The personal toll of Estemirova's murder

Natalia Estemirova (left) and Tatyana Lokshina in Chechnya, Dargo village, in spring 2007. Estemirova's murder in July 2009 has shaken other human rights workers. (Courtesy of Tatyana Lokshina)

MOSCOW — Tatyana Lokshina is in mourning. And she is angry.

Human rights workers are supposed to aid those in need and document the cases of those who have been wronged. They are not supposed to attend the funerals of their colleagues.

Yet that is where Lokshina, an activist at the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, found herself, yet again, last week.

Her friend and colleague Natalia Estemirova, the leading human rights campaigner in the Russian republic of Chechnya, had been kidnapped and murdered, silenced for tirelessly reporting the atrocities that activists say are not only sanctioned but committed by the regime of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.

“I’m devastated, totally crushed about her death,” said Lokshina, echoing the sentiment of dozens of activists and journalists who relied, both professionally and personally, on Estemirova, one of the last in their field to live and work in Chechnya.

News of the murder was met with shock, but not with surprise. Kadyrov was said to harbor a personal hatred for Estemirova. At least seven of his well-known opponents have met violent deaths.

One of the first was Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading journalist for opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, who was gunned down in the entrance to her Moscow apartment building in October 2006. She and Estemirova were what activists called the soul of their campaign to expose the atrocities that have flourished under Kadyrov’s rule.

When critics of official power in Vladimir Putin's Russia are killed, be they journalists, politicians or activists, it strikes a blow to Russia’s beleaguered human rights community.

Yet Estemirova’s murder has prompted an unprecedented collective soul searching among the women who form the heart of that community. With two of their best and brightest felled by assassins’ bullets, life has become all the more dangerous and the future all the more uncertain.
The sense of defiance that once bound them is crumbling.

Karinna Moskalenko is a lawyer who focuses on Chechen cases and represents Politkovskaya’s family. As the trial of alleged accomplices to Politkovskaya’s murder got underway last year, she was struck with mercury poisoning at her home in France. An initial investigation ruled the poisoning an accident. A second investigation raised doubt.

Moskalenko said she used to feel brave, traveling to Grozny in Chechnya and Nazran, the capital of the neighboring republic of Ingushetia. “I would believe that no one could do anything illegal against me. I’m a lawyer, I don’t do politics,” she said. “I was very brave then, I sincerely believed nothing can be done with me, because it was so clear I was acting in a legal way. Now I’m not so sure,” she said.

On Saturday, Memorial, the Russian NGO where Estemirova worked and the last major NGO to maintain an office in Chechnya, said it was shutting its doors there.

“This murder has shown that working in Chechnya is fatally dangerous and we cannot risk the lives of our colleagues even if they are ready to carry on their work,” said Alexander Cherkasov, who also works there.

That means events inside Chechnya, which Kadyrov runs as a personal fiefdom, complete with an ingrained cult of personality, a feared security force and a network of secret prisons, will withdraw even further from the public eye.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/russia/090719/human-rights-workers-mourn