Monday, October 12, 2009

Russian human rights activist murdered.

Read this:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/07/david-remnick-natalia-estemirova.html

"Natalia was one of those remarkable people whom reporters depend on in every ominous corner of the world: the human-rights activists who know so much, and who give completely of themselves, with little thought to their security. They are the ones who reap no glory or profit; they are the ones for whom the violence and corruption is not a “story” but the center of their lives. Natalia did her work for Memorial, a human-rights group that began during the Gorbachev years. It started out intending to unearth the buried facts of the Stalin era. Now it concentrates largely on the present tense.

It is a horrible event, and yet it is just the latest of many outrages against Russians devoted to truth-telling. Each time, the reaction is the same: the howls of anger, the dramatic funeral, the icy indifference of the Russian government, and a prolonged investigation and a trial scripted by Dostoyevsky."

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