Cherkasov: Estemirova never took her eyes away from today's problems

The last thing that Natalia Estemirova did was to state that Chechnya again has public executions. This was stated by Alexander Cherkasov, a member of the Board of the HRC "Memorial", at the ceremony in Moscow of awarding the medal of Russian Ombudsman "Hurry Making Good", where Natalia Estemirova was awarded posthumously. In Mr Cherkasov's opinion, probably, she was assassinated because of that.

The human rights activist recollected that he got acquainted with Natasha in 1999. According to his story, she made public everything that happened "here and now". "The last thing she did was to state that public executions were again practiced in Chechnya. It looks like murder was her punishment, as the word combination 'public (extrajudicial) execution' is too sensitive in Chechnya," said Alexander Cherkasov, according to whom Natalia Estemirova was one of the few persons who "never took her eyes away" from what was underway.

Mr Cherkasov also named the observer of "Novaya Gazeta" Anna Politkovskaya and lawyer Stanislav Markelov, who were also engaged in Chechen matters and murdered.

"We now talk a lot about what happened 40 years ago, and know very well about what was earlier. But here and now the past repeats, because we haven't paid off with it. And Natasha lived in that. If we count how many people disappeared in Chechnya, and it means: kidnapped, tortured to death at interrogations and assassinated, and if we correlate this count with the population of Chechnya, it will be more than the victims of the big Stalin's terror as compared with the population of the Soviet Union. And we took our eyes away from it, but Natasha was remarkable, because she never did it," Alexander Cherkasov has emphasized in his presentation.