Saturday, July 18, 2009

Estemirova's death and Iran

With posters of his bearded face smiling down at all and sundry in Chechnya's bombed-out capital and with political opponents thin on the ground because of their mysteriously disappearing or, indeed, because of their being too terrified to express their opposition, it appears that Russia's man in Grozny, Ramyan Kadyrov, is not a very nice person. Academic caution, modal verbs, required here; might be wrong, might be wrong, but there are a lot of people who believe that this man is a bit of a nutter and that he is responsible for lots and lots of nasty things and lots and lots of deaths, including those of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist, who was shot down in a Moscow lift back on 7 October 2006.(1) Well he has been denying his involvement in that one albeit not too convincingly and now he is equally convincing in his denial at having anything to do with the death of the human rights activist, Natalia Estemirova whose body was discovered near the village of Gazi-Yurt in neighbouring Ingushetia after she had been abducted from her home in Grozny on Wednesday morning. Now it is, of course, a bit difficult to pin this on Ramyan and he is hardly likely to have done the killing himself. More importantly, however, with Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, dismissing the theory that the Kremlin's man in Grosny is behind the killing as "primitive and unacceptable",(2) the West will have to handle this one with kid gloves. After all, with Obama and his Zionist friends looking for Russian backing for their Iran policy, there is much more at stake than a question of who killed two brave journalists and let us face it, when it comes to human rights, the West is capable of a type of hypocrisy that wouldn't be out of place when spouted by the "it wasn't me" omnipresent man who stares down at all and sundry in Grosny.
1 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/ramzan-kadyrov-the-warrior-king-of-chechnya-430738.html
2 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/16/natalia-estemirova-killing-russia-chechnya


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