The following is a rant with little editing or consideration.No sooner had the news media reported on her abrupt kidnapping, did we hear of the discovery of the journalist and human rights advocate Natalia Estemirova's body. I am told that the body was found with bullet wounds to the head and chest on a roadside outside of Nazran, Ingushetia, the neighboring region to Chechnya.
Estemirova was a pioneer journalist and member of the beleagured NGO Memorial, and those who worked with her are passionate in describing her commitment, courage, and vital importance as one of the last people still carrying on with the important work of documenting human rights abuses by both the state and paramilitary bodies against the civilian population of Chechnya. Her sudden kidnapping and murder is a most vile act, one that is almost unspeakable in its hideous brutality. Yet it is also a murder that we should not consider in isolation. There is a long history of tolerated attacks against journalists and human rights activists, and a climate for impunity and rule of law that holds no one accountable for this kind of crime. The message is clear and not undesirable for some elements of the government: those of courage who challenge the status quo may find themselves paying a high price.
Hearing this news, one may recall with acid-mouthed disgust the murder
of the prominent human rights attorney Stanlislav Markelov, who was
shot dead on a snowy Moscow sidewalk, most likely in connection with
his work in Chechnya. The more appropriate memory is of course Anna
Politkovskaya. On Oct. 5, 2007 Natalia Estemirova was awarded the
inaugural Anna Politkovskaya journalism award for her investigative
reporting on human rights, and the two had maintained a close
friendship. Here is a comment from Estemirova's 2007 interview with
RFE/RL after winning the prize:
Considering that U.S. President Barack Obama just left Russia smiling and willing to believe in a reset of relations, while a Russian delegation then flew to Italy to play Summit games and act like a world leading power, my question is how long are we going to wait for the Kremlin to condemn and act upon this horrible murder? How much longer before we can connect the dots between all these events and see the reality of what is happening in Russia.
I recall a recent private meeting I held only a few weeks ago with a high ranking German official in the Bundestag. He told me, with some exasperation, "Every time that Russia behaves like this and does something outrageous, we in Germany are always asking ourselves what we did wrong to cause it."
Isn't it about time that we stopped manufacturing excuses for these kinds of events?
"We have a lot of problems right now, most of all with people who have found themselves in very difficult situations," Estemirova says. "In Chechnya, there is a big problem with fabricated criminal cases and many young Chechen men are in prison in Russia under difficult conditions. Can you imagine, since 2000 the authorities have been stirring things up so anybody with power thinks they can just beat Chechens. Now there is a situation where many of them are imprisoned for nothing, for crimes that were committed by others, crimes that they had no relation to. Now these cases need to be reexamined. This is work that needs to be done by defense attorneys, and this work needs to be paid for. This is what I want to spend this prize on."When Markelov was murdered, it took President Dmitry Medvedev a full nine days to give a response, and when he did it was out of the side of his mouth. Putin never said a word publicly about Markelov, but dismissed the murder of Politkovskaya, which took place on his birthday, by criticizing her as an insignificant journalist whose work meant nothing in the eyes of the government.
Considering that U.S. President Barack Obama just left Russia smiling and willing to believe in a reset of relations, while a Russian delegation then flew to Italy to play Summit games and act like a world leading power, my question is how long are we going to wait for the Kremlin to condemn and act upon this horrible murder? How much longer before we can connect the dots between all these events and see the reality of what is happening in Russia.
I recall a recent private meeting I held only a few weeks ago with a high ranking German official in the Bundestag. He told me, with some exasperation, "Every time that Russia behaves like this and does something outrageous, we in Germany are always asking ourselves what we did wrong to cause it."
Isn't it about time that we stopped manufacturing excuses for these kinds of events?
Too bad we don't see Robert Amsterdam weeping over the murdered children in Iraq. Are they less important than this woman? I smell BIG hypocrisy here.
Karl, the facts are that any civilian deaths in Iraq by the US military were unintentional. And, that any children intentionally murdered by rival terrorist groups operating in Iraq have been doggedly hunted down by the US military and the Iraqi government. But, you know all this. So, your lame moral equivalence of murdered children in Iraq given those those facts versus the intentionally murdered journalists/human rights workers in Russia where the perpetrator is never brought to justice as hypocrisy is bogus.
I suspect you think your nose rather than your brain.
Penny:
"Karl, the facts are that any civilian deaths in Iraq by the US military were unintentional."
LOL!!!! This is not true and you know it. The US bombed Baghdad and other big Iraqi cities for weeks during their illegal invasion. Thousands of Iraqi civilians died in these bombings.
