Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Russia’s Steve Biko; What Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death tells us about the Kremlin’s leadership

Wall Street Journal

In 1977, anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was arrested by South African police, clubbed to within an inch of his life, chained, stripped, manacled, denied care and ultimately left to die in a car. More appalling was the apartheid regime’s response to his murder: denial, followed by coverup, followed by professions of indifference to Biko’s suffering.

For the generation of Westerners that came politically of age in anti-apartheid rallies—Barack Obama’s generation—Biko’s name became a byword for everything they were fighting against. So it is with most revolutionary movements. It’s not sufficient to have the example of great heroes in the mold of a Walesa or Suu Kyi or Mandela. They also require great victims: Men and women who, in the manner of their dying, demonstrate why it is their victimizers who must perish instead.

Last year, the Arab world found its Biko in Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. Now Russia may find its own Biko in the memory of Sergei Magnitsky, a mild-mannered, middle-class tax attorney from Moscow who spent the last of his 37 years in a filthy Russian prison before dying in November 2009 of medical neglect and physical torture.