It's a good thing that the left and right in America should argue with passion over such issues as global warming and health care. It is less healthy, perhaps, but to be expected that sometimes the animosities that result from these arguments become more important than the issues that gave rise to them. One corrective might be to consider places where politics means something altogether different.
The current issue of Foreign Policy has a list of the "least free places on earth." It's nice that there is one venue in which North Korea can be competitive. But the really heartbreaking story came from the Russian satrapy known as Chechnya. Anna Nemtsova writes for FP.
Natasha Estemirova was a human rights activist in that dismal place. She dedicated her life to bringing to light the horrors inflicted on the people of Chechnya by the Russians and by the Russian backed government.
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.
Americans know gangsters well enough. From Al Capone to the Gangster Crips, we are perfectly capable of producing our own homegrown crop of murderous thugs. Decent life is possible in America because the Crips control a few hoods, during a few hours a day, and the government controls the rest. But imagine a country where the Crips are the government, and they are backed by a super-Capone with nuclear shells in his tommy gun. That would be Chechnya.
Ms. Estemirova was no threat to the regime. Or she wasn't unless you think that telling the truth is a threat, which it is. Anyway, the boss man hater her. He was in a position to do something about her.
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.
That should break the heart of everyone who cares about human dignity and liberty. We Americans have an unfortunate habit of exaggerating the defects we perceive in folks across the aisle. The left morphs George W. Bush into Hitler, or imagines that anyone who opposes universal health insurance must be in favor of genocide. The right imagines that Barack Obama is an Al Qaeda operative or an incipient Stalin. Such adolescent hysterics obscure the most important distinctions. Our statesmen are not perfect. They are nothing like Ramzan Kadyrov, let alone Hitler or Stalin. It would do to keep that straight.
KB:
Thanks for this moving post.
e2
Posted by: Erik | Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 04:39 PM