We also have news about demoralized American troops shooting civilians in their homes in a classic Vietnam style. And how about those prison camps like Abu Ghraib? Do the tortured Iraqis appreciate the democracy and freedom you claimed to "export" there?
Quite the hypocrisy already. You invaded Iraq for oil and killed 1-2 million Iraqis in the process. That is a Nazi-style invasion and genocide. Shame on you, shame on you.
It is clear to me and other long time readers of RA blog why RA doesn't write about the problems in Nigeria, Iraq children or about Michael Jackson but certain people just don't get it.
The situation in Russia is getting worse each day. Kremlin has already put the "best" detectives to investigate this murder (as they did with Politkovskaja). And the leader of the investigation is the murderer himself - Kadorov.
So bad..who will call Russia to order?
BOB:
I appreciate your comments, but I think your headline has it absolutely backwards. This killing is not the price of courage, it's the price of cowardice.
What killed this marvelous woman was the cowardice of those inside and outside Russia who would not defend and protect her. Their silence killed her, just as it killed so many in the time of Stalin.
President Obama recently visited Russia and instead of confronting Putin about this violence, he praised him as a pragmatist. Indeed, this "solution" is about as pragmatic as you can get, but the signal sent by the hapless American neophyte may well have green-lighted further killing.
It's time for you to point the finger of blame squarely at the people of Russia and the Western leaders who have betrayed their values.
ISQUIL:
That is the stock and trade of our blog La Russophobe. There is no better place to find such efforts. We'd like to see much more effort of that kind here on this blog as well.
Sadly, Mr Amsterdam, because you, as a lawyer, have ostensibly compromised your objectivity regarding the Putin regime, having accepted Khordokovsky as your client, your words are easily dismissed by those who wish to defend such brutality.
That is the problem of a lawyer claiming objectivity. Your "weakness" of standing, is a microcosm of the West's weakness.
Russia can easily argue that the West want to destabilise Russia for their uncentralised lust for capitalist lebensraum. This argument can be countered but never defeated. After all, there are greedy capitalists straining on their leash to exploit the Russian market - and who don't really care too jots about human rights, unless it furthers their business plans.
We in the West need to find an ethical form of capitalism. When we have that, our standing to claim objectivity and moral superiority will be much more effective.
Yet again civil society is witnessing how ruthless dictators deal with their critcs. Ms Estemirova's murder is yet another chilling reminder of the perils faced by some journalists and Human Rights activists working in conflict zones around the world. By bringing hard hitting facts to the public arena they irrefutably place themselves in the sniper scope of their enemies. Tragically, this despicable crime against both Human Rights and Press Freedom is becoming an increasingly all too common occurrence across the globe. Nevertheless, many journalists remain undaunted in the face of such adversity and continue to run this gauntlet of reprisal in the pursuit of bringing crimes perpetrated against innocents to world attention.
The perpetrators of this grotesque act of murder against the world of human rights must be brought to justice. By allowing these murders to go unpunished is setting a dangerous precedent for other dictatorships to follow!
Yet again civil society is witnessing how ruthless dictators deal with their critics. Ms Estemirova's murder is yet another chilling reminder of the perils faced by some journalists and Human Rights activists working in conflict zones around the world. By bringing hard hitting facts to the public arena they irrefutably place themselves in the sniper scope of their enemies. Tragically, this despicable crime against both Human Rights and Press Freedom is becoming an increasingly all too common occurrence across the globe. Nevertheless, many journalists remain undaunted in the face of such adversity and continue to run this gauntlet of reprisal in the pursuit of bringing crimes perpetrated against innocents to world attention.
The perpetrators of this grotesque act of murder against the world of human rights must be brought to justice. By allowing these murders to go unpunished is setting a dangerous precedent for other dictatorships to follow!
Karl,
Please ask Americans to leave Iraq when Russians leave the Northern Caucasus, where they also conducted (and are conducting) genocide. Stop the hypocrisy already.
What is needed now: a high-profile website with the information Natalia Estemirova gathered, with the goal of exposing the people behind the human-rights abuses she investigated. The power of social media -- and socially-conscious people all over the world -- needs to be focused on this goal.
