dignity.

In January, I blogged about a Sri Lankan journalist who knew he would be killed one day for revealing the atrocities of the long civil war in his homeland. He wrote a letter to be published after his assassination - a letter, as Steve Coll from the New Yorker wrote, "[that] is like nothing else you will read today, that I promise." I was reminded of it while reading about the recent execution of Natalya Estemirova.

Ms. Estemirova was a fearless human rights investigator in Chechnya.

She wandered the ruined republic wearing a skirt, blouse and heels, lipstick on, carrying her purse and presenting a straight face, perhaps warmed by a slight smile, to masked gunmen and victims alike. She could seem as proper as a chief librarian, ready to add to her archive, both on paper and in the mind, which revealed the Chechen wars for what they really were. How did she dare?

This was Chechnya, after all, a world of violence so sinister it can be difficult to describe in a newspaper. Thugs dominate this land. Experience has taught them that fear will reliably bend opponents to heel. Who was she to chase them? Why could she not be convinced to quit?

The answer is now written, though everyone who knew her knew it long ago: only death would stop her. All her friends could do was trust her to dodge it, as she had, somehow, for years...

She was, improbably, a one-woman parallel government, providing services the real government was unwilling to offer. She found the incarcerated. She hunted for hidden graves. She built cases against perpetrators, even when she found, as she often did, that they wore government uniforms.

I wonder if Ms. Estemirova left a letter for her loved ones and for her people. Regardless, her legacy is clear: political strongmen have no armor for hard facts and the dignity she embodied. (Thus, they must attack, even knowing the opposition's ammunition is unlimited, intangible.) There is nothing passe about speaking truth to power. We can't all be heroines but we all need them.