Image courtesy of Caucasian Knot from Fatima Tlisova's presentation "Brutal Censorship."
In June of this year I interviewed Fatima Tlisova, an independent journalist from the North Caucasus who has reported on human rights abuses and political/military brutality and corruption in the region. She was giving a presentation for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on eight journalists who had been marginalized by Russian authorities through unjustified criminal prosecution, forced exile and even assassination. Included among the journalists she profiled was the late Natalia Estemirova, a prominent Chechen reporter and activist who dared to write about Chechen President (and Russian lackey) Ramzan Kadyrov’s personal torture prisons and barbaric intimidation tactics. For instance, Natalia was one of the very few journalists who documented the beheading of a local rebel, whose head was placed on a stake in the center of his village at Kadyrov’s order. For her determination to achieve social justice for her people, Natalia was assassinated. Activists and other independent journalists assert that her murder was conducted by Kremlin security officials.
Fatima Tlisova is a Pulitzer Center grantee, and this past week I spent my working hours carefully fact checking her articles. I was truly happy to do so for because of my Ukrainian ethnic background and my own people’s vicious oppression under Soviet rule, I wholeheartedly support Fatima’s mission to expose the world to the atrocities occurring in her homeland at the hands of Putin and his minions.
I encourage you all to visit her project page and read her articles on the Pulitzer Center website. We have just published her blog post on the life and death of Natalia Estemirova. It is the first in a series of reports from her project published in advance of her upcoming feature story in the fall issue of the Nieman Reports.
Read/watch my print and video interview with Fatima. It is also available on my website, www.christinapaschyn.com, under the print section.
