The Fate of the World’s Forgotten Wars Is Seen in Chechnya

The world’s interest, for a while, was on Ukraine. Then it turned on ten cents to Gaza. Now it’s Iran. The focus and anxiety were all justified. But why do politicians and the public give priority over the other?

I was not different from anyone else, which was transferred over the past few weeks by Will Wales from the edge of Donald Trump towards Iran. Meanwhile, the world has made less attention, as the Israeli forces in the world continued as they are desperately looking for food, while Ukrainians feel giving up that Russia makes more roads in their lands.

The world’s interest, for a while, was on Ukraine. Then it turned on ten cents to Gaza. Now it’s Iran. The focus and anxiety were all justified. But why do politicians and the public give priority over the other?

I was not different from anyone else, which was transferred over the past few weeks by Will Wales from the edge of Donald Trump towards Iran. Meanwhile, the world has made less attention, as the Israeli forces in the world continued as they are desperately looking for food, while Ukrainians feel giving up that Russia makes more roads in their lands.

What about the many forgotten wars? Do we only have a lot of head space, or do we not care about the conflicts that have been raging for years and that barely caused us a rhythm?

I was thinking about this while reading the exceptional notes of Lana Estemirova, a young woman, a book that is more honored for her mother, Natalia, a human rights activist in 2009 and left in a trench.

Who is talking anymore about what happened in that land in the North Caucasus that Moscow has always seen as rioters? Nearly 15 years ago, starting from Boris Yeltsin and then increasing greater virginity during the era of Vladimir Putin, Chechnya was subjected to the ground. In 2003, the United Nations declared its capital, Grozny, that it is the most destructive city in the world. Since then, it has been rebuilt – part of the young man, a pride part – and the country is relatively calm, but only thanks to the terrible dictatorship of Ramzan Kadirov.

And who talks about Sudan, where the war between the government and the semi -military support forces left tens of thousands of people dead and about 26 million people – half of the population – which are due to the severe food insecurity?

Or Haiti, where gangs now control 80 percent of the capital, Port or Prince, and despite the mission of 800 police led by Kenya, supported by the United Nations, and now only by the United States, violence continued to rise. In 2024, nearly 6000 people were killed, an increase in the previous year.

Or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Rwanda -backed forces seized large areas of land. More than half a million people fled the latest fighting around the regional capital, Juma, prompting the total number of messages in the region to 2.5 million. Or Yemen. Or resistance to the opposition militia in Myanmar, which seized about 100 towns while fighting an army that exercises power through brute force.

A long time before Trump reached power for the first time in 2017, governments all over the world lost the will to retract human rights violations. Confidence, and perhaps destroyed it, has been damaged due to interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. These alleged humanitarian interventions were seized by Trump, as he created “America First” talisman: no more wars forever does not mean more American forces deployment to remove dictators.

Trump appears to be contrary to his restrictions by bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, but he made it clear that he is not interested in whether the system is dictatorship.

This means that if you live in a state where people disappear at night, it will not be heard again, then you are really alone.

This is the brutal life that Estemirova lived. Her childhood was dominated by the Chechen wars. The first, between 1994 and 1996, resulted in the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the declaration of independence by the Chechen separatists. This ended on a dead end.

On the eve of Putin, Putin took the position of Prime Minister as Prime Minister, Russia launched a large -scale military operation in 1999. It was the pretext of a series of bombings in Russian cities, which were blamed in the Chechen rebels but attributed it to the Russian intelligence that it used as a false science and the pretext of invasion.

The conflict ultimately led to a Russian victory and the establishment of a pro -Kremlin government during the era of Kadirov. It is believed that up to 200,000 people have died since the beginning of the fighting – which ranges from only 1.5 million.

Chechnya are not strangers to suffer at the hands of Moscow. In 1944, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of all the population to Central Asia, more than 1000 miles east, on charges of wrong cooperation with the Nazis.

In her notes, Estemirova wrote about an early life in the war: “Before I am two years old, she left me in the care of my grandmother and returned to Grozny, where she received a mark overlooking the city entrance with the words” Welcome to Hell “.

Although her mother was devoted to her and did what she could to maintain her safety, she was exposed to a great danger by working frankly to document many human rights violations and the disappearance that occurred based on Kadyrov’s orders, or random killings by Russian forces. Lana describes how she was shot and Natalia by drunk soldiers, for fun only. When her mother faced them, they move away from their barracks.

Lana was sent to different schools away to try to give her a feeling of normal life. In the city of Orlers in Yakatrnburg, it will be mocked as a “terrorist” by Russian students. In returning to the homeland, I have not seen anything unwanted about being in a semester without doors or windows. Genetically challenging her mother, she fought from the back guard of the girls not to wear the veil, but in the end she had to surrender.

Instead of seeing the warnings, she made the 2006 murder for her friend and brave Russian journalist Anna Politicovskaya Natalia Estyrova more determined to fight. She was depicting collective graves and writing about the largest possible number of cases, with the combination of other activists from the memorial of the group now achieved.

Kadyrov has become more angry than her actions. He tried to control it in silence, and in 2008 of the president of the Human Rights Council. Just a few weeks lasted. It was called several times to see; Every time he was boiling with anger.

By that stage, the world has long moved from Chechnya – not that it has given much attention. Is it an inherent bias towards poor countries? Or to reformulate Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister before the war, when talking about Nazi allegations of Czechoslovakia, “a fight in a distant land among people and we do not know anything of them.” Has social media restricted our attention further? We have always been selective, but it seems that our lack of interest has now turned from a struggle to deal with a large number of cases to a deliberate rejection of participation. Burning and contradiction has been converted into a strategy.

Lana Esimirova was only fifteen years old when her mother was kidnapped in July 2009.

As it was happening, my wife, BBC Lucy Ash, was the last Western correspondent to see her alive on the task of reports to Chechnya. I made me second and final to Grozny as part of a delegation of journalists invited in November 2008, where we were called to the newly built official residence in Kadyrov outside the city. Surrounded by followers, we took a tour of his land, which included a special horse racing path, a human skiing lake, and a personal zoo garden, where he told us that he liked to relax by communicating with the tigers and the opening.

Kadyrov still exists – he has sent large units of the forces to help Putin’s war in Ukraine. The two are cut from the same fabric. No one ever was prosecuted to kill Estenirova. The investigation was an excuse.

Former Natalia colleagues, Lana, helped move to Britain. She got married, and last year she was her own daughter, and Natasha described her – on her mother’s anniversary.

A year after the murder, then the President of the United States hosted Barack Obama Dmitry Medvedev (Putin’s temporary position as president). In front of television cameras, they announced a “reset” of relations after what was “dangerous erosion.” Trump is now Putin again. The current generation of human rights defenders under their mercy.