J.F.Melzian - Lütticher Str. 2 - D 13353 Berlin
2009-9-30
– COPY –
To Mr Orlov
Memorial
Moscow
RE: Strategical murdering and murder accusations
REF: TV euronews 08-9-26
Sir,
on TV I saw you pretendig to know why and by who Estemirova was killed. But it was just another repetition of your eternal accusations that your government (and you mean Putin and his envoys and/or helpers with that) is alledgedly responsible for the murders of burgherrightlers. As always, you presented no proof , your statement of an invented "fact" was again all you had.
In this you were cooperating with others in the West, uttering more or less explicitly and loudly the same, always the same, allegations. What you saw and see as your job, is to repeat these western speech bubbles without valid content, so you are an agent of western claims to Russian government wickedness and the western claim, "because of this", to getting a say in Russian home politics.
I am in reality what you claim to be, a person concerned with the government crimes (g.c.) of his own country, New Gross West Doychland (NGWD), and I have a large selection of such g.c. cases, some of them done to me, to punish me for finding out about the others. In contrast to you, I am not an agent of foreign wordsmiths and accusationforgers, nobody supports and protects me. I am persecuted politically for 30 years now by the very system that you want to impose upon your country "in order to stop these murders, finally", and no justice action ever brought justice in such cases to me or others: the German g.c. cut-throats are 100% protected by the German g.c. government of Kohl-Schroeder-Merkel (KoSchMer.DE), and not even insufficient research (as Mr. C The most important murder was that of the burgerrightlers Petra Kelly and Gerd Bastian in the end of 1992: it was really a nazi putsch, changing the future of NGWD and Europe, even world politics completely. WITH these main figures in the ngwd Green Party, the fascist attack on Yugoslavia would not have been possible, and Obama would have no place where to place his rockets directed against your country, if not in Poland. However, thanks to the murder of Kelly+Bastian, a fake "just" war could be wagend and won against YU, YU could be destroyed into little pieces (this is what your agent-runners and you want with Russia, too), and everybody was allowed to steal whatever they wanted – e.g. America a territory in Kosovo for their warmongering, as a base for attacks.
In contrast to this strategic murder – and others in KoSchrMer.DE – the murders of burgerrightlers in Russia have "only" propaganda value, that is, they are obviously only murdered in order to give your western agentrunners and you the possibility to accuse Mr. Putin for them, albeit without the slightest shadow of a proof. With "only" I do not want do demean the tragedy of a murder and/or the the worth of the work the murdered did before. I just want to make clear that the eternal culprit you always knew already before the act never had a reason and a benefit (only damage to his reputation) to act this way, while his enemies – the fascist world system of the germanic nazi states (Großgermanistan, GG), their propaganda war units, and their quislingss in the countries to be attacked, people like you – aimed at and got another pretext to slander campaigns against your country and that leader who, unlike his two predecessors, does not provide them with everything necessary for ruining it.
The last three murders of Russian burgerrightlers happened a few days before meetings of the MI6 shpitzel posing as our chief of government, Merkel, with Medvedev in BND-capital Munich and Soc This war is in the decisive beginning a pure propaganda war, and if the attacked does not understand this and has (therefore) no effective propaganda defence force (PPO) – which is the case with your country –, all this lying about can already be sufficient for a complete victory. The attackers, with the crucial help of their quslings (you), have only to convince the attacked country to do "by itself" the damage to it that the attacker wants to be done – e.g. install an incompetent corrupt puppet regime as GG does in every f... colony they ever steered into being "theirs". You're not yet near that, but our nazi scum has endless ressources, the full support of all our western states, and some more time. At the latest in summer 2014 the next WW should start, because we do Big Wars in 25-years increments (with the wars against Viet-Nam 1964+ and against the Soviet Union 1989+ having been the last specimens). If our plans work thanks to you, we'll get Moscow this time without any shootings, without any danger to us. Our helpers, you, will then be made to disappear quietly...
In a letter to our g.c. fuehrer Merkel I have listed the murders done by the German government and never investigated in the slightest – in shameful contrast with seeking "justice to be done" always and only outside Germany, and only in countries we want to destroy because since Hitler we think they are under-countries populated with under-menschens, to be wiped out for our großgermanic benefit. One of them being our thirst for revanche, so much stronger since for many years now we are forbidden to pronounce it. So we do not pronounce it, we just do our very best to accomplish it.
In some earlier writings of mine, e.g. letters to French revichyzation fuehrer Chierat in 2004/05, I have studied the general pattern of political murder and similar events (like the abduction of French journalists in Iraq, then) with the same outcome, that is, the intimidation and silencing, that is, the "liquidation for all practical purposes" of observers, withnesses, jorunalists, writers, if these are not prostituted ("em-bed(!)-ed") propaganda hacks. The universal pattern of such murder waves is that they are part of an ethnical-cultural-political cleansing that takes place in every country that the nazi scum of GG wants to colonize. Usually they do it before stealing the territory, which, exactly because of that, will then be possible without any resistance.
