issues, reporting her findings to Human Rights Watch, and her articles to Novaya Gazeta and the Caucasus news Web site Kavkazsky Uzel.  She was investigating kidnappings under the zealot and Kremlin backed Chechen president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov. 

Kadyrov, a man brazen with power and emboldened by a cult of personality had personally threatened Natalya only three months ago.  Earlier this month, HRW released a report, citing:

Today, the armed conflict in Chechnya has subsided and the capital, Grozny, has been largely rebuilt. However, abuses such as torture, illegal detention, and extrajudicial executions persist (albeit on a smaller scale), and impunity for past and ongoing abuses is rampant. The perpetrators of ongoing violations are mainly law enforcement and security personnel under the de facto control of the republic’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Two years ago, the supreme court in Moscow closed down the Russia-Chechen Friendship Society  (RCFS), the non-governmental organisation and home for independent journalism on Chechnya.  Only a few months prior, prominent journalist Anna Politkovskaya who had been covering the Chechen conflict was gunned down in front of her apartment in Moscow.  Her murder remains unresolved. 

The first sentence of a NY Times article published in April makes it all so clear.  It reads: The enemies of the Chechen president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, keep turning up dead.

It is a sad, a shame, that indiscriminate killings of journalists, human rights activists, and anyone considered an enemy in Russia continue, unabated and uninvestigated.  Their deaths reflect a power structure, closed in upon itself, where money and loyalty are the breadwinners. 

The truth will eventually emerge and when it does, history will judge Putin and Kadyrov as cowards.