Aishat Magomedova, Head of Women's Charitable Hospital, died in Dagestan

On December, 26, Aishat Magomedova, founder and permanent Head of a women's charitable hospital, died in one of the hospitals of Makhachkala after a long-lasting illness. She had been 66.

During the past two years Aishat Magomedova had been seriously ill. She needed expensive medications and some of the Dagestani journalists with the support of "Memorial" Human Rights Center prepared an appeal to different human rights and other organizations asking them to collect money for Magomedova's treatment but it was already too late.

Aishat Magomedova was born in 1944, in the village of Godobery, Botlikh district of Dagestan, in a family of a village teacher. She graduated from Dagestan Medical Institute, became a gynaecologist well known in Dagestan and had for many years been managing a unit in a republican hospital.

In the beginning of 1990's when public health started shifting to commercial basis Aishat Magomedova created the "League of Mother and Baby's Protection" in order to provide women from low-income families with free medical aid. In 1995 Aishat opened a Women's Charitable Hospital in Makhachkala.

Aishat Magomedova had been permanent Head of the hospital. The clinic had rendered free outpatient medical aid to 40 thousand women and over six thousand underwent a course of therapy.

In 2008 the Ministry of Ownership and Land Relations of Dagestan submitted a suit on the clinic's eviction from illegally occupied buildings to the republican Court of Arbitration. On April, 29, 2008, Magomed Isaev passed a judgment of allowance of the claim.

This was followed by a number of cross-claims which were not accepted, meetings in protection of the hospital, publications in local and federal mass media, appeals of famous human rights activists.

"There are not so many people in the republic who could be compared to Aishat Magomedova from the point of view of decency and disinterestedness. The whole Russia can be proud of such persons in the future, too. I am sure there will appear a number of memorials to the "Dagestani Mother Teresa" in different republics of Northern Caucasus", Lidia Grafova, Chairman of Executive board of the "Forum of Migrants' Organizations", declared.

On November, 30, 2009, the Government of Dagestan issued a direction No 297 of granting the hospital a new building in Beibulatov street, 16, Machachkala. However, Aishat Magomedova said that the building did not meet the standards for medical institutions.

Further fate of the Women's Charitable Hospital is yet unknown. According to her colleagues, everything had been supported by Aishat Magomedova's enthusiasm only. Aishat's friends and family state that it has been just the events connected with the eviction of the hospital that broke Magomedova's health.

Aishat Magomedova had been deeply concerned about the fates of the Dagestani women, especially the ones who lived in the mountain villages. Time and again she had expressed her opinion on acute problems of social and political situation in Dagestan. In one of her last interviews given to journalist Svetlana Anokhina in May, 2010, Magomedova said: "I am often asked: what's wrong with your women, where do shakhid women appear from? There are a great number of reasons, among them one which people avoid speaking publicly about. There is a great respect towards a girl who gets married with a "forest man", especially if she decides to become a suicide bomber. Men regard her as equal to themselves, a "sister in arms", while you know that up to nowadays men enjoy special deference, women stand up when they come in, they never sit at the same table with them and have no right to interfere with their talk".

Last year a film called "Dagestani Woman's Fate" was shot in Dagestan on the initiative of the "League of Mother and Baby's Protection" and non-governmental fund "Women's Charitable Hospital" whose leader was Aishat Magomedova.

The film shows the audience the difficult situation in which women living in mountain districts of Dagestan are. Unemployment, absence of medical aid and social protection result in grave forms of diseases many women suffer from and children's death rate annually increases.