Ian Kelly, spokesman at the Bureau of Public Affairs at the U.S. State Department, just had this come across the wire:
The United States is deeply saddened by reports of the abduction and murder of respected human rights activist Natalya Estemirova. We call upon the Russian government to bring those responsible to justice.
A member of the NGO Memorial HRC in the North Caucasus, Natalya Estemirova was uncompromising in her willingness to reveal the truth regardless of where that might lead. She was devoted to shining a light on human rights abuses, particularly in Chechnya, and received a number of international awards for her brave work, including the 2007 Anna Politkovskaya prize by the Nobel Women’s Initiative and awards from the Swedish and European parliaments. We extend our deepest sympathies to her family.
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“The United States is deeply saddened by reports of the abduction and murder of respected human rights activist Natalya Estemirova.”I wonder how deeply saddened the US is by the reports of civilian victims of their bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. There must he thousands of them this year alone.But I guess these Afghan and Iraqi Muslims don’t matter because they are not “good” Muslims like the Chechens are. I mean those Chechens fighting against the Russian state. They are a “good ally” like Zbigniew Brzezinski once said.
Sad?How about OUTRAGED?Calls upon?How about DEMANDS?State Department?How about BARACK OBAMA?This president simply does not have a clue.
“How about DEMANDS?”To make demands you actually have to have moral authority to make them, which the US does not have after the genocide on Iraqi and Afghan children in it’s illegal wars.Maybe a nation like Nepal or New Zealand has a moral authority to lecture Russia in certain matters. The US does not.
When a Kremlin critic is brutally murdered and somebody starts talking furiously about Iraq, all intelligent people smell the repugnant bile of the KGB.Who does this cretin think he is fooling? Wasn’t the same tactic’s utter failure in Soviet times enough? Guess not.
Karl, let me repeat again my rebuttal to your nonsense in a thread above:============Karl, the facts are that any civilian deaths in Iraq by the US military were unintentional. And, that any children intentionally murdered by rival terrorist groups operating in Iraq have been doggedly hunted down by the US military and the Iraqi government. But, you know all this. So, your lame moral equivalence of murdered children in Iraq given those those facts versus the intentionally murdered journalists/human rights workers in Russia where the perpetrator is never brought to justice as hypocrisy is bogus.==========Face it, Karl, you are trolling, looking to pick a fight, completely off topic and with an agenda. You are ignorable for all of those reasons.
Indeed, Karl, you’re not being honest. Civilian victims of bombings have been and are lamented and mourned in the West, as they should; but in no case was the death caused by the victim’s pro-human rights activism.One might just as well ask why the Russians don’t mourn the victims of their attacks on the Chechens. To imitate your style: “Ah, but the Chechens aren’t really people, like the Orthodox Christians. So why should we mourn them?”And, as penny points out, you leave out the fact that Natalya was a woman of extraordinary courage who risked her life for the sake of human rights in Russia.How many Russian human rights activists have been murdered in the US?…
This is completely one sided. when a security official who works to eliminate militant activities gets murdered we hear no response, but when a journalist critical of the government is killed, western media is quick to make the situation look like the end of the world. The perpetrators of this attack could be anyone, and this includes militants operating in the south Caucasus in an attempt to defame the government by making it look like they are the ones responsible for this. It’s unfair and completely biased to immediately point fingers at the Kremlin.