Natalya Estemirova is a well-known domestic human rights activist and journalist. She was an employee of the branch of the human rights center "Memorial" in the Chechen Republic. In 2009, she was abducted near her home in the Chechen capital and killed. Her corpse was found near the federal road known as the Caucasus. The assassination of Estemirova caused a great political and public resonance.
Human Rights Defender Biography
Natalia Estemirova was born in the small town of Kamyshlov in the Sverdlovsk Region in 1958. Her father was a Chechen, originally from a village in the Gudermes region, and her mother was Russian.
Natalia Estemirova was a graduate of the historical faculty of the university in Grozny. Until the late 1990s, she worked as a history teacher at a school in the Chechen capital.
She worked on the territory of Grozny at the beginning of the Second Chechen War, in 2000 she began to cooperate with the representative office of the Memorial center. In particular, she was engaged in collecting information about the victims during the shelling in the Grozny market.
In 2004, Natalya Estemirova was awarded the prize "Correct Vital Activities" in the Swedish parliament. Established in 1980 by journalist Jakob von Jukskull, this award is given in the areas of human rights, environmental protection, education and health. Among her laureates were Svetlana Gannushkina, Edward Snowden, the human rights organization Memorial, the Union of Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia.
In 2005, a photo of Natalya Estemirova appeared again in all newspapers when she and the chairman of Memorial, Sergei Kovalev, were awarded the Robert Schuman medal. This is the French Prime Minister, who is considered one of the founders of NATO and the European Union.
Estemirova herself was a member of the commission on conditions in prisons, pre-trial detention centers and prisons. In particular, her supporters claim that she fought against falsified cases, revealed violations in isolation wards and other places of deprivation of liberty, fought against torture, and investigated extrajudicial executions and kidnappings.
Human rights activities
In fact, Natalya Khusainovna Estemirova began to engage in human rights activities in 1992 during the conflict between Ossetians and Ingush. In North Ossetia, she participated in the compilation of lists of missing persons, helped organize travel for refugees.
During the leadership of Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudaev was a participant in opposition rallies, at which, she claimed, the whole color of the Chechen nation at that time was gathering. In the fall of 1994, when the First Chechen War began, she left with her daughter for her mother in the Urals. She returned to the destroyed Grozny in 1995.
In 1997, Estemirova was considered the head of the press service of the Society of Prisoners of Filtration Camps. In total, she shot 13 programs about unfairly convicted people. Work was underway to alleviate the plight of tortured people, and compensation was obtained. At the same time, she did not receive money for human rights activities at that time, earning lessons.
Since 1998, she has been engaged in human rights journalism.
Second Chechen Campaign
At the beginning of the Second Chechen War, the heroine of our article was in Adygea. She sent her daughter to relatives in Yekaterinburg, and she returned to Chechnya. In the biography of Natalia Estemirova, important changes occurred after she began to cooperate with the human rights organization Memorial. At the risk of life and freedom, the heroine of our article took out through checkpoints records and films about what was really happening in Grozny.
Estemirova was one of the first who spoke in detail about the shelling of refugees on the road from Rostov to Baku. Thanks to her, numerous photographs of the victims of rocket fire at the Grozny market were made public. The human rights activist traveled almost all hospitals in Ingushetia and Chechnya, having obtained hundreds of testimonies of numerous victims of the war among children.
Work with "Memorial"
In the spring of 2000, Natalia became an employee of the Memorial Center in Ingushetia. The investigation of the events in Novye Atagi is based on her polls conducted by a journalist. When she arrived in this village on March 20, it was still blocked by the military, and stripping continued. Estemirova spent a week in it, hiding in the ruins of houses and gardens, because if a person with non-local registration was found, she was in serious danger.
Since the end of 2001, she has taken up the coverage of cases of murders and kidnappings in Chechnya. In addition to working at Memorial, she was a member of the expert council of the Ombudsman for Human Rights in the republic, and worked closely with journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was assassinated in 2006.
Thanks to Estemirova, it became known about the shelling of the high-mountain village of Riga in the Vvedensky district in the spring of 2004.
At the head of the Public Council
After meeting with employees of Memorial with Ramzan Kadyrov in February 2008, Estemirova headed the Public Council for Assistance in Ensuring Human Rights and Freedoms, which worked under the administration of Grozny.
