{"id":165746,"date":"2020-07-27T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2020-07-27T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=165746"},"modified":"2020-07-27T06:20:23","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T05:20:23","slug":"chechnya-is-trying-to-exterminate-gay-people-our-silence-only-emboldens-vladimir-putin-and-ramzan-kadyrov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/07\/chechnya-is-trying-to-exterminate-gay-people-our-silence-only-emboldens-vladimir-putin-and-ramzan-kadyrov\/","title":{"rendered":"Chechnya Is Trying to Exterminate Gay People–Our Silence only Emboldens Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Putin backs probe into gay torture in Chechnya. DW Jun 2020<\/p><\/div>\n

28 Jun 2020 – <\/em>Torture. Rape. Murder. I cannot get the gruesome images of these brutal crimes out of my head. \u201cWelcome to Chechnya: Inside the Russian Republic\u2019s Deadly War on Gays,<\/a>\u201d which premiered at the Sundance Festival in January is one of the most harrowing films I have ever seen.<\/p>\n

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\u201cImagine in the 21st century, in a supposedly secular country,\u201d says David Isteev, at the start of this acclaimed documentary, \u201cyou have cases where people are killed simply because they are homosexual \u2014 where they are maimed, where the families of these people are urged to kill their children and siblings. It\u2019s unreal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWelcome to Chechnya\u201d follows Isteev, emergency program coordinator for the Russian LGBT Network<\/a>, and his fellow activists as they risk their lives trying to protect gay Chechens from being targeted both by the authorities and their own families.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Chechnya is a small Muslim-majority republic in southwestern Russia. It is also a place where gay people live in terror. Since 2017, there have been a series of state-sponsored anti-gay purges across Chechnya, in which hundreds of gay men have been arrested and detained in secret prisons. The purges were first revealed<\/a> by the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta<\/a> in April 2017 and later corroborated by\u00a0Human Rights Watch<\/a>, among others.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe documented a large-scale, vicious, anti-gay purge\u201d marked by\u00a0 \u201ctorture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings,\u201d Tanya Lokshina, the Russia program director at Human Rights Watch, told me in a phone interview from Moscow. In 2017, a detainee\u00a0told Human Rights Watch<\/a>, \u201cThey electrocuted us, beat us with pipes, kicked us, and punched us, they made other inmates beat us, they called us names, spat in our faces.\u201d<\/p>\n

In December 2018, there were reports<\/a> of a second wave<\/a> of arrests and attacks against gay Chechens. Yet there has been little coverage of their plight over the past 18 months. For David France, the award-winning director of \u201cWelcome to Chechnya,\u201d it makes no sense to talk of a \u201cfirst\u201d or a \u201csecond\u201d purge, as it is all part of a single ongoing campaign of persecution against gay Chechens. \u201cThey are still being hunted,\u201d France told me in a phone interview from New York.<\/p>\n

The hunter-in-chief is Ramzan Kadyrov, a thuggish<\/a>, tiger-loving<\/a> autocrat<\/a> who was installed<\/a> as president of Chechnya by Russian President Vladmir Putin in 2007. Kadyrov, Lokshina said, \u201chas been enabled by the Kremlin to run Chechnya as his own fiefdom, effectively as a state within a state, where international human rights law, and even Russian legislation, is not taken into account.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like every good tyrant<\/a>, Kadyrov has a list of \u201cundesirables\u201d who are demonized and scapegoated for all of the country\u2019s problems \u2014 and top of his list are gay people. It is the Chechen leader who ordered<\/a> the rounding up and detention<\/a> of gay men, who he calls<\/a> \u201csubhuman\u201d and \u201cdevils.\u201d In recent years, he has also been \u201cjustifying and encouraging<\/a>\u201d\u00a0so-called honor killings<\/a> of gay Chechens by their families while his administration, France explained to me, refuses to prosecute such crimes.<\/p>\n

