And Then There Were None

Natalia Estemirova had a dry sense of humor and a giant heart. I remember the first time she showed us around her apartment, in the war-weary city of Grozny, she pointed to a huge shrapnel hole in the wall separating her daughter's bedroom from the hallway. "Check out the new design of the ventilation," she said. "I never have time to fix it, so let it stay a part of our interior."

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That was classic Natalia -- a single mother and a human rights activist in a place that desperately needed them, she never had time for her own life; there were too many troubles to report on. She was a walking fountain of Chechnya's sad stories: "I want to tell you a story about this man, a widower who was kidnapped from his house in a mountain village and now is being tortured in jail. His two little children live with his mother, who is almost 100 years old." That was the first thing she told me when we met in Grozny in 2005.

Many times after that, I would call her to see how things were in Russia's forgotten war zone. Natasha, as we called her, would always quickly reply: "They abduct people by the dozens, they burn their houses, they torture guerrillas' relatives, kick people out of their apartments -- something has to be done, something has to be done to help them." Who are they? I would ask her. "Come over, I will tell you."

Well, on Tuesday, they came for Natasha. At 8:30 that morning, as she walked out of her house, she was dragged into an unmarked white Lada, screaming vainly for help. Just like one of the stories she so doggedly pursued. And of course, we know how this one ends: They found her body later that day, in nearby Ingushetia, riddled with bullets. This, unfortunately, was the Chechnya that she knew all too well, the place of thuggery, violence, and corruption that most of the rest of the world has been content to forget. Just recently Moscow declared that the war there is over. Well, it may not be war, but it remains as lawless as a war zone. Abductions and killings by them are rising.

Until this week, Natasha had a simple rule: She never gave up her investigations until she knew for certain that nothing else could be done. That became her practice from an early age, when she was a reporter. Before the wars started, she had been a history teacher. Back in the 1990s, when the violence began, she reported 13 documentary stories for local television stations. "That was when I became a human rights activist at heart. When my husband died in war, my heart hardened," she said. That was all she told me about her personal life; there was none. She never liked talking about what happened to her husband.

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