Nations are like single persons, and like single persons they are composed of several sub-assemblies with specialised tasks. Although every human cell has every information inside for any job a human could be confronted with, in real life they exist and work in these subassemblies, doing what there are supposed to there and not what others are supposed to at their respective places. Young mothers, for instance, are supposed to feed and protect their babies, and not to build, say, a PPO just because those who must do that simply do not do it. If you rob a person his eyes, he can no longer see, there are not an illimited number of eyes to a person. The same is true for countries: there are those specialists who run its canalization system (what a horror, if they were on strike), and others with the task of steering the whole thing, the countries "masters" as it were, and yet others with the task of providing the nation with feedback, mainly on that steering: are we still heading where we want or should want to go. These feedbackers are called other names, God knows why, so that they are referred to as humanrightlers or burgerrightlers or intellectuals or 68ers or at times, when communists are suppressed, "communists", or "liberals" when liberals are suppressed etc. etc. Their task is to see, to understand, to judge, and to communicate, and because this is mostly done by writing down what they found out (so that it can be published and taken into account by many others), they are also called "writers" or "journalists", sometimes "experts on..." etc. etc. Their task is to be a specialised part of the brain of a nation, that part that cares about the overall direction and the relation of the real itinerary with a route projected before, a plan, or a collection of laws, values etc.
Since people have enemies and countries, too, the enemy work always is directed at the whole body: to kill it and eat it. If humans do that to humans, they are called cannibals, and if states do that routinely to others states, as GG does, they should be called cannibal states accordingly. With big animals of prey and small victims such cannibalization can be quick and complete, but for fighting a big victim one of the usual strategies is to divert the victim: instead of heading for security it is steered into a trap of a large variety of possible forms, where it can be easily killed. With persons you can e.g. turn around a sign-post: the eyes still see well, but the information has been forged. A person made blind has to rely on other hints, which will be very difficult immediately after blinding. They have to rely on other persons and their integrity, so if these are no more honest, because they have been turned around like a sign-post, then those trusting them are doomed. Such false guide are thus false burgerrightlers, false intellectuals, false humanrightwatchers etc. Wherever camouflage takes place, it can be difficult to tell the genuine from the fake thing, at least from afar.
This is the root of the murder series in targets (future victims) of the nazi scum of GG: intellectuals, writers, burgerrightlers (or whatever they are called) have the task to watch after the right track, but animals of prey want to deviate their future victim onto a path leading to a trap and their doom. Therefore the most urgent need for a GG nazi initiative to invade and colonize a society is to either deflect (recruit as quislings) or liquidate the path-correction-organs of that society. There were many murders in Weimar Germany as a cultural-political cleansing iniative to pave the way for Hitler, there was the same wave of political murders under Kohl in order to prepare the silent nazi systtem we have in KoSchrMer.DE today (completely nazi in its structures, completely "democratic" in its self-propaganda), this was the character of the murder wave in Russia under El'cin, the mass murders in South America for stabilizing the U.S. whores supressing these peoples are known to everyone, and also the murders of early 2005 in Lebanon followed exactly that pattern. The new invention, which would be impossible without murder accomplices like you, is however, that in Russia since 1999 and in Lebanon, one "good" thing (killing off of those who would later oppose nazi dictatorship) is combined with another "good" thing, namely attacking someone on the next plane, the steering post of the society in question, just because with his acts he opposes foreign tyranny just as stubbornly as the burgerrightlers do in other fields: the good guy who does not surrender to the infamy of the aggressor is then decried by murder accomplices like you to be the bad guy who does the intellectual cleansing necessary for the future invader. This has been done in exactly the same manner against Putin and Assad, and in the case of Assad (and Syrian protection against civil war, which had been wanted by the Lebanese and worked for decase), the Lebanon was recolonized by the ancient colonial powers like France "because of the murders done by Assad", while Syria proper, thanks to the support by Putin withstood America's wish to invade=steal or bomb it like Iraq.
