MuseumDESCRIPTION:
On July 15, 2009, the body of murdered Chechen human rights defender Natasha Estemirova was found. Katerina Sokiryanskaya talks about the incredibly brave and wonderful life of her colleague and friend.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this week’s episode of Voices on Genocide Prevention. I’m very pleased to have with me today, calling from St. Petersburg, Katerina Sokiryanskaya. Thank you very much for speaking with me.
KATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Good morning, Bridget, thank you for having me on the air.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And Katya, we’ve asked you to speak with us today about the work of Memorial, but in particular, on the incredibly sad occasion of the murder of one of your colleagues, Natasha Estemirova. Memorial has been a lifeline of information about human rights abuses in Chechnya and in the Caucuses, and throughout Russia. We want to express our condolences to you and to Memorial.
KATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Ah, thank you very much, but it is really very difficult to talk about what happened. Actually the worst thing we could ever imagine has happened. We were afraid something like that could happen, for several years now. Finally, when something terrible like this did occur, we were completely unprepared, shocked, and lost. And it’s truly so that Natasha is irreplaceable, and we know that we have not only lost our best colleague, but first and foremost, we have lost a very dear, very close person with whom we have spent many years working together.
Natasha started working as a human rights defender since 1992, when the Ingush-Ossetian armed conflict broke out, in the Prigorodny district of north of Ossetia. It was the only armed ethnic conflict on the territory of the Russian Federation. At that time, Natasha was a school teacher in Grozny, but when she heard about the terrible events which were taking place in the neighboring republic, she went there, and she worked to release hostages, take care of the injured, and document the crimes which were committed during the several days of very intense fighting.
Natasha started working for Memorial during the second Chechen war, particularly in 2000, when the office of Memorial was opened in Grozny. The first case she was working on was a horrendous crime committed by the federal soldiers on the 5th of February 2000, in the small town of Novi Aldy, where, during several hours, 56 to 80 people were shot dead, were executed summarily by the soldiers. And Natasha went there, soon after the event, and she documented this crime. She made it public, and there was filming made of the victims, and some of the corpses that were not yet buried. People were waiting for somebody to come and to document and to investigate this crime.
So then Natasha started to work in Memorial on a regular basis. She, during the first days of the second campaign, she was working with victims of heavy bombing. At that time, Chechen towns and the capital city of Grozny were very heavily bombed, inflicting mass terror among the civilian population. There were aerial attacks on the convoys of refugees who were trying to flee the conflict zone. Then, starting with winter 2000, the terrible mop-up operations were carried out in the Chechen villages. When parts of villages or entire villages would be closed off by soldiers and military, they would do door-to-door checkups and detain everybody who seemed suspicious. Very often these people were subsequently disappeared, or they would be found dead.
Natasha went into the villages, she made hundreds of photographs, she documented tens, and dozens and then hundreds of cases of enforced disappearances, and summary executions. Not only documented, but she tried to help every family, doing whatever she could. She would take a mother looking for her son, and go with her to the Prosecutor’s Office, to the military commissariat, sometimes just to be there with her and demand that the soldiers pay attention to her problem. And this gave, Natasha gave the relatives strength to fight for their children and sometimes, actually many times, they were successful, they would manage to release the young man, and often in terrible condition, but still alive.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And--
KATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Natasha dealt with major problems as well as with smaller problems of the people she encountered. She would help a mother looking for her son to search for him, but she would also, if she would see that the little children in the family who were underfed, or they don’t have school books, she would simply go and buy that, and do that for the family, although she, herself was very constrained with financially. Memorial has a very small…Memorial could pay only very small salaries at that time.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And this was some of the most dangerous times for civilians across Chechnya, with the war, and then the mopping up operations during the period where Chechen civilians were targeted, really indiscriminately. Did Memorial lose any other colleagues at this period?
KATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: We lost Viktor Popkov in the beginning of war, in the very beginning of war, but since 2000 to 2002, which were the years of large scale violence, we didn’t lose our local colleagues. In 2004, our employee from Sernovodsk was abducted and he went missing. And now Natasha.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: One of the things that is hardest to understand is, it seems like there’s still violence sponsored by the state, particularly by the Chechen officials. But one, at least from the outside, would not have expected one of your colleagues to be targeted at this point in the conflict. Why do you think she was murdered now?
KATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Well-large scale violence was on decrease by 2003, when federal soldiers mainly withdrew to the barracks. The next period of the conflict was launched , which we call the period of Chechenization, whereby ethnic Chechens, lots of administrative and military functions were transferred to ethnic Chechens and local security services were created, which now, instead of the federal soldiers carried out these mop up operations. The scale of violence reduced somewhat, but this violence became more selective, more targeted and more concealed from the outside view. The Chechens feared these forces, they knew very well the mechanisms of the Chechen society would be used in order to make combatants surrender, or in order to eliminate them or find and discover them.
