The world’s consideration was, for some time, on Ukraine. Then it shifted on a dime to Gaza. Now it’s Iran. The main focus and the priority have been all totally justified. However why is it politicians and publics prioritize one over the opposite?
I used to be no completely different to anybody else, transfixed over the previous few weeks by the will-he-won’t-he of Donald Trump’s brinkmanship in the direction of Iran. In the meantime, the world paid much less consideration because the wretched Palestinians continued to be fired upon by Israeli troops as they search desperately for meals, whereas Ukrainians really feel deserted as Russia makes ever extra inroads into their territory.
Please Stay: The Chechen Wars, My Mom and Me, Lana Estemirova, John Murray Press, 288 pp., $24.95, June 2025.
What of the numerous forgotten wars? Do we have now solely a lot headspace, or can we not care about conflicts which were raging for years and which barely trigger us to skip a beat?
I used to be pondering this whereas studying the extraordinary memoir of Lana Estemirova, a younger Chechen girl, a e-book that’s extra a tribute to her mom, Natalia, a human rights activist gunned down in 2009 and left in a ditch.
Who talks anymore about what occurred in that land within the North Caucasus that was at all times seen by Moscow as a troublemaker? For almost 15 years, beginning with Russian President Boris Yeltsin after which with even larger ferocity below his successor, Vladimir Putin, Chechnya was pummeled to the bottom. In 2003, its capital, Grozny, was declared by the United Nations to be essentially the most destroyed metropolis on the planet. Since then, it has been rebuilt—half shabbily, half ostentatiously—and the nation is comparatively quiet, however solely due to the horrible dictatorship of Ramzan Kadyrov.
And who talks about Sudan, the place a struggle between the federal government and the paramilitary Speedy Help Forces has left tens of hundreds useless and some 26 million individuals—round half of the inhabitants—going through extreme meals insecurity?
Or Haiti, the place gangs now management 80 % of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and regardless of a Kenyan-led mission of 800 police, backed by the U.N., and now solely half-heartedly by the U.S., violence has continued to soar. In 2024, almost 6,000 individuals have been killed, an improve on the 12 months earlier than.
Or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the place forces backed by Rwanda have seized massive swathes of territory. Over half one million individuals have fled the latest combating across the regional capital, Goma, pushing the entire variety of displaced within the space to 2.5 million. Or Yemen. Or the resistance of opposition militia in Myanmar, who’ve tentatively seized round 100 cities as they combat a army that workouts energy by means of brute pressure.
Lengthy earlier than Trump first got here to energy in 2017, governments all over the world had misplaced the desire to push again arduous on human rights abuses. Confidence had been broken, maybe destroyed, by the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. These so-called humanitarian interventions have been seized on by Trump as he established his “America First” mantra: No extra ceaselessly wars meant no extra deployment of U.S. forces to take away dictators.
Trump did appear to contradict his personal strictures by bombing Iran’s nuclear amenities however has made it clear that he’s not excited by whether or not a regime is a dictatorship or not.
Which implies that should you stay in a state the place individuals disappear within the evening, by no means to be heard of once more, you might be actually alone.
That’s the brutalized youth that Estemirova lived by means of. Her childhood was dominated by the 2 Chechen wars. The primary, between 1994 and 1996, resulted from the breakup of the Soviet Union and declaration of independence by Chechen separatists. That led to a stalemate.
On the eve of Putin taking workplace as prime minister, Russia launched a full-scale army operation in 1999. The pretext was a sequence of bombings in Russian cities, which have been blamed on Chechen rebels however have been attributed by some to Russian intelligence utilizing them as a false flag, a pretext for invasion.
The battle finally resulted in a Russian victory and the institution of a pro-Kremlin authorities below Kadyrov. As many as 200,000 persons are thought to have died for the reason that begin of combating—an enormous toll on a inhabitants of simply 1.5 million.
Chechens aren’t any strangers to struggling by the hands of Moscow. In 1944, Soviet chief Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of your entire inhabitants to Central Asia, greater than 1,000 miles to the east, on the false cost of collaboration with the Nazis.
In her memoir, Estemirova writes of an youth at struggle: “Simply earlier than I turned two years previous, she left me within the care of my grandmother and returned to Grozny the place a painted signal on the metropolis’s entrance greeted her with the phrases “welcome to hell.’”
Though her mom was dedicated to her and did what she might to maintain her protected, she put herself at enormous threat by working overtly to doc the numerous human rights abuses and disappearances that came about on Kadyrov’s orders, or random killings carried out by Russian troops. Lana describes how she and Natalia have been as soon as shot at by drunken troopers, only for enjoyable. When her mom confronted them, they scuttled away into their barracks.
Lana was despatched to completely different colleges distant to attempt to give her a way of normality. Within the Urals metropolis of Yekaterinburg, she can be mocked as a “terrorist” by Russian pupils. Again residence, she noticed nothing untoward about being in a classroom with no doorways or home windows. Inheriting her defiance from her mom, she fought one-girl rearguard motion to not put on a scarf, however finally was compelled to offer in.
As a substitute of seeing the warnings, the homicide in 2006 of her pal and brave Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya made Natalia Estemirova extra decided to combat on. She would {photograph} mass graves and write about as many instances as she might, whereas bringing collectively different activists from the now-banned group Memorial.
Kadyrov grew to become extra enraged by her actions. He tried to woo her into silence, appointing her in 2008 to chair of a “human rights council.” She lasted only a few weeks. She was summoned a number of occasions to see him; every time he was boiling with rage.
By that time the world had lengthy moved on from Chechnya—not that it ever paid it a lot consideration. Is it inherent bias in the direction of poor international locations? Or to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s hapless pre-war prime minister, when speaking of Nazi claims on Czechoslovakia, “a quarrel in a faraway land between individuals of which we all know nothing.” Has social media restricted our consideration spans but additional? We have been at all times selective, however our lack of curiosity appears to have shifted now from a wrestle to deal with the plethora of instances to a deliberate refusal to grow to be concerned. Exhaustion and ambivalence have been became technique.
Lana Estemirova was simply 15 when her mom was kidnapped in July 2009. Bundled right into a automobile as she walked to the bus cease on her technique to work, she was pushed out of city after which shot 5 occasions within the chest and head.
Because it occurs, my spouse, the BBC journalist Lucy Ash, was the final Western correspondent to see her alive on a reporting task to Chechnya. I made my second and final go to to Grozny as a part of a delegation of invited journalists in November 2008, the place we have been summoned to Kadyrov’s newly constructed official residence outdoors the town. Surrounded by henchmen, he took us on a tour of his grounds, which included his personal horse-racing monitor, a man-made lake for jet snowboarding, and a private zoo, the place, he informed us, he appreciated to unwind communing with the tigers and cheetahs.
Kadyrov remains to be there—and has dispatched massive contingents of forces to assist Putin’s struggle in Ukraine. The 2 are minimize from the identical fabric. No one was ever prosecuted for Estemirova’s homicide. The investigation was a pretense. have been a sham.
Natalia’s former colleagues helped Lana to maneuver to Britain. She married, and final 12 months had a daughter of her personal, whom she has referred to as Natasha—in reminiscence of her mom.
A 12 months after the homicide, then-U.S. President Barack Obama hosted Dmitry Medvedev (Putin’s sham non permanent stand-in as president). In entrance of TV cameras, they introduced a “reset” of relations after what had been a “harmful drift.” Trump is now wooing Putin once more. The present technology of human rights defenders are at their mercy.
