Russian human rights group Memorial may have suspended operations in Chechnya following the murder of Natalia Estemirova, but it will continue its work there as a tribute to her memory. The group’s Grozny office is temporarily closed, but “the work will go on”, Svetlana Gannushkina told a meeting at the National Endowment for Democracy today, as to do otherwise would be a “betrayal” of her legacy.
Estemirova was at the forefront of monitoring and exposing torture, disappearances and extra-judicial killings in Chechnya, said Gannushkina, a board member of Memorial.
The Russian and Chechen authorities are “at least acquiescent” in the slaying of Estemirova and several other human rights activists, the meeting heard, judging by their failure to investigate and prosecute such cases. Zarema Sadulayeva and her husband, Alik Dzhabrailov, were recently killed after being abducted from the offices of Save the Generation, a children’s charity in the southern Russian republic.
But Estemirova’s execution could be a “tipping point”, the NED meeting heard, if it served to prompt the international community to demand of the Kremlin an end to the impunity governing human rights violations across the Caucasus.
Human rights activists and reporters have been leaving the region, fearful for their safety. “Chechnya is turning into a closed region like Turkmenistan,” says Human Rights Watch researcher Tanya Lokshina.
The upsurge of violence “is a consequence of outrageous abuses of authority by local leaders and the Kremlin’s irresponsible policies,” writes Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Pro et Contra journal. “Politically, the Russian government has no worries; it has no political opposition to challenge its policies, and people at large wouldn’t hold the Kremlin to account for the rising violence in North Caucasus,” she suggests.
Chechnya is rapidly becoming Russia’s Algeria, claims a Moscow analyst, because – as Paul Goble puts it – “ most Russians see it as an inalienable part of their country that is nonetheless de facto separate but also because Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is laying the groundwork now for the de jure independence of his republic.”
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