Natalya Khusainovna Estemirova
In the whole world journalists are mostly killed because of their job. One of the victims was Natalya Khusainovna Estemirova. She was a Russian human rights activist and board member of the Russian human rights organization Memorial. She was born in Kamyshlov, Sverdlovsk Oblast to Russian and Chechen parents. In 1991, she worked as a correspondent for the local newspapers The Voice and The Worker of Grozny. While working on TV in Grozny, she filmed thirteen short documentaries about the victims of Russian punitive practices. She participated in the Organization of Filtration Camps Inmates as a press-secretary. The widow of a Chechen policeman, she gathered evidence on human rights violations since the beginning of the Second Chechen war in 1999, leaving her daughter in Yekaterinburg with relatives. In 2000, she became a representative for the Memorial Human Rights Centre in her native Grozny. She visited many hospitals in Chechnya and Ingushetia, taking hundreds of photographs of child victims of the war. Estemirova was a frequent contributor to the independent Moscow newspaper New newspaper (Novaya Gazeta) and the Caucasus news website Caucasian knot (Kavkazsky Uzel). Estemirova received the Right Livelihood Award as a representative of Memorial at a ceremony in the Swedish parliament building in 2004.
Estemirova was abducted on July 15, 2009 from her home in Grozny, Chechnya, according to Tanya Lokshina of the Moscow bureau of Human Rights Watch. Four men forced Estemirova, 50, into a white Lada sedan as she was leaving her apartment for work, Reuters reported. Witnesses said the journalist shouted that she was being kidnapped as the car sped from the scene, according to cpj.org page. Later the same day, her body was found in the neighboring region of Ingushetia, according to international news reports. She was shot in the head and the chest; no belongings were reported missing. She was also an advocate for the Moscow-based human rights group Memorial and a consultant for the New York-based international rights group Human Rights Watch. She was the fifth Novaya Gazeta journalist killed since 2000.
Estemirova’s colleagues told CPJ that her relentless reporting on human rights violations committed by federal and regional authorities in Chechnya put her at odds with regional officials. Oleg Orlov, head of Memorial, told the Russian service of the U.S. government-backed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that he believed Chechen authorities were behind the murder of his colleague. Estemirova was one of the very few people reporting regularly from Chechnya on human rights abuses. She had covered extrajudicial killings, abductions, and punitive arsons for New newspaper (Novaya Gazeta). After a series of threats from Chechen authorities, she wrote under a pseudonym, New newspaper (Novaya Gazeta) reporter Elena Milashina said. Shortly before the murder, she had contributed to an HRW report on the punitive burning of houses by regional authorities.
President Dmitry Medvedev condemned the murder in remarks to journalists at the Russian-German Public Forum in Munich on July 16. “What’s most important is to find the criminals responsible and to sentence them to the punishment they deserve. This is important,” he said. “It is important to do this to honor the people who died while defending our legal system, defending regular people, and to educate an entire new generation of citizens.”
Estemirova was "buried in line with Islamic tradition before sunset on Thursday, in a cemetery in her ancestral village, Koshkeldy, in Chechnya's Gudermes district." About 150 people attended a vigil that was held in Moscow's Pushkin Square about nine days after the murder, following Russian Orthodox tradition.
So we can conclude that the work of a journalist is a very dangerous profession. Each day brings an unknown future.
Links:
https://cpj.org/data/people/natalya-estemirova/index.php
https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/ru/case/case-history-natalia-estemirova
https://lenta.ru/articles/2009/07/16/estemirova/
https://cpj.org/data/people/natalya-estemirova/index.php
https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/ru/case/case-history-natalia-estemirova
https://lenta.ru/articles/2009/07/16/estemirova/