Writing in the New Republic, Usam Basyaev has some final words about the work and life of the human rights advocate Natalia Estemirova.  Basyaev points to the sometimes diverging viewpoints held by Estemirova and her colleague Anna Politkovskaya.

What motivated Natasha Estemirova? Why did she
do this work that led eventually to her death? She did this for nearly
17 years, having started in 1992 during the Osset-Ingush conflict. I
don’t think that patriotism, at least as it is generally understood,
was her motivation. She didn’t have well-defined political views. She
was neither a supporter nor an opponent of Chechen independence. She
wanted political questions to be resolved without blood, without
shooting, without suffering and killing. She was interested in politics
only when this would help her to resolve her human rights cases
successfully, to the small degree that this is still possible in Russia.

Natasha’s
father was Russian and her mother was Chechen and she loved both of her
nations equally. For her consciousness, what she saw happening around
her was as if one part of her was killing the other. She cried when the
elected president of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov, was killed. She refused
to walk on Victory Boulevard after it was renamed Putin Boulevard, even
though, from our office to the center of Grozny, this was the most
convenient route. The latter was responsible for killing the former,
and for the former, she had cast her vote. It sounds naive, but, for
her, this was very important.

She was a
naive person in general. She would begin by saying, “now, listen to my
idea,” and what would follow would be completely impractical, at least
in my view. For instance, there was her desire to reconcile everyone
with everyone else, by creating a reconciliation commission in
Chechnya, similar to one that had existed during Soviet times. The
difference is that, back then, the government was reconciling people
who were involved in blood feuds, where one family had wronged another.
Now, the crimes are being committed by the government, and an
institution of this type could well become an additional form of
pressure against the victims, so that they would not appeal to the
courts or the police. What do you have to complain about if you have
already forgiven the offense? It did not take long to persuade Natasha.
When she understood the argument against it, she gave up the idea.

She
was a real human rights activist. If she took on a case, she gave it
her full attention, and she didn’t transfer the work onto others. She
wrote the appeals to the prosecutors herself, carried them to their
offices herself, and monitored them to be sure that criminal cases
would be opened. She gave information to the press, when it would pose
no risk to the people she was defending. She valued the lives of other
people above all else, and for this, did not even spare her own.

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