But already at the end of March, Kadyrov removed her from this post, indignant at the statements of the heroine of our article made in the program "Islamic Evolution", released on the REN-TV channel. The program was dedicated to the mandatory wearing of a headscarf by Muslim women in educational institutions and offices in Chechnya. Kadyrov was dissatisfied with the human rights activist, after which a number of colleagues persistently advised her to leave the republic. Estemirova actually went abroad for several months, but returned to Chechnya in the fall.
Kidnapping
Just at this time in the republic, cases of abduction of local residents by unknowns became more frequent, missing. Local security forces carried out punitive operations against relatives and family members of the militants, as well as people who were suspected of participating in illegal armed groups. In particular, they burned houses.
Estemirova actively publicized these facts, sought to counter the prevailing lawlessness. In just six months, she recorded cases of arson of 24 houses.
In the summer of 2009, Natalia intensified her activities after the emergence of new facts about the ongoing terror in Chechnya against local residents. They continued to set fire to houses; without trial, they made ordinary people responsible for the actions of their relatives. Estemirova passed photos of burnt houses, interviewed people.
In an interview, she noted that after the abolition of the regime of counter-terrorism operations in the Chechen Republic, dozens of people have already been abducted. In July 2009, Rizvan and Aziz Albekov, father and son, were abducted. Soon they were publicly killed right in the center of the village of Akhkinchu-Borzoy, where all the local residents were gathered. It was thanks to Estemirova that the public became aware of this fact.
Murder
The news that Natalya Estemirova was killed appeared on July 15, 2009. According to available information, she was abducted near her home in Grozny. Her fellow human rights activists immediately raised the alarm when the heroine of our article did not come to the meeting. They interviewed the neighbors, among whom they found witnesses who saw from the balcony how Estemirova was forcefully put into a white VAZ, while she herself screamed that she was being abducted.
Soon, the head of the press service of the investigative committee of the prosecutor’s office, Vladimir Markin, stated that at 16:30 Moscow time, the body of a journalist with gunshot wounds to her chest and head was found in a forest 100 meters from the Caucasus road in Ingushetia.
The woman was a little over 50 years old. For what Natalya Estemirova was killed, it is not known for certain, but most suspect that the reason was her persistent investigation into the kidnapping in Chechnya and their extrajudicial execution.
The heroine of our article was buried in the village of Koshkeldy in the territory of the Gudermes district in Chechnya.
Authorities reaction
The head of state Dmitry Medvedev spoke about the assassination of Estemirova. He stated that he was outraged by this crime, instructed the head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, to do everything that was necessary for a professional and objective investigation. At the same time, the head of state linked her murder to human rights activities.
The murder of a human rights activist by the president of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, called monstrous. He promised to personally monitor the investigation, as well as to sort it out informally, in accordance with Chechen traditions.
Memorial officers accused Kadyrov himself of involvement in the murder of a journalist; he himself repeatedly rejected this.
Journalists at the Novaya Gazeta also claimed to be a political assassination. According to Dmitry Muratov, Estemirova herself understood that recently her life was in danger.
Investigation progress
Two criminal cases were opened on the fact of the murder of Estemirova. In Chechnya due to the abduction, and in Ingushetia due to illegal arms trafficking and murder. July 16, they were united in one thing, he was transferred to the Main Investigation Department for the Southern Federal District. According to investigators, the key motive for the crime was her professional human rights work.
Answering the question of who killed Natalya Khusainovna Estemirova, in the summer of 2011, the investigation said that it considers the Chechen fighter Islam Uspakhadzhiev, who took revenge on the journalist, to be guilty. In 2013, it became known that law enforcement authorities suspect Alkhazur Bashayev, believing that the reason for the crime is revenge for the publication of a journalist.
However, the investigation of the criminal case has not yet been completed. The trial of the accused did not take place.
Personal life
Little was known about the family of Natalia Estemirova. According to her friend Marina Litvinovich, the journalist’s husband was killed for a long time, she remained a widow.
She left her daughter Lana, who is now 24 years old. After the mother was killed, human rights activists organized a fundraiser in her favor, as the girl remained an orphan.
The heroine of our article has a sister, Svetlana, who constantly lives in Yekaterinburg.