In an interview<\/a> in July 2017, HBO sports reporter David Scott asked Kadyrov about the anti-gay pogroms in his country. \u201cWe don\u2019t have those kinds of people here,\u201d Kadyrov responded. \u201cWe don\u2019t have any gays. If there are any, take them to Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPraise be to god,\u201d the Chechen president added. \u201cTake them far from us, so we don\u2019t have them at home. To purify our blood, if there are any here, take them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kadyrov has been welcomed with open<\/a> arms<\/a> across the Middle East. The Chechen strongman likes to portray himself as a devout Muslim<\/a>\u00a0and has clamped down on alcohol<\/a>\u00a0while enforcing Islamic dress codes<\/a> and endorsing polygamy<\/a>. He sees his war on gay people as part of his \u201cIslamization<\/a>\u201d\u00a0project. France described him to me as a \u201cmadman and a despot\u201d who \u201cbends Islam to his own use.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be clear: There is nothing in Islam<\/a> that justifies or excuses the torture or persecution of any group of human beings. Yet the fact of the matter is that homophobia, as I have written<\/a> previously<\/a>, is rife in many Muslim communities across the world. Chechnya, though, is in a gay-hating league of its own. As Human Rights Watch has noted<\/a>, the Russian republic \u201cis a highly conservative, traditional Muslim society; homophobia is intense and rampant, and homosexuality is generally viewed as a stain on family honor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last March, more than 30 countries signed a joint statement<\/a> at the U.N. Human Rights Council calling for \u201ca swift, thorough and impartial investigation into the alleged persecution\u201d of gay people in Chechnya. With the exception of Albania, not a single Muslim-majority country signed onto the statement. Meanwhile, Muslim communities across the West fundraise and lobby for persecuted Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingya, Uighurs \u2026 but not Chechens being \u201chunted\u201d by Kadyrov and his goons. Those Chechens, it seems, are the wrong kind of Muslims \u2014 they are gay Muslims.<\/p>\n

The vicious pogroms<\/u> against gay men in Chechnya, however, cannot only be laid at the door of Islam or Muslims. Russia itself is plagued by homophobia \u2014 encouraged both by the Russian Orthodox Church<\/a> and the country\u2019s president<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s obvious where Putin stands,\u201d a frustrated Russian LGTBQ activist says in \u201cWelcome to Chechnya.\u201d \u201cIf they told him that gays were being killed, he wouldn\u2019t give a damn.\u201d In 2013, Putin signed<\/a> the now-notorious \u201cgay propaganda\u201d law, which criminalized<\/a> the distribution of \u201cpropaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships.\u201d Polls suggest a majority of Russians<\/a> believe gays are conspiring to \u201cdestroy\u201d the country\u2019s values, while 1 in\u00a05 of them want to \u201celiminate<\/a>\u201d\u00a0gay and lesbian people from Russian society.<\/p>\n

Then there is the global context: As the director, France, reminded me, homosexuality remains illegal<\/a> in more than 70 countries across the world and is punishable by death<\/a> in eight of them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Related: Stoning Gay People to Death in Brunei Is an Outrage and Not My Definition of Islam<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Is it any wonder, then, that activists talk of a \u201cgay genocide\u201d? In May 2017, in fact, three French gay rights groups filed a complaint<\/a> at the International Criminal Court accusing Chechnya of a policy of genocide against gay people. The legal problem, though, as France points out, is that the Genocide Convention<\/a> applies only to \u201cnational, ethnical, racial, or religious\u201d groups, thereby excluding persecuted LGBTQ communities.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, France draws a direct comparison with the Holocaust. \u201cThis is the first time since Hitler\u2019s regime that there has been an open, government-directed policy to round up and liquidate LGBTQ people,\u201d he told me. Between 1933 and 1945, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum<\/a>, \u201can estimated 100,000 men were arrested for violating Nazi Germany\u2019s law against homosexuality, and of these, approximately 50,000 were sentenced to prison. An estimated 5,000 to 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps on similar charges, where an unknown number of them perished.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNever again<\/a>\u201d\u00a0has (rightly) become the global mantra, in reference to the Holocaust. But, with regard to gay people, it is<\/em> happening again. Right now. In Chechnya.<\/p>\n

So where, today, is the outrage from our politicians or the press? Where are the protests? Why the lack of global support for this repressed minority? As Lokshina pointed out to me, most Western countries have failed to provide a \u201csafe haven\u201d for gay Chechens fleeing persecution. The United States under Donald Trump may have imposed financial sanctions<\/a>\u00a0on Chechen leaders, for example, but it hasn\u2019t admitted<\/a> a single LGBTQ refugee from Chechnya.<\/p>\n

Remember, our inaction, our indifference and, above all else, our silence makes us complicit in these crimes against LGBTQ communities. But it\u2019s much worse than that. Our silence also emboldens brutal demagogues like Putin and Kadyrov \u2014 and lays the groundwork for further human rights abuses across the board. \u201cIf there\u2019s no punishment,\u201d says an exhausted-looking Isteev toward the end of the film, \u201cif LGBT people are regarded as subhuman, if you can do anything to them, it means that tomorrow, anyone can find themselves in the shoes of gay Chechens.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Mehdi Hasan<\/a> – mehdi.hasan@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Go to Original – theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chechnya is a small Muslim-majority republic in southwestern Russia. It is also a place where gay people live in terror. Since 2017, there have been a series of state-sponsored anti-gay purges across Chechnya, in which hundreds of gay men have been arrested and detained in secret prisons. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":165749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[2068,120,1145,1144,487,651,594,278,593],"class_list":["post-165746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sexualities","tag-chechnya","tag-conflict","tag-gay-rights","tag-homosexuality","tag-human-rights","tag-justice","tag-lgbtqi","tag-russia","tag-sexualities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}