And Then There Were None

Ever since 2000, amidst the horror of the second Chechen war, she worked for the Russian human rights group Memorial. She reported on filtration camps during the war, and abductions and torture of civilians after the war. These were haunting stories she found, of widows in burnt and blackened houses, crying relatives, dead bodies.

And in pursuit of the truth about this suffering, she was relentless; she could make the dead walk if she needed something. People said that about her. It was Estemirova who investigated and documented the witnesses who saw air bombings in the Vedensky region in 2004, where a mother and her children died; at the time the Russian army officials denied the attacks. If not for Estemirova's efforts, the world would have never heard of it. It was Estemirova who discovered a mass grave at a construction site in Grozny and put the city authorities "on their ears," as she said, to do something about the remains.

And it was Estemirova who wrote reports about 50 abducted civilians this year; many locals blamed the disappearances on forces loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, the region's thuggish young president. "Ramzan hated her. It was him who got rid of her, as only death could stop that woman," Oleg Orlov, Memorial's director, told me the night she was killed.

Whenever we arrived to work in Chechnya, Natasha's home was our home. The last time we stayed with her, in 2006, she lived with her 13-year-old daughter in a tiny two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a nine-story building. She had no tap water and the elevator did not work. The city water deliveries came to Natasha's building at noon, when both Natasha and her daughter were at work or at school. "It is OK, guys, tonight you take a shower out of a water bottle," she commanded, and sent us off to buy water and food, as her fridge was totally empty. "And no complaints, let's be happy they do not bomb us," she said with her natural optimism.

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