I have done other investigations as to the mass massakers in Russia. It turned out they were all organized by the agentrunners of the direct killers (as opposed to the indirect killers the murder supporters like you) on "jubilee dates" after events of the past that they wanted to take revenge for:Dubravka was a massaker to punish Putin for the Cuba crisis exactly 40 years after it, although Putin was, as far as I know, not one of the leading figures of the planning or execution of the events in the Carribean in 1962. Putin was punished in Beslan for WW-2 65 years after it started, although, for all I know, it was not Putin who started WW-2 and should be punished for it. But, in nazi propaganda strategies, always "the punishment proves the crime" – which means that according to your agent-runners Putin WAS responsible of WW-2, and your task is to convince us of that.
The pattern is the same as with Estemirova: your agent-runners, which murder Russians so that you can launch your preplanned and preformulated hurling of invectives, do not give the slightest damn for the victims, hundreds of children in Beslan for instance, and they did not when they shot or burned or gassed them in WW-2. They just want territorial gain, and every propaganda-shootout you deliver after your friends have killed so many innocents bring them somewhat nearer their goal. When this has been done often enough, when "the whole world is now convinced" that Putin is an addict of murdering small children, then, of course, "he must go", and you can be proud that you have pushed your country much nearer the only thing the West wants from ist: complete ruin. This will be our territorial gain. Please remind – since your allegedly do "memorial" work – that "killing small children" is always a trump card of fascist propaganda (in WW-1 by the english against the germs, then of the german nazis against the Jews, then the german nazis /germanic and jewish/ against the yugoslav Serbs, and now the pan-european nazis /goys and jews/ against Putin), so this is the society you choose to be in and work with and for.
It seems obvious that Merkel – this aw so lovely Eva Braun type – and Hitler are equally innocent: Merkel was not in the Caucasus when Estemirova was shot, and Hitler never did a death selection at a KZ-ramp or put fire to a Russian village personally. If Merkel who wanted, needed and exploited the Estemirova murder is "innocent" just beause she was not there, why then are Putin or Kadirov (or both?) guilty? It is obvious that the heads of big organizations (and all other persons with enough money) can order murders-by-others, steer them from afar, so that in the end someone near the victim performs it. If an administration is corrupt – as allegedly is the case in the Caucasus, I cannot judge it – then much could be done through it. If not, much can still be done by other means, e.g. persons sent there for the purpose. In g.c., however, not the performing of the murder but the ordering of it is reckoned to be the real crime, and in the case of the murder of Russian intellectuals which happens at special occasions to be exploited at these occasions it is obvious that he who works with these murders is part of the scheme, of the gang, of the complete crime committed where the shooting of a person ist "only" a minor lever for a bigger, "higher" puprose. These cases must thus be analyzed accordingly. Everything said here seems to apply too to the murder of Anna Politkovskaja. There seem to be millions who could have shot that shot, but only a very small circle of people who would order such a murder to discredit Putin on his birthday, and by no means Putin can be among them. The whole thing is optical trickery of the lowliest kind, and everyone who endorses it, is a heap of shit. It is, among other things, a crime against the human faculty of reasoning.
In my letter to Merkel I mention also the "riddle" of the Caucasus war of 08-8-8: 40 years after the invasion of Prague (to punish Putin for it for being its culprit, too, of course), on a data fetishist's fetish day (8-8-8, such days allegedly have special powers which such rascals want to grab for themselves), and nine years after Putin became prime minister of Russia (thus as the same kind of besmirking a personal jubilee of his as shooting Politkovskaja on his birthday) – the whole Georgian war is a stinking groß-germanic nazi plot from the outset. And: its start was known days before in Berlin, when creeping things of the regime did certain things to me which were to show me that on this day, 08-8-7, I was attacked together with "my people" (Russia never recognized me as "theirs", but "my" nazishit that governs me has decided decades ago, when I had studied Slavic languages, just because I refused to get prostituted by their nazi orgs as all the others, that I "must" be). This war was ordered and started from here, as was the murder of Estemirova, as were the massakers of Dubravka and Beslan.
If I was a burgarrightler in Russia in your position and with your USP (remembrance), then I would do my best to save my country from yet another enemy invasion with again the same means of stinking hate propaganda, fifth columns, and strategical deception (posing as helpful friends, so that you can easily perform enemy actions), which could easily be remembered and taken lessons from if people only remembered to remember.
I'll inform others of my findings. This is our duty as intellectuals, isn't it, and you inform people even of "facts" which aren't, and which you (therefore) haven't found out.
J.F.Melzian
Berlin
you are right on the money.
she needs to be the focus for all human rights activists. the west, must link trade issues with human rights. stay tuned. m
you are right on the money.
she needs to be the focus for all human rights activists. the west, must link trade issues with human rights. stay tuned. m