Chechen Authorities Arresting and Killing Gay Men, Russian Paper Says
Source: NY Times (click for link to story)
MOSCOW
— First, two television reporters vanished. Then a waiter went missing.
Over the past week, men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have disappeared
from the streets of Chechnya.
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Maxim Shemetov / ReutersChechnya’s leader claims there are no gay people in the Russian region. A
gay rights activist is seen being detained by police during an LGBT
community rally in Moscow in 2015.
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On
Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story
already circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen
authorities were arresting and killing gay men.
While abuses by security services in the region, where Russia fought a two-decade war against Islamic insurgents, have long been a stain on President Vladimir V. Putin’s human rights record, gay people had not previously been targeted on a wide scale.
The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the local authorities.
By
Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own
sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The
newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many
others had died in extrajudicial killings.
A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.”
“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency.
“If
such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to
worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where
they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said.
The sweep, like so much else in Russian politics today, was entangled in the country’s troubled politics of street activism.
It began, Novaya Gazeta reported, after a Moscow-based gay rights group, GayRussia.ru,
applied for permits to stage gay pride parades in four cities in
Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, of which Chechnya
is a part.
The
group had not focused on the Muslim areas. It had been applying for
permits for gay parades in provincial cities around Russia, and
collecting the inevitable denials, in order to build a case about gay
rights and freedom of assembly with the European Court of Human Rights,
in Strasbourg, France. It had applied to more than 90 municipal
governments. Nikolai Alekseev, a gay rights activist coordinating this
effort, told Novaya Gazeta he had chosen this tactic rather than staging
risky, unsanctioned gay parades.
Gay
men have begun deleting online accounts, or fleeing the region.
One
user of Vkontakte, a Russian social networking site, wrote that a
16-year-old boy had been detained in a village in Chechnya. He returned
days later, according to the post, “all beaten, just a sack with bones.”
The
newspaper published contact information to aid men wanting to leave
Chechnya for relatively more tolerant parts of Russia. But reaching
communities of closeted gay men in the remote mountain region poses
challenges. “Even
delivering the information is very difficult,” Ms. Sokiryanskaya, who
is familiar with the aid effort, said. “They are just small islands,
isolated.”