Natasha was combating all these types of crimes, which were committed during this period as well. For example, Chechen security forces would take relatives of alleged combatants hostage, and keep them for several months, subject them to torture. They would be fathers and mothers and sisters, of alleged combatants, and of course it was very difficult for those in the hills to resist such a pressure. Natasha worked on such cases and spoke about them very openly, which was very dangerous. There was also a new wave after 2003, in 2004, and 5 and 6, a wave of fabricated trials when people tended to disappear less, because the practice of enforced disappearing was probably too embarrassing for the Russian Federation. So what they would do, they would abduct a person. He would disappear for some time, from several hours or several weeks, and they’d discover him in preliminary detention, having already confessed to committing serious crimes. In the meantime, the relatives wouldn’t know where the person is, and an independent lawyer wouldn’t have access to him, and he would usually be very severely tortured. And in court, these confessions extracted under torture would become the main, or very often the only proof of the person’s guilt. So this machine was put into motion in, say, 2004, 2005, and it still is functioning now. Natasha was among the most outspoken critics of this system as well.
There is a terrible institution in Grozny called ORB-2 Prison, which is the department for organized crime, which was a notorious torture place, Caucasus-wide. There were people brought there from neighboring Republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia and subjected to the most horrendous torture. Natasha collected the documentation on such cases. She-- well, there was a group of independent and very brave lawyers who worked with her to combat the system. Finally by 2007, a human rights defender managed to defeat the practice of terrible torture in this place. Chechenization also meant that local regime headed first by Ahkmad and then by Ramzan Kadyrov, who was established in Chechnya, and this regime put immense pressure on the population, basically it is a totalitarian regime. The society is under control and the level of fear in Chechnya now is much higher, than it was in times of worst violence in 2000, 2001.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And Katya, you yourself were also attacked. You’ve been beaten trying to carry out your own work.
KATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Several members of Memorial were under attack at one point or another. We knew about the danger, and well the Chechen authorities expressed their deep dissatisfaction with the work of Memorial already two years ago. Since then there was pressure; we received signals that the Chechen government was very unhappy about what we were doing. There were two meetings with the Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, where he expressed that he wants Memorial to bring information to him, but not to deliver it to the outside world, which, of course, was unacceptable to us. It was then when we started to first think of closing our Chechen offices and working from Ingushetia or Moscow, because we thought that we didn’t want to risk our people, first, but we also were not prepared to give up an inch of our principles. So combining the two was risky and we paid a very high price for trying to combine both.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And what do you know of what happened to Natasha?
KATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: I was in Grozny on that day, and the night before we stayed in the office late. Natasha was in a very good mood, and laughing and then we all went home. And the next morning, her phone was switched off in the morning, but we didn’t somehow pay much attention to it, because Natasha was often at meetings, and she could turn off the phone, and she was kind of working on her own very often. So we didn’t get worried right away.
Then a journalist came to the office who said he had an appointment with Natasha. He waited for her for an hour and she didn’t come, which was very strange, because she was very responsible person. At around one-thirty, we already started getting anxious. We realized that something wrong happened. Her phone was still switched off, and we went to her house, to the block of flats where she lived, and started interrogating people around, just went around asking people whether they saw anything suspicious and strange happening there that morning. When I was talking to the drivers from the local shuttle buses, there is a stop of the shuttle buses which Natasha took every morning, number 55, so I came to the drivers and asked whether they saw anything suspicious that morning. When I was talking to the driver, a young lady came up and asked, “Are you looking for Natasha?” And she said, “I saw her being abducted this morning.” And then she explained that she saw, in the morning, how Natasha was forced into a car, she just started to scream out something, and then the car left. So then it was already clear that something very bad happened. Surprisingly, this young woman was afraid even to come to Natasha’s daughter or to come to Memorial or to send us a message somehow to let us know that something wrong had happened. So, around two o’clock, we already gave information to the media that Natasha was abducted. Then at around four-thirty, we received a message from Ingushetia that her dead body was found there. Five bullets in her body.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Katya, I know it’s very difficult. As you said, she was a close friend and courageous colleague, so I want to thank you for speaking with us. As a final question, though, what will happen to Memorial’s work in Chechnya? Will you continue or will you operate out of Ingushetia? What are the plans moving forward, to make sure that this incredibly important work continues, but with the safety of your colleagues central?
KATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: This is a very complicated issue, and we were in so much shock and pain and grief when this happened to Natasha, that we decided that we’re not able, at the moment, to make a reasonable decision.
So we decided to temporarily suspend our activities for the time of mourning at least, and come back to this issue later, at a later point, and discuss whether we will continue to work. All our local colleagues want to continue. They’re determined to continue. However, we are also thinking we cannot risk anybody any more. That’s one thing. At the same time, we are determined to work in Chechnya, and we will work in Chechnya, no matter whether we have our offices there, or whether we operate from Ingushetia or from Moscow. We will definitely work, and we will be much more outspoken, even more outspoken now than we used to be. It’s just a matter of developing new mechanisms of how to make ourselves secure, our colleagues secure, and at the same time, do the important work of protecting Chechen civilians from human rights abuses.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And Memorial, and particularly the work of the Grozny, the Chechnya office of Memorial, has been just astonishingly courageous for years now. And for those of us who work on these issues there has been no other source of information as consistently excellent as your work. We wish you all luck, and would express again, our deep condolences for the loss of your colleague.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about responding to and preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/genocide.
