The death of human rights worker Natalya Estemirova was widely reported last week as the latest in a string of unsolved murders of members of the small circle of journalists and activists working to expose the extreme brutality of the now decades-old conflict over Chechen independence. Since the 2006 murder of journalist and press author Anna Politkovskaya, whose book A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya offers an eyeopening look at the lives of Chechens caught in the crossfire between violent rebels and an equally violent counterinsurgency, we have followed some of the larger developments in what has been so far an unsuccessful quest to find and try her murderer(s).
And now with the assassination of Estemirova, who according to the UK’s Times Online recently “became the first recipient of an award in [Politkovskaya’s] name for work for the leading Russian rights group Memorial,” the world has also lost one of the most prominent inheritors of Politkovskaya’s legacy.
Find out more about Politkovskaya’s groundbreaking work in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya with this excerpt or follow some of the coverage of the assassinations at the New York Times or at the Times Online website.