Rights campaigner dies
June 19, 2011
Yelena Bonner, who died Sunday after undergoing major heart surgery in Boston, was a Soviet voice of conscience who continued to fight for human rights for the people of Russia after the end of the Cold War.
Bonner was hailed by EU leaders for her "courageous fight for freedom" which was not limited to any "ethnic group or state."
"The world has lost one of the most inspiring and dedicated human rights defenders," former Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, who heads the European Parliament, said.
The 88-year-old, who was married to Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov until his death in 1989, helped organize Russia's nascent rights movement and became a keeper of her husband's legacy.
Jose Manuel Barroso, who heads the European Commission, said Bonner "stood side by side with her husband in the fight for political freedom, democracy and human rights in the former Soviet Union, and all over the world."
'Putin must go'
Bonner spent the last years of her life in the United States after becoming disillusioned with modern Russia, horrified first by the brutality of the war in Chechnya and later by vanishing freedoms under the rule of Vladimir Putin, whose resignation she demanded last year in an open letter to the government titled "Putin Must Go."
There was no immediate reaction from Putin or current President Dmitry Medvedev to the news of Bonner's death.
Born in the Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, Bonner was raised during the bloodiest years of Stalin's atrocities. Her father, a leading Communist Party intellectual, was executed in 1938 when she was 14 and her mother was sent to a labor camp for eight years.
Author: Gabriel Borrud (AFP, Reuters)
Editor: Sonia